Day One
7:15 am Registration & Networking
8:15 am What it Takes to Make a LEAP a Reality
8:20 am Chair’s Opening Remarks
Preparing HR for the Next Five to Ten Years of Work in Life Sciences
8:30 am Discover: Total Rewards & Workforce Trends
Synopsis
An interactive presentation/discussion on topics such as:
- Impact of the new administration In the industry
- Workforce challenges
- Merit increases (2025)
- Equity strategies and what changes to expect in the next 6 mo. – 1 yrÂ
8:50 am Discover: Embracing Remote Work: How Syndax Pharmaceuticals Maintains Culture & Productivity in a Distributed Workforce
Synopsis
- How can we transition to a predominantly remote workforce?
- Learn strategies for fostering connection and company culture among remote employees, including ‘meetings that matter’ and leveraging the commercial team’s remote work experience
- Discover Syndax’s lessons learned on managing remote work, including: an innovative approach to office space, partnering with Regis to provide on-demand office access for in-person collaboration, addressing productivity concerns and providing flexibility for employees
9:10 am Develop: How Else Can We Be More Agile & Prepare for the Future?
Synopsis
As life science organizations compete for staff, and struggle to retain valued employees, becoming accustomed to remote work is critical. With productivity increases of 47%, 74% of staff reporting they are more likely to stay at their company and an average saving of $11,000 per year for every employee, offering remote work is necessary. HR leaders need to iron out the creases to ensure they are leveraging this future focused strategy to its full potential. This is a Q&A session designed to help you understand the ‘how’.
9:30 am Action: How Are You Going To Build Resilience for the Future?
Synopsis
This is a roundtable discussion to put together an action plan to take back to your organization.
9:50 am Speed Networking Break
Track A – Attracting Top Talent
Enhancing the Onboarding Experience to Retain Engagement
10:30 am Discover: Improving Belonging & Retention With a Thoughtful Onboarding Process
Synopsis
- How can we utilize our onboarding process to increase subsequent feelings of belonging and therefore staff retention?
- Focus on what your organization does well, and share this story in the onboarding process
- How Visterra have decreased attrition to single digits by leveraging the onboarding process as a tool to attract the right candidates and enhance belonging in the organization
10:50 am Discover: Elevate Your Hiring Game: Proven Secrets for Identifying Game-Changing Employees
Synopsis
- Hiring Game Changers© is a time-tested methodology to identify true success factors that separate true gamechangers from average hires
- Develop Powerful Selection Strategies: Create custom interview questions to reveal a candidate’s true potential and differentiate coachable, high-impact hires from mediocre ones
- Evaluate Candidates Across Five Key Dimensions: Learn how to assess candidates using the Game Changer Rating Matrix, focusing on technical skills, communication, interpersonal abilities, aptitude, and attitude
11:10 am Develop: What Other Tweaks Can We Make to the Candidate Journey To Improve Experience?
Synopsis
This is a Q&A session designed to help you understand the ‘how’.
11:30 am Action: What Are You Going to Change About the Candidate Journey to Enhance Belonging & Retention?
Synopsis
- As we compete closely with other organizations for applicants, how can we speed up our onboarding process so that applicants stay engaged with our mission?
- What ways can we speed up the onboarding process between a) first interview b) being hired c) start date?
- What technology can we utilize to help us streamline this process?
This is a roundtable discussion to put together an action plan to take back to your organization.
11:50 am LEAP Benchmarking Session
Track B – Developing Talent in Life Sciences
Leveraging Leadership Development Programs to Overcome Skills Gaps
10:30 am Discover: Breaking the Resistance: How Brii Biosciences Transformed Required Training into Engaging Learning Journeys
Synopsis
- How Brii Biosciences turned learning from a compliance checkbox into a powerful engagement tool
- How customized learning paths, built on employee feedback, became an integral part of the performance evaluation process – driving real investment in development.
- How Brii’s Learning Labs not only increased participation but also ensured that employees applied their knowledge, creating a lasting impact
10:50 am Discover: Microbiologic’s Comprehensive Leadership Development Program
Synopsis
- How can we build a strong pipeline of future talent?
- How to provide training sessions for a cohort of leaders over 12 months, culminating in a capstone ‘game show’ event
- Learn about Microiologic’s ‘Lead Academy’, ‘Drive Team’ and ‘Emerging Leaders’ programs that have had a significant impact on developing the organization’s leaders
11:10 am Develop: How Can We Ensure Our Leadership is Competent to Support the Business?
Synopsis
Navigating the Complexities of Leadership
A report by Boyden emphasizes the need for leaders to be agile, communicative, and capable of managing change effectively. HR professionals play a crucial role in identifying and developing leaders who possess these skills, ensuring that the organization can adapt to the rapidly changing landscape.
This is a Q&A session designed to help you understand the ‘how’.
11:30 am Action: How Are You Going to Evolve Your Leadership Development Programs?
Synopsis
Output Focused Action Session Facilitated by the Chair
- How can we carve out the time and space to make sure that our leaders are fully engaging in these sessions?
- How can we weave this into the day to day of the business? What are people’s experiences with running this virtually, hybrid, or in person?
- Can we implement mentoring or sponsorship in smaller companies, how has this worked for others?
- How can we develop our own HR teams so that they are more effective and cover more territory?
This is a roundtable discussion to put together an action plan to take back to your organization.
11:50 am LEAP Benchmarking Session
12:00 pm Lunch
Revolutionizing your Hiring Systems to Find the Ideal Candidates
1:00 pm Discover: Reimagining Talent Strategies with Talent Intelligence, AI & Automation
Synopsis
- How does Randstad translate deep talent intelligence into targeted talent marketing campaigns to attract, engage, and convert top candidates aligned to in-demand skills while building scalable, future-ready pipelines?
- Learn how to intelligently apply artificial intelligence in sourcing, recruiting, and matching – using AI-driven search and match to surface hidden skills, and accelerate time-to-fill
- Explore how automated talent outreach and engagement powered by CRM integration enhances sourcing workflows – enabling personalized, persona-driven outreach that re-engages talent, boosts recruiter efficiency, and elevates the overall candidate and hiring manager experience
1:20 pm Discover: Takeda’s Journey to Becoming a Skills-Based Organization
Synopsis
- How do you build a skills ecosystem, aligning all HR processes?
- What role does the Talent Marketplace play in becoming a Skills-Based organization?
- What are the barriers to becoming a skills-based organization and how is Takeda addressing them?
1:40 pm Discover: Big ‘T’ Transformation: Fundamental Operational Shifts to Deliver Value
Synopsis
- What makes most talent leaders and their teams start to sweat? What will it take? How do I get started? What tools do I use? Will the changes yield the right results?
- Danaher has experienced more change than ever before – shifting market demands, shrinking talent pools, the largest ever spinoff of it’s environmental and industrial applications businesses, continued growth through M&A, the impact of Artificial Intelligence, and a new company brand. At the same time, Danaher’s #1 strategic priority was around Talent – building and sustaining diverse, high performing teams. The problem was … Talent Acquisition wasn’t ready.
- Danaher discusses powerful tools to take on the largest scale TA Transformation in company history globally within less than 12 months. Hear from Nikki on their transformation journey and the key principles and tools they used to transform TA at ‘the speed of life.
2:00 pm Develop: How Else Can We Improve Our Hiring Processes?
Synopsis
This is a Q&A session designed to help you understand the ‘how’.
2:20 pm Action: How Are You Going To Hire for the Right Candidate?
Synopsis
- How can we practice behavioral based hiring to ensure new hires fit into the current culture of our organization?
- How can we map job descriptions to competencies and interview questions to create a rigorous interview process that emphasises cultural importance?
- How can we create and communicate our value proposition and how can remote work tie into this?
This is a roundtable discussion to put together an action plan to take back to your organization.
Enhancing Employee Engagement to Retain Valued Employees
1:00 pm Discover: Implementing OKR to Increase Employee Engagement
Synopsis
- How can we implement Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to engage and realign employees after a difficult period of restructuring and strategy changes?
- Set 50/50 top-down and bottom-up goals on a 3-month cadence
- How Omega Therapeutics got leadership buy-in for OKR, as well as the observed positive impact such as a significant decrease questions about priorities and increase employee motivation
1:20 pm Discover: Rebuilding Culture & Resilience During Challenging Times
Synopsis
- How can we rebuild the company culture and create a high-performance environment during challenging times?
- Foster belonging, transparency, and resilience
- How Spur is designing a culture of boldness, resilience, transparency, and principled behavior through its ‘Culture Club’ and leveraging virtual and in-person events to maintain connections and a positive work environment
1:40 pm Develop: How Else Can We Enhance the Engagement of Our Employees?
Synopsis
HR leaders in scaling businesses need to prioritize their compensation and total rewards strategy. 69% of employees in the life sciences sector consider competitive pay and benefits as the top factor for job satisfaction. Additionally, companies with robust total rewards programs are 1.5 times more likely to report higher employee engagement and retention rates.
This is a Q&A session designed to help you understand the ‘how’.
2:00 pm Action: How Are You Going to Enhance the Engagement of Your Employees?
Synopsis
- How can we motivate employees who are in single point sensitive roles?
- How can we motivate employees when we are limited financially?
- How can we drive momentum through exposure and scientific motivation rather than through financial incentive?
This is a roundtable discussion to put together an action plan to take back to your organization.Â
2:20 pm Innovation: Retain & Reward Without Limits: Strategic Benefits Beyond the 401(k) Ceiling
Synopsis
- Are your highest earners limited by traditional retirement plans that cap contributions and create retention risk?Â
- Â What if you could offer a benefit that removes those limits, reduces future tax exposure, and protects against rising healthcare costs, without disrupting your current infrastructure?Â
- Â Our non-qualified strategy does exactly that, giving you a powerful, turnkey advantage in attracting and retaining top talent
2:40 pm Networking Break
Cultivating a Successful Company Culture
3:10 pm Discover: How Culture Will Lead Your Organization Through AI Disruption
Synopsis
- A forward-thinking culture is essential for leading your organization through AI disruptionÂ
- Explore how a culture is essential to drive the successful adoption of AI, reshape the talent advantage, improve the colleague experience and practical steps leaders can take to build a future-ready culture
- Gain insights that will empower you to lead your team through the evolving landscape of AI and beyond
3:30 pm Discover: How a Simple Talent Philosophy is the Key to Success
Synopsis
- Abbvie's Talent Philosophy sets the expectations for how they lead and develop their employees and is central to our culture. We are clear in what our expectations of people leaders and employees
- Abbvie's Talent Philosophy is the foundation to their HR practices and programs, grounded in Performance, Behaviors Differentiation
3:50 pm Develop: How Else Can We Construct & Communicate Our Culture?
Synopsis
Companies with adaptive cultures that align with their business goals are 1.5 times more likely to experience revenue growth. As such, after periods of rapid growth, HR leaders need to pin down and communicate their cultural framework clearly so that employees embed those values into their behaviors.
This is a Q&A session designed to help you understand the ‘how’.Â
4:10 pm Action: How Are You Going to Cultivate Your Companies’ Culture?
Synopsis
- How can we retain important aspects of our culture as we are scaling, how can we get ahead and set these into a cultural framework?
- How can we transmit our existing culture to new sites?
- How can we identify and adapt scalable parts of our culture to align with the new organization? How can we control the impact this has on our employee group?
- How can we communicate with employees and bring them on this journey with us as we grow while remaining transparent?
- How can we help employees to understand our mission as a company and get that alignment set?
- How can we communicate our culture into values and embed these behaviours into our organizations?
This is a roundtable discussion to put together an action plan to take back to your respective organization. Â