WorkLife HR Strategies: The Morale Crisis

This conversation will explore HR practices and programs that drive effective employee engagement and retention during a complex economic and social era. The session will examine the role of people managers as the first line of employee support as well as the philosophies, strategies and benefits designed to build employee confidence and resilience as core competencies versus a wellness benefit.

When external growth paths are unclear and internal advancement feels stalled, how do you keep employees motivated? This session provides a blueprint for creating career movement even with constrained headcount. It will cover the business case for prioritizing internal development when hiring budgets are tight, practical frameworks for identifying and growing high-potential talent without elaborate assessment centers and strategies for building transparent career pathways that restore the effort-to-outcome equation employees are seeking.

When putting in the hours no longer translates to measurable progress or advancement, how do you reignite development? This session offers a practical playbook for turning coaching into a continuous, scalable system that delivers real ROI. It will cover how to build coaching infrastructure on a limited budget, integrate coaching into daily workflows without adding another program to manage and apply measurable frameworks that demonstrate how coaching drives retention and performance—not just engagement scores.

Most companies are asking the wrong question: Should we invest in AI coaching or human coaching? New research from BetterUp Labs, in collaboration with Stanford’s Social Media Lab, shows the real breakthrough comes when you stop choosing. In this session, BetterUp’s Senior Research Scientist Alex Liebscher shares new data on how synchronized coaching drives habit formation, reduces stress, and boosts optimism, transforming episodic development into a continuous performance system.