What will it mean to be paid well in New Zealand five years from now? Melissa Clark-Reynolds opens the conference with a broad, provocative look at the forces reshaping pay: technology, generational change, new ways of working and rising expectations around transparency and fairness. She’ll draw on global examples and bring each back to what it means for reward here in Aotearoa. It’s a session to stretch your thinking and set the tone for the two days ahead.

What do today’s economic settings mean for the pay round ahead? Brad Olsen skips the broad economic tour and focuses on what reward professionals need to know: where wage growth, inflation and the labour market are heading, and what that means for 2026/27 increase budgets and pay decisions. It’s a practical, New Zealand-focused briefing to help you set your pay round with evidence behind you.

When pay budgets can’t meet expectations, how do you still deliver value employees can see? In this fireside chat, people leaders from across sectors share how they’ve handled the squeeze. They’ll explain why they added wellbeing benefits to their total reward offer and how they communicated them to build an employee value proposition people genuinely feel. They’ll also cover the measurable outcomes, from uptake and usage to staff feedback and engagement, and the advice they’d give peers facing the same pressures.

Robbie will be joined by:

• Renae Brunton, Head of Employee Experience, Northpower
• Nic Yelash, Manager, Group Employee Remuneration and Superannuation, IAG
• Jane Stella, Organisational Culture and Development Delivery Lead, Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora

Each leads people work for a large, dispersed workforce, and between them they span the public, private and community-owned sectors. Together they’ll explore the pressures they’ve faced and how they’ve approached reward decisions.

The remuneration role is changing faster than the job description. The manual work that once filled the week is increasingly automatable, and the value is shifting to what you do with the time – and the confidence – that gives you back.

Kathleen Webber, Co-Founder and CEO of LiveRem, looks at what it takes to be a rem professional of the future: where tools and automation can genuinely optimise the role, and how better data turns pay decisions from defensible guesses into decisions you can stand behind. Three case studies show what this looks like in practice for New Zealand organisations. Practical, forward-looking, and grounded in what’s working now.

Health benefit costs are rising faster than most benefits budgets were built to absorb. Simply trimming cover rarely survives contact with a workforce that values it. So, what are the alternatives?

Alison Bamford opens with a short overview of the four drivers pushing health benefit costs up. She then puts the hard questions to Angela Williams and Alex Kotiah:

• Where do you start when costs are rising faster than your budget?
• How do you align health benefits with your wider people strategy, so cover reflects what your workforce actually values?
• Where can you make real savings in how plans are run and financed, and where are cuts a false economy?
• How do you judge success by outcomes, not just spend?

Angela and Alex draw on client case studies from a range of industries. They’ll cover what New Zealand employers have tried, what worked, and what they would do differently.

The market, the employee, the boardroom and the future – four research teams on what’s driving reward decisions right now.

Four of New Zealand’s leading reward advisory firms bring their newest research to the RemNet stage in one power session. In sharp 15-minute briefings, each reveals what their latest data says about pay, reward and the pressures shaping decisions right now. Then all four come together for a live panel Q&A: put your questions directly to the experts, and hear where their findings align – and where they part ways.

Reward Trends in New Zealand
Neil White, Principal Consultant, NZ Government Lead, Korn Ferry
Neil will focus on five practical changes remuneration professionals should make over the next 12 months, drawing on Korn Ferry’s March and July 2026 Global Total Rewards Pulse Surveys. The research suggests that while salary growth is stabilising, remuneration professionals face increasing pressure to demonstrate the value, fairness and effectiveness of reward investment. Our key message is that remuneration professionals need to shift from administering pay to actively shaping how organisations value work, skills, performance and future capability.

Beyond the Pay Increase: What Really Shapes Employee Perceptions of Fair Pay
Cathy Hendry, Managing Director, Strategic Pay
This session shares new research into employee perceptions of pay fairness, pay increases and pay transparency. We will explore the concept of pay fairness and how it is shaped by much more than just the number itself.

STI efficacy – under the radar
Tanya Giles, Director, PwC
Research across the NZX, ASX and further afield (FTSE100) shows executive STI are consistently paying out at levels close to target, regardless of economic volatility and other factors.

As ‘no votes’ to remuneration reports increase within the ASX (‘say on pay’ regime), we explore the common challenges that are being laid down to STI efficacy, and how we can take these learnings and apply them in the context of our own organisations.

Work Reimagined: AI and the Workforce
Jenny Dicker, Manager, People Advisory Services – Reward, EY
EY’s 2025 Work Reimagined research examine’s AI’s impact on the global workforce – covering talent and AI advantage, adoption maturity, and the flow-on effects for skills, culture and reward.

With inflation, cost pressure, skill shortages, organisational transformation and rising expectations that AI will lift productivity all in play, reward leaders are increasingly being asked to make big calls with imperfect information, and often with less time than they’d like.

This panel brings together senior reward and people leaders, the people who actually make those calls, for a candid conversation about how they’re handling it. How do you balance commercial reality against what employees expect? What do you do when the data is incomplete and nobody has written the playbook? And how do you reach a decision you can stand behind, then take it to your executive, your board and your people?

Expect practical perspective rather than theory: the trade-offs they’ve weighed, the judgement calls they’ve made, and what they’ve learned along the way.

Sarah and Shirley open day two with insights from Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends research and its New Zealand companion findings. The forces reshaping work are no longer future trends. AI, changing workforce expectations, greater transparency and rising accountability are today’s business realities, and organisations now face tipping points rather than tensions to manage. For reward professionals, pay can no longer be separated from workforce design, data, AI and governance.

Together Sarah and Shirley explore the questions reward leaders should be asking now:

• How do we value work done by humans and AI together?
• Can we trust the workforce data behind our reward decisions?
• How do we design reward for organisations that won’t sit still?
• How can reward leaders help their organisations build trust?