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Total Rewards is the premier conference for HR and compensation professionals who want to create and deploy powerful rewards strategies that drive organizational success.
We’ve built a robust program, so you customize your schedule based on your individual needs.
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- Pre-Conference
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- Main Stage
- Presentation (45 minutes)
- Interactive Panel (60 minutes)
- Presentation (60 minutes)
- Engage Live (30 minutes)
- Express Learning (25 minutes)
- Debate (60 minutes)
- Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
- Entry: Awareness with Limited Experience
- Advanced: Applied Theory and Strategy

Sales compensation: your turn is coming! You need to be ready when sales management asks for help with their sales compensation program! It’s time to revisit sales compensation fundamentals. This 3-hour pre-conference session is perfect to help gain a foundation in sales compensation philosophies and principles. Learn basic terms, plan concepts and frameworks. Bring your questions and knotty issues too. Join sales compensation practice leader Dave Cichelli for this engaging session.
Additional registration and fees are required. Preconference sessions are only available for Total Rewards’23 conference registrants.

Do you want to tell better stories with visually appealing, efficiently updated HR/Rewards dashboards? Join me for an overview of dashboard design principles and an introduction to tools like Power Query, Power Pivot, and Macros. Gain hands-on experience building a dashboard with these tools in real time! Prerequisites include intermediate to advanced Excel skills, comfort creating/editing pivot tables and charts, Excel 2016 (or a later version), and the ability to add the Power Pivot tab to Excel.
- Understand effective dashboard design principles.
- Learn to use specialty tools and specific techniques to create a dashboard in real time.
- Recognize how this approach can be used for any type of HR or Rewards dashboard.
Additional registration and fees are required. Preconference sessions are only available for Total Rewards’23 conference registrants.


In spite of rising healthcare costs, challenging market dynamics like specialty pharmacy, hyperinflation and a changing healthcare landscape, Northern Tool + Equipment has been able to deliver flat health and welfare costs and a richer benefits package for 3 years and running. Join this case study to hear about the methodological process they followed to design their long-term benefits strategy and how your organization can incorporate a similar approach.



Lockheed Martin has transformed the way our employees and their families derive value from Total Rewards programs. How? By rethinking the overall user experience with a consumer-centric approach. Join this session to learn about the journey we took to rethink and recast benefits and compensation service delivery from the consumer’s perspective. We’ll share how we established our business case, brought the right parties to the table and turned our vision into reality. Learn from our experience and unlock Total Rewards value for your workforce!

After almost two years of a strong job market, we entered 2023 with more uncertainty about the economic environment ahead. Fears of a global recession have caused employers to tighten their belts. Mandates to cut costs must be balanced with calls to assist employees during times of financial struggle. How can employers best support their workforce during this time? Join our session for hot-off-the-press actionable insights from your industry peers.





Financial education, literacy, and inclusion means more than just addressing an employee's base salary. Various compensation components, workplace benefits and long-term financial planning are critical to the employee value proposition, and yet, not everyone begins at the same starting line. Companies who are successfully unleashing the power of diverse talent pools and facilitating diversity and inclusion progress have identified equity as core business priority across all employee programs. Let’s discuss how to overcome opportunity gaps across the employee value proposition and the ripple effects of pay inequity on long-term financial wellness.




Most employees don’t view themselves as job holders. Instead, they see themselves as individuals bringing a toolkit of skills, applied to work to achieve business and career goals. Through lenses of workforce strategy, rewards and skills hubs enabled by AI, the panel will explore the operational shift from an antiquated job focus to an agile, skills-based model. This includes discovering, developing, and rewarding the application of valued experiences and portable skills, rather than attaching primary worth to the “pedigree” of title and education. We will explore rewarding what talent can do rather than solely on what they have done.






Organizations pursue ESG agendas to attract and retain the best talent, optimize employee well-being and more. Join this session to better understand the connection between significant ESG risks/opportunities and Total Rewards strategy/design. Hear from key leaders about their use of Total Rewards strategy to reinforce organizational ESG commitment, plus their experience with top ESG issues like climate change, DEI, employee well-being and cybersecurity. Learn how you can use Total Rewards strategy as a powerful tool to drive these critical business agenda items in your organization.




Executive compensation professionals oversee pay processes for top leaders in their company or industry. What could go wrong? Learn from this panel of seasoned consultants and practitioners what the most common errors are across key areas, including design, the compensation committee meeting and communications/disclosure. You’ll come away with a wealth of strategies for preventing errors and mitigating the impact of mistakes when you do make them.

Creating value for today’s organizations, which are bigger and more complex than ever, is a tall order for compensation functions. Adding to the challenge is this fickle labor market that can turn in an instant, and then turn back before your compensation surveys even have time to collect answers from other folks who are just as confused as you. Together, let’s take an honest, humorous, self-deprecating look at our profession and figure out how to stay relevant for the next 40 years.



Cultivating a healthy company culture requires constant care. The talent leaders at the Memorial Hermann Health System took a holistic rewards approach called The Well Together Human Capital Strategy, which draws on all their systems to deliver an exceptional employee experience. You’ll learn from their insights how to integrate the latest compensation trends, find new opportunities to recognize and thank workers and train your leadership to attract and retain top talent.






Over 80% of U.S. employers use artificial intelligence (AI) for HR functions. AI can assist with everything from talent acquisition to compensation benchmarking to identifying employees at risk of leaving. As legal and regulatory requirements intensify for AI use, thissession will give youpractical guidance for navigating AI-related diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility issues and mitigating risk when using AI tools in employment decisions.




Curious how companies fared during the first year of disclosure under the new Pay vs. Performance rules? Join this session to find out. We’ll explore the alignment (or misalignment) of company financial performance with executive compensation and the most prevalent metrics selected by companies. In addition to reactions from shareholders and other stakeholders, we’ll share lessons learned and what they mean for your company, plus how to streamline compliance with these regulations going forward.

Organizations are forever trying to reduce risk in affordable ways. This session will teach you to do just that by sharing proven best practices in health plan risk mitigation and a practical framework that any plan sponsor can implement without significant financial investment. Learn how this approach has already helped plan sponsors save more than $5 billion since 2010, and how it can benefit your organization today.


Are you looking for straightforward guidance to revamp your total rewards program? Join this interactive session to take inspiration from the book Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten to identify and explore key principles for program design, operations, and communication (e.g., never stop asking “why”—as in “Why do we offer ‘XYZ’ program?” or “Why do we do it this way?”). Learn how getting back to basics can lead to key program improvements in your organization and have the chance to discuss with your peers on how you can implement these principals within your organization.









On the heels of advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning come the evolutionary implications of the metaverse. Many organizations are working to establish early presence in the metaverse as part of strategies to strengthen customer loyalty and improve collaboration, engagement and/or market products and services. But will it really improve human capital management and Total Rrewards processes and practices? Join the National Security Agency to sort through the metaverse hype and understand its true potential for helping Total Rewards professionals like you.


Pay equity is evolving at lightspeed for three key reasons: 1) employees are demanding more transparency, 2) state/federal agencies are intensifying their regulation of compensation decisions and 3) as compensation professionals, we have more complex analytical tools at our fingertips. As the pay equity landscape becomes more complicated, so do the ways we can fall victim to its perils and pitfalls. Join this session to unpack and learn how to avoid potential pay equity issues.



Compensation structure and delivery decisions have traditionally been made by employers. At Shopify, we tend to challenge traditional business practices, so last summer we launched Flex Comp: the first-ever compensation model that lets our employees choose how they get paid with custom combinations of salary, stock options and restricted stock units. We’ve seen such high adoption of this model that we’re expanding compensation choices to include additional benefit programs. Join us to learn how flexible compensation could help your organization!











Today, many people are ready and willing to publicly say their pay, with or without their employer’s approval—as TikTok sensation Hannah Williams can attest. Williams went viral when she asked strangers on the street how much money they make, forming the basis of the popular “Salary Transparent Street” project. You don’t want to miss Williams’ one-of-a-kind conversation with Total Rewards professionals and employment law leaders about the growing pay-transparency movement, changing legislation, salary negotiation, rewards communications and more.

Over the last several years, employers have gotten creative with their flexible benefits to attract and retain top talent. Like other employer-sponsored spending accounts (e.g., HSAs, FSAs, HRAs, etc.), life planning accounts (LPAs) give employees a subsidy to spend on designated wellness services. These customizable accounts offer ways for Total Rewards professionals to increase employee engagement, create competitive differentiation and promote overall well-being—without incurring significant cost. Join this session to understand how LPAs can benefit your organization.

Total Rewards professionals face significant challenges when designing global strategy. This session maps out and provides high-level approaches to overcome those challenges. In addition, you will be given a quick and easy checklist to use when developing and communicating a global total rewards strategy. This checklist will help you consider different needs in varying groups/countries and provide a global total rewards umbrella that can be contextualized by diverse groups.

Conventional performance-management models are built on “carrot or stick” approaches, such as rewarding star employees via bonuses, profit-sharing and equity. While pay-for-performance has its place, is it the best way to motivate and retain all your workers? In this interactive session, we’ll unpack the psychology of pay to examine the effectiveness of current models and share innovative alternatives. You’ll also learn from the wisdom of the crowd through anonymous live-polling and an engaging facilitated discussion.

Interactive dashboards are powerful tools for analyzing and promoting workplace diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). HR and rewards professionals can use them to visualize real-time compensation metrics, identify and correct salary gaps, and understand sources of systemic bias within their companies so they can prioritize actionable change. In this session, you’ll learn to create data visualizations that will drive better business decisions, improve collaboration and mitigate legal risk.




This interactive session will inform and arm you with actionable, essential information about operating a global benefits strategy. We will address current global issues affecting the workplace in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, including inflation, quiet quitting, purpose, family benefits, leave, remote work, engagement and more. Additionally, you will learn about legislative and cultural differences that influence your day-to-day business decisions in the ever-changing world of global HR/benefits.


Organizations can’t succeed if their employees are struggling. Talent leaders at biopharma company Daiichi Sankyo knew they needed to act after experiencing high turnover and survey results showing workers felt burned out and dissatisfied with work/life balance. They conducted cross-functional design-thinking sessions, which use creative, people-focused problem-solving techniques, with employees and leaders, and then launched a forward-thinking initiative to build work/life harmony. Follow their journey to re-engage their workforce—and then launch your own!


The goal of any compensation committee meeting is strong engagement and effective decision-making. But these meetings can be daunting to plan! How do you ensure the best outcomes and constructive discussions? What should the agendas include? Who needs to be involved (and when) in the preparation? How should the materials be presented? How do you work most effectively with the committee chair? This session will answer those questions and more through shared best practices and real-life lessons learned about facilitating successful compensation committee meetings.




Today, industries with an abundance of front-line workers are at the front lines of the talent crisis. Learn how compensation professionals in the hospitality, health care and retail sectors are designing rewards strategies that respond to volatile talent markets. Panelists will share engaging visualizations and case studies that highlight successes and challenges. You’ll come away with an understanding of how to use traditional and non-traditional market data to optimize your approach.






Total Rewards professionals play a key role in companies’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) efforts. How can we best engage employees in this important work? This session shows you how to boost your sustainability through innovative benefits like the Carbon Savings Accounts™ (CSAs), which are structured similarly to HSAs. CSAs fund environmentally friendly modifications for people’s homes, technology and transportation. Learn how the innovative framework of CSAs enable it to serve as a financial wellness tool for employees, a smart corporate sustainability strategy for employers, and a win for the planet!


The past few years have upended business as usual, with companies undergoing radical shifts to their structure, processes and workforce. Yet many organizations’ retirement plans haven’t kept pace with the changes. If you’re a plan sponsor looking to catch up (and catch your breath), this session is for you! You’ll learn a range of forward-looking strategies, from outsourcing certain tasks to a complete program overhaul. You’ll emerge feeling refreshed and ready to modernize your plan for today’s talent market.


Compensation decisions can be made with a great deal of bias, conscious or unconscious, depending on the decision maker. As Total Rewards professionals, what can we do to combat this all-too-common problem? Using algorithms and technology, we can reduce that bias and help managers be fair, ensure equity and save time. In this session, we will share the complete rationale behind the intelligence we’ve created that can be applied in any company around the world.


With a change in leadership and a newly revised long-term vision for the organization, we needed to change our strategic rewards to align with the newly stated goals of the organization. Upon a strategic review, we identified the first step was to enhance and expand our incentive program. Learn how we designed, received approval, and implemented this new program across 46 countries at the same time. Learn the barriers that we faced, how to ensure the plan was effectively communicated and the importance of automation of the global incentive plan was needed to ensure a successful rollout.










Increasingly, companies are using very large, one-time equity awards called “mega equity grants” to motivate and retain founder CEOs after significant monetization events. The question is: Do they work? In this spirited, Oxford-style debate, consultants and organizational leaders will argue for and against this popular form of executive compensation. Throughout the dialogue, participants will share research and case studies that will empower you to make your own informed decision.






Medications are rapidly increasing in both complexity and cost. How is that impacting employee benefits plans? What’s driving today’s trends and what treatments can we expect in the future? Let’s review the current state of specialty pharmacy and what employers need to think about in terms of managing costs—now and going forward. We’ll also explore innovation in personalized medicine and review new tools like pharmacogenomics that help patients and providers know if a drug is working.

If pay transparency is such a great idea, why are most organizations so tight-lipped about it? A majority get failing grades in openly communicating their compensation philosophies and salary ranges with employees. Let’s discuss the reasons why and review lessons learned by employers in New York City, California and Washington about the new pay range transparency regulations. We’ll also review research on the impact of such regulations on organizational attraction, retention and reward strategies.

Are you searching for a blueprint for your Ttotal Rewards package? Look no further than your own employees! This session will focus on the value of engaging with them and listening to their feedback to guide your company’s strategic Total Rewards initiatives. Learn practical steps and gain resources to implement a bottom-up approach that promotes physical, mental and financial well-being.

If you struggle to know if your sales compensation plan is driving value, you’re not alone. Even when companies run analytics or have standard reporting and performance metrics, they often fail to present findings in logical, organized ways that leverage industry trends and benchmarks. Join us to learn how to create effective sales compensation messaging and commercial presentations for executives. Understand the most critical financial and business sales analytics to run, plus sales compensation industry ratios/benchmarks to use when performing your own industry comparisons.

Recently, we have seen explosive growth in the use of People Analytics tools. Features like automatic collection and large dataset analysis offer the promise of improving every phase of the HR pipeline, including measuring productivity and making important personnel decisions. Unfortunately, many potential pitfalls exist. To help you avoid those, we will highlight the challenges of People Analytics tools and demonstrate how to use them fairly.






During this live demo, we’ll walk through an annual merit process to collect ratings and merit increases. You’ll see how SecureSheet guarantees real-time, secure, centralized data and enforces company budget and business controls. There will be plenty of time for interactive questions and answers.
With SecureSheet, it's easy, fast, and secure. Simply: Upload your spreadsheet with your formulas, formats, and validations. Add user-defined security that controls precisely what users can do with the data. Immediately share one SecureSheet with no risk of multiple versions. Data is updated immediately in real-time, and updates during the process is easy.

With all the current focus on equity and closing wage gaps, a pay equity analysis has become an essential tool for US companies. But are you taking the time to ensure your various analyses are consistent with applicable pay equity laws? If not, you could be creating or exacerbating serious legal problems for your company. Join this session where an employment law attorney will explain the patchwork of legal requirements, common pitfalls, and best practices you need to know to ensure your pay analysis approach is legally compliant.



Late last year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued new rules governing executive incentive compensation recovery (or “clawbacks”) for public companies in the event of a financial restatement. Don’t miss this critical overview of the new rules, which mandate clawbacks for a broader category of financial restatements and impose stringent disclosure obligations. While most companies have clawback policies in place, chances are they aren’t fully aligned with these rigorous new requirements.



If speed is of the essence and you need to learn to fly a plane while building it, join the Ipsen Total Rewards team as we share our variety of techniques to automate processes, empower HR colleagues and provide competitive rewards programs for our employees. In just twelve months, we streamlined compensation benchmarking and salary offer processes, enhanced parental benefits and simplified mobility practices—not to mention several additional enhancements. Learn to put our efficient approach to use in your organization!



This panel will help you navigate the quickly changing legal landscape around pay transparency while staying true to your organization’s talent philosophy. Learn from expert compensation specialists how to address key questions, including:
- How wide of a payrange should you publish and to whom?
- Should you disclose information by request for internal/external postings?
- Should your compliance be geographically based or universal? You’ll come away ready to engage leadership and determine the best strategy for your company.


Time is money—at least for hourly employees. FLSA standards protect non-exempt employees, but what’s in place to govern workloads for the exempt population? The pandemic blurred the boundaries between our work and personal lives, which has significantly impacted mental health and rates of burnout. This has led to employees highlighting the importance of better-balanced work schedules. Let’s talk about the intersection of workload and compensation and where we can positively impact the employee experience.

Organizations are facing pressure from internal and external stakeholders to be more transparent in the ways they approach pay. Although many organizations are examining their pay practices to ensure fairness, some are reluctant to publicize what they find. What is the “right” level of information to share? How transparent should your organization be? Let’s discuss the challenges and opportunities along the continuum of pay transparency, as well as how that transparency can help or hurt your organization’s reputation.


Any Total Rewards offering should align with its company’s strategic direction and market. Upon realizing ours did not, we decided to reshape it with significant policy downscaling, all while keeping legal compliance and employee well-being in mind. This required design, engagement and change management plans to ensure a successful rollout to 4,000 healthcare workers. In total, our transformation involved 52 policies and 12,000+ points of engagement—and was worth the effort. Learn how our transformative approach can work for you.




Learn how Roche/Genentech is optimizing the employee experience and how our approach could work in your organization. We will share our unique US benefits strategy and the internal and external forces that shape our priorities around employee health, wealth and life. Through an integrated, strategic change/communications approach that includes both digital and traditional platforms and channels, we are grounding our work in data and metrics to measure success and shape our strategic roadmap.



Remote work continues to evolve for employers and employees alike. Join our panel of compensation and people leaders who manage diverse workplace modalities to learn how they navigate the challenges (and benefits) of remote, hybrid and in-person workplaces. We’ll provide original data and insights into the current state of remote work, plus offer concrete case studies for you to assess and apply within your own organization.



Most of us participate in some kind of loyalty program (e.g., Starbucks Rewards, Hilton Honors, Emirates Skywards Miles, etc.) so is it farfetched to think of equity compensation in the same way? Let’s explore innovative ideas to refresh stale employee stock plans, including the possibility of running them like loyalty programs—complete with rewards and participation points that contribute to other benefits. We’ll look at the practicalities of creating a new kind of plan that encourages increased employee participation and engagement through a points system.




Once you’ve conquered pay equity, what comes next? A lot! Consider what other unintended biases live in additional rewards programs and how to address them. Are you charged with connecting the dots between strategies for rewards equity, DEI and ESG initiatives? Have you considered a rewards equity analysis to advance DEI outcomes and help with critical metrics for ESG strategies? Join The Coca-Cola Company and Deloitte Consulting for answers.

Today, we are experiencing the greatest test the working world has faced in generations: The Great Resignation, quiet quitting, career cushioning, social and political unrest, a generational divide, a potential recession…and more. Kristen Hadeed believes that if we want our organizations to continue thriving, now and in the future, the ways we think about leadership, culture and business need to shift—soon and in a big way. Why? Because standing still in a rapidly changing world is the fastest way to slip backwards.
As a leadership thought leader, author and entrepreneur, Kristen has spent the last decade working with high-performing teams, executives and boards all over the world. She has helped them tackle some of the biggest challenges organizations currently face:
- How do we know what the future of leadership and business look like?
- How do we build cultures of belonging and connection?
- How do we build trust amongst our teams?
- How do we bridge the generational gap?
- How do we stay competitive when it comes to attracting talent?
- How do we give people more than just a job (i.e., how do we REALLY engage and inspire them)?
In this session, Kristen will challenge traditional leadership approaches that simply don’t work in today’s world and share actionable steps YOU can take to build the best version of your organization!
Session Takeaways Include:
- Explore 4 key elements of culture that will be critical as we look to the future: passion, freedom, growth and care/belonging.
- Understand the shifts needed to spark engagement, increase retention and decrease unnecessary turnover.
- Learn how to inspire a higher level of buy-in.
- Identify what mindsets, approaches and mentalities must shift to remain competitive.
- Discover how to bridge the generational gap.