The People Shaping the Conversation: Meet the Speakers Coming to FutHRustIC Festival 2026
The most useful conversations about work rarely begin with a single
answer. They begin with people who have worked through difficult
organisational questions, tested approaches in practice, challenged
established assumptions and learned what happens when strategy meets the
reality of employees, leaders and teams.
That is the thinking behind the speaker programme at FutHRustIC
Festival 2026.
Taking place from 17–20 November 2026 in London, the four-day
festival brings together professionals working across HR, Internal
Communications, leadership, employee experience, learning and
development, workplace culture and the future of work. The programme
brings together perspectives from global organisations, public
institutions, professional services, cultural organisations, technology
companies and specialist consultancies.
The breadth of the speaker lineup matters because the challenges facing
organisations rarely sit neatly within one function. Employee
communication affects trust. Leadership affects culture. Learning
affects capability. Organisational change affects engagement. Decisions
around technology, mobility, wellbeing and workplace structures can all
influence how people experience their organisation.
For professionals working in HR and Internal Communications,
understanding those connections is increasingly important.
The FutHRustIC speaker programme reflects that reality. Rather than
focusing on one definition of the future of work, it creates space for
different disciplines and experiences to meet, compare approaches and
examine the practical questions organisations are dealing with now.
Why the people behind the work matter
There is a difference between discussing an organisational challenge in
theory and having responsibility for navigating it in practice.
The FutHRustIC 2026 speaker lineup includes people who have worked
inside major organisations, advised leaders, developed people
strategies, led communications functions, supported organisational
change and worked directly with employees.
That range creates an important advantage for a professional conference.
HR and Internal Communications professionals do not necessarily need
another collection of abstract predictions. They need opportunities to
understand how other practitioners approach familiar problems.
Questions such as these are rarely straightforward:
- How should leaders communicate during periods of change?
- How can internal communications become more relevant to employees?
- What does effective employee engagement look like in practice?
- How can organisations develop leaders who communicate well?
- How should organisations approach learning and development?
- What role does culture play when organisations are growing or
transforming? - How can people teams work effectively across international
environments? - Where should technology and new ways of working fit into the
employee experience?
The speakers coming to FutHRustIC bring different answers, experiences
and professional perspectives to these questions.
That diversity is particularly relevant because the boundaries between
people, communication and organisational strategy are becoming
increasingly connected.
Internal communications is becoming a leadership discipline
Internal Communications sits at the centre of many organisational
conversations, but its role can vary significantly between
organisations.
For some teams, the focus is primarily on information. For others,
Internal Communications is closely involved in employee engagement,
leadership communication, organisational change and culture.
The FutHRustIC programme reflects this wider role through speakers
working directly in internal and employee communications.
Paddy Johnston,
Internal Communications Consultant at Level Up Communications, brings
specialist communications experience to the programme, while Brooke
Hobson-Jones, working in Corporate Internal Communications at Landsec,
offer perspectives from major organisations.
The programme also includes communications leaders working across
different international and organisational contexts. Hala
Al-Balushi, Internal Communication Manager at Omantel, Katharina
Auer, Head of Internal, HSE, Suppliers & Partners Communications at
Hitachi Energy, and Simona Radu, Global VP, Employee & Executive
Communications at Schneider Electric, bring experience from
organisations operating across complex environments.
Their presence highlights an important professional consideration:
internal communication is not simply about producing messages.
Effective communication requires understanding the organisation, its
people, its leadership structures and the context in which information
is being received. The same message can have very different
implications depending on what employees already know, what they trust
and what they need from their leaders.
Jon Bates, working in Employee and Leader Communications at
Microsoft, adds another perspective on the relationship between employee
communication and leadership.
For communication professionals, this raises a practical question: are
internal communications teams primarily delivering information, or are
they helping organisations create understanding?
The distinction matters. Information can be distributed quickly.
Understanding requires context, clarity and often conversation.
HR and Internal Communications need each other
People strategy and communication strategy are often discussed
separately, yet employees experience them together.
An organisation might introduce a new people policy, restructure a team,
change its working model or introduce a new development programme. HR
may be responsible for the policy or programme, while Internal
Communications helps explain it. But employees do not necessarily
separate those functions in the same way.
They experience the result as part of their overall relationship with
the organisation.
This is reflected in the range of HR and People professionals joining
FutHRustIC.
Ahmed Salah, Global Head of Human Resources at Oxford Economics,
brings a global HR perspective, while Magdalene Arthur, Senior
People Partner at WHSmith, and David Hippolite, Senior People
Partner at the Victoria and Albert Museum, represent people-focused
roles within very different organisational environments.
Emma Wilson-Wyer, Senior People & Impact Manager at KAEFER, add further
perspectives on how people functions operate within specific
organisational contexts.
These roles demonstrate why modern people work cannot be reduced to a
single model.
A People Partner working in retail, a museum, security services or an
engineering environment will encounter different workforce structures,
operational realities and organisational priorities. The principles of
good people practice may overlap, but implementation requires context.
For HR professionals, that creates an ongoing balancing act between
consistency and relevance. Policies need to support organisational goals
while still making sense to the people expected to work within them.
Communication plays a major role in that process.
Leadership communication is about more than delivering a message
Leadership is another major thread running through the FutHRustIC
programme.
Louise Thompson, Leadership Coach, Speaker and former Director of
Communications, brings together leadership development and
communications experience. Allan Morling, Founder and Behavioural
Change Consultant at Leadership EQcellence, approaches leadership
through behavioural change.
Their perspectives sit alongside Rob Hosking, an international TEDx
motivational speaker.
Leadership communication is often treated as a question of presentation
skills, but the more difficult challenge is consistency.
Employees pay attention not only to what leaders say, but also to what
leaders prioritise, repeat and reinforce through their decisions.
That means communication cannot be completely separated from
behaviour.
A leadership team can communicate a set of organisational values, for
example, but employees will also assess whether those values appear in
everyday decisions. Similarly, an organisation can announce a change
programme, but confidence in that programme will depend partly on
whether leaders provide clear explanations and continue communicating as
the situation develops.
For communications and HR professionals, this makes leadership support
a strategic responsibility.
Practical questions include:
- What do leaders need to understand before they communicate?
- Which messages should come from senior leadership?
- Where is dialogue more useful than broadcast communication?
- How should leaders respond when they do not yet have every answer?
- How can communication remain consistent across different leadership
voices?
These are not purely communications questions. They sit at the
intersection of leadership, culture, employee experience and
organisational trust.
Employee experience is built through everyday interactions
Employee experience can sometimes sound like a broad concept, but its
practical meaning is found in everyday interactions.
How does someone experience their first weeks in an organisation? How
easy is it to access information? How does their manager communicate?
Can they see opportunities to develop? What happens when organisational
priorities change?
These experiences accumulate.
FutHRustIC brings together speakers whose roles touch different parts of
that experience.
Nick Holmes, Vice President of Learning & Culture at Avalere Health,
brings a perspective focused on learning and culture. Amber (Stoten)
Douglas, Learning & Development Leader for the UK & Europe at IWG,
offers another perspective on organisational development and capability.
Meanwhile, Vidya Murali, Director of Business Operations at
Skyscanner, brings an operational perspective that sits alongside the
more traditional HR and communications functions.
This variety is valuable because employee experience does not belong
exclusively to HR.
Managers influence it. Communications influence it. Learning teams
influence it. Operations influence it. Leadership influences it.
Organisational systems and processes influence it.
The practical challenge for organisations is therefore to understand
where these experiences connect.
A learning programme, for example, may be well designed but poorly
communicated. A new employee initiative may be communicated effectively
but difficult to access. A leadership message may be clear but
contradicted by the employee’s experience of a process.
Looking at employee experience across these touchpoints can reveal
problems that are difficult to see when each function operates
independently.
Culture needs to be understood through behaviour
Organisational culture is another area where professional language can
become disconnected from everyday reality.
Culture is often described through values, purpose statements or
employee initiatives. Yet culture also emerges through repeated
behaviours: how decisions are made, how people respond to mistakes, how
leaders handle disagreement, how teams collaborate and what behaviours
are recognised.
That is why behavioural change and people development are important
parts of the FutHRustIC conversation.
Allan Morling’s work in behavioural change connects directly to this
question, while Nick Holmes and Amber Douglas bring learning and
development perspectives that consider how organisations build
capability.
Fiona Yensen, former Head of Wellbeing at the UK Home Office and
Founder of Twiga Training & Consultancy Ltd., adds another perspective
through wellbeing and professional development.
The connection between culture and behaviour is particularly important
for organisations attempting to make cultural change sustainable.
Changing a value statement is relatively straightforward. Changing the
behaviours that employees experience every day is considerably more
complex.
For HR and communications professionals, that means asking practical
questions about reinforcement.
What happens after the campaign ends?
What do managers do differently?
How are new behaviours supported?
How are employees given opportunities to practise them?
What happens when organisational pressure makes old behaviours easier?
These questions move the discussion from culture as a statement to
culture as an organisational practice.
Global organisations require local understanding
Several FutHRustIC speakers work in organisations with international
operations or global responsibilities.
That brings another layer of complexity to HR and Internal
Communications.
A message that works in one country may need to be adapted elsewhere.
Employment practices differ. Cultural expectations differ. Regulatory
environments differ. Communication preferences differ. Employees may
also have very different relationships with their local leadership
teams.
Tatiana Chagas, Senior Global Mobility & Immigration Specialist in
International Employment at PM Group, brings a perspective focused on
international employment and mobility.
Hala Al-Balushi, Simona Radu, Katharina Auer and others in
the programme work within international organisations where
communication and people practices need to function across multiple
contexts.
For global teams, the challenge is often finding the right balance
between central direction and local relevance.
A completely centralised approach can miss local realities. A completely
decentralised approach can create inconsistency.
The solution is rarely simply choosing one or the other. Instead,
organisations need to identify which elements genuinely need global
consistency and where local teams should have room to adapt.
That is as much a communication challenge as an operational one.
Technology, law and the changing workplace
The future of work conversation also extends beyond traditional HR and
communications topics.
Technology is changing how organisations operate, while regulation and
legal questions are creating new considerations for employers and
employees.
Sylvie Delacroix, Inaugural Jeff Price Chair in Digital Law at
King’s College London, brings a legal and academic perspective to the
programme.
Her presence broadens the conversation around the workplace by
introducing questions about how digital developments intersect with law,
organisations and society.
This is increasingly relevant for HR and communications professionals
because new technologies often create questions that cannot be answered
by one department alone.
When organisations introduce new digital tools, for example, they may
need to consider employee communication, training, data, governance,
legal responsibilities and workplace culture at the same time.
Understanding those connections can help professionals move beyond
viewing technology simply as a tool.
The more useful question is often how technology changes the way
people work, communicate, collaborate and make decisions.
Reputation, trust and communication are connected
The speaker programme also includes professionals whose work sits at the
intersection of communications, governance and organisational
reputation.
Terri Duhon, Non-Executive Director and Risk Chair at Wise and
Rathbones, brings board-level experience in risk and governance.
Nicole Bearne, Founder & Director of The Comms Exchange Ltd and iNED
at Motorsport UK, brings communications and governance experience.
These perspectives are particularly relevant when considering how
organisations respond under pressure.
Internal and external reputation are often discussed separately, but
employees are also audiences. They see organisational decisions,
experience their consequences and form their own interpretations.
During periods of uncertainty, internal communication therefore
becomes part of organisational resilience.
Employees need information they can understand, but they may also need
clarity about what is known, what is changing and what remains
uncertain.
That requires communication professionals to work closely with
leadership and other functions rather than treating communication as the
final stage of decision-making.
A programme built around different professional perspectives
One of the defining features of the FutHRustIC 2026 lineup is the range
of professional backgrounds represented.
Alongside HR, Internal Communications and leadership specialists, the
programme includes people working across wellbeing, behavioural change,
learning, international employment, business operations, digital law,
governance and communications.
The speaker list includes:
- Fiona Yensen, former Head of Wellbeing, UK Home Office and
Founder of Twiga Training & Consultancy Ltd. - Paddy Johnston, Internal Communications Consultant, Level Up
Communications. - Ahmed Salah, Global Head of Human Resources, Oxford Economics.
- Jan Freygang, former Recruiter at Disney.
- Nick Holmes, Vice President, Learning & Culture, Avalere Health.
- Magdalene Arthur, Senior People Partner, WHSmith.
- Allan Morling, Founder & Behavioural Change Consultant,
Leadership EQcellence. - Terri Duhon, Non-Executive Director and Risk Chair, Wise and
Rathbones. - Shalini Gupta, Head of Internal Communications, Arup.
- Rob Hosking, International TEDx Motivational Speaker.
- Louise Thompson, Leadership Coach, Speaker and former Director
of Communications. - Brooke Hobson-Jones, Corporate Internal Communications, Landsec.
- Vidya Murali, Director, Business Operations, Skyscanner.
- Jon Bates, Employee and Leader Communications, Microsoft.
- Hala Al-Balushi, Internal Communication Manager, Omantel.
- Tatiana Chagas, Senior Global Mobility & Immigration Specialist,
PM Group. - Hannah Harrop, Head of HR, Security, OCS.
- Amber (Stoten) Douglas, Learning & Development Leader, UK &
Europe, IWG. - Emma Wilson-Wyer, Senior People & Impact Manager, KAEFER.
- David Hippolite, Senior People Partner, Victoria and Albert
Museum. - Howard Krais, Co-Founder, True.
- Nicole Bearne, Founder & Director, The Comms Exchange Ltd and
iNED, Motorsport UK. - Simona Radu, Global VP, Employee & Executive Communications,
Schneider Electric. - Dr Sujaya Banerjee, CEO, Capstone People Consulting.
- Katharina Auer, Head of Internal, HSE, Suppliers & Partners
Communications, Hitachi Energy. - Sylvie Delacroix, Inaugural Jeff Price Chair in Digital Law,
King’s College London. - Esther Kuku, Director of Communications and Engagement,
Resuscitation Council UK. - Natasha Liedl-McDowall, Internal Communication Partner to
Operations, LSEG.
Together, they represent different organisations, functions and
professional experiences. That makes the programme less about one
prescribed approach and more about exposing professionals to the
different ways people and organisations are tackling shared challenges.
What professionals can take from the conversation
A conference programme becomes useful when the ideas discussed can be
taken back into the workplace.
For HR and Internal Communications professionals attending FutHRustIC,
some of the most useful questions to carry through the four days may be
relatively simple:
Where are we treating communication as a delivery function when it
should be part of decision-making?
Where are our employee experience problems actually process or
leadership problems?
Which behaviours are we trying to change, and what reinforces them
today?
Are our people strategies connected to what employees actually
experience?
Where do global approaches need local adaptation?
How well equipped are our leaders to communicate uncertainty, change
and difficult decisions?
What would we do differently if we designed our employee experience
around the whole journey rather than individual initiatives?
These questions do not require a single answer. Their value is in
helping professionals examine their own organisations with greater
clarity.
That is also why a diverse speaker programme can be useful. A
perspective from Internal Communications may change how an HR
professional thinks about a people initiative. A leadership discussion
may give a communications professional a different way to approach
executive communication. A behavioural change perspective may challenge
assumptions about culture.
The value is often found in the connection between disciplines.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is FutHRustIC Festival 2026?
FutHRustIC Festival 2026 is a four-day professional festival focused
on HR, Internal Communications, employee engagement, leadership,
workplace culture, employee experience and the future of work.
When does FutHRustIC Festival 2026 take place?
FutHRustIC Festival 2026 takes place from 17-20 November 2026
in London, UK.
Where is FutHRustIC Festival 2026 held?
The festival takes place in London, UK, bringing together
professionals working across HR, Internal Communications and related
people and workplace disciplines.
Who is speaking at FutHRustIC 2026?
The speaker programme includes HR leaders, Internal Communications
professionals, leadership coaches, behavioural change consultants,
learning and development specialists, communications leaders and experts
working across international employment, governance, digital law and
employee experience.
Which topics will be covered at FutHRustIC?
Topics represented across the programme include Internal Communications,
HR, employee engagement, leadership, organisational culture, learning
and development, wellbeing, behavioural change, employee experience,
international employment and the future of work.
Is FutHRustIC relevant to Internal Communications professionals?
Yes. The programme includes professionals working specifically in
Internal Communications and Employee and Leader Communications,
alongside HR and leadership specialists whose work intersects with
employee communication.
Is FutHRustIC relevant to HR professionals?
Yes. The speaker lineup includes Global Heads of HR, People Partners, HR
leaders, Learning & Development professionals and specialists working
across people and organisational functions.
Why are HR and Internal Communications discussed together?
HR and Internal Communications frequently work on connected
organisational challenges, including employee engagement, organisational
change, leadership communication, culture and employee experience.
Bringing the disciplines together allows professionals to consider these
issues from different perspectives.
What can professionals gain from attending FutHRustIC?
The festival provides an opportunity to hear different professional
perspectives, examine practical approaches to people and communication
challenges, and connect with professionals working across HR, Internal
Communications, leadership and workplace culture.
How many speakers are taking part in FutHRustIC 2026?
The festival programme features 30+ speakers across four days,
representing a range of organisations, functions and professional
backgrounds.
How can I register for FutHRustIC 2026?
Registration is available through the official FutHRustIC website:
https://futuhristic.com/registration/
Bringing the conversation together
The strongest professional conversations rarely stay within one
department.
A question about employee engagement can quickly become a question about
leadership. A communication challenge can reveal a culture issue. A
learning programme can influence employee experience. A change
initiative can expose weaknesses in organisational communication. A new
technology can create questions about training, governance,
communication and workplace behaviour at the same time.
That is why the range of voices at FutHRustIC Festival 2026 matters.
Across four days in London, professionals will have the opportunity to
hear from people who approach these challenges from different positions
and different areas of expertise. The goal is not to provide one
universal model for how organisations should operate, but to create a
space where experienced professionals can compare ideas, question
assumptions and take useful thinking back to their own organisations.
30+ speakers. Four days. One festival bringing HR and Internal
Communications into the same conversation.
FutHRustIC Festival 2026 takes place from 17-20 November in London.
Meet the speakers, explore their perspectives and join the conversation.
Register now: https://futuhristic.com/registration/
