Transform 2026 · Compensation & Benefits
Transform 2026 held 44 sessions on comp and benefits. One picture emerged. A growing group of companies is already getting it right.
Start with the Finland story. A company expands globally. Their Finnish employees pick a different pay structure. They choose a local contract with local norms and no equity. The company goes public. The US team builds wealth. The Finnish employees call HR. They are frustrated. Nobody explained what they were giving up.
"We expanded in the US, and the US said, 'We want a completely different structure.' And now that the company has gone public and everybody in the US has massive upside from their equity, and the people in Finland are like, 'What the hell? We didn't know this was an option.' We're like, 'Well, this is what we told you. You said you wanted this.' 'Yeah, but you should have educated us about the difference because everybody else is a millionaire and I'm just regular.'"
Jenny Dearborn, Chief Enterprise Excellence Officer, Greenfield Global — "Growing Beyond Borders: Tactical Approaches to Faster Growth Through Global Hiring"
This lesson ran through the whole comp and benefits track at Transform 2026. Employers who help employees understand their benefits get better results. The companies closing that gap have the data to prove it.
The most-attended sessions agreed on one point. Benefits personalization works when you build the right structure under it. One session tackled the tension head-on. It was called "Personalized Benefits: The Promise Everyone Wants or the Reality No One Can Deliver?" The speakers had real answers.
Personalization means meeting employees where they are, inside a smart system. The best companies set a firm benefits floor first. These are programs they will keep no matter what. Then they add flexible options on top.
"It's all about meeting people where they are within reason. So I think the second part of your question about what isn't it — it's not a 'let's ask every single person in the company what exactly they want and why, and let's make sure that we find a way to put it into the ecosystem.'"
Connor Sweeney — "Personalized Benefits: The Promise Everyone Wants or the Reality No One Can Deliver?"
That version works. Define your floor. Tell employees what it is. Build flexibility into the tiers above it.
"You have to define what is a minimum that you are comfortable with in good times and bad."
Laura Mills — "Personalized Benefits: The Promise Everyone Wants or the Reality No One Can Deliver?"
The best personalization also changes over time. Life events shift what employees need. A benefits package that fit someone in year one may not fit them in year three. Their family, health, or finances may have changed. Leading companies treat benefits enrollment as an ongoing conversation, not a once-a-year form.
"Personalization may mean one thing today, even if we're able to measure and ask employees what they really want. That could change and shift very quickly... it's staying very versatile."
Jason — "Personalized Benefits: The Promise Everyone Wants or the Reality No One Can Deliver?"
One deep-dive session drew serious attention. It covered Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements, known as ICHRAs. ICHRAs flip the old employer-sponsored model. Instead of the employer picking a health plan, the employer sets a reimbursement amount. Then employees shop for their own coverage on the open market.
The session "Rethinking Health Benefits: Real-World Lessons from the Shift to ICHRA" made the comparison clear. ICHRAs apply the 401(k) model to health benefits. Employers get predictable costs. Employees get real choice, including portability when they change jobs. For companies watching premium costs rise each year, this is the most significant structural option available right now.
The switch takes real effort. It requires employee education, help navigating plan options, and patience with early bumps. But companies that have made the shift report a consistent finding: employees who actively chose their own coverage are more satisfied than those enrolled in a plan chosen for them. Having a choice matters, financially and psychologically.
The Pitch the Future competition surfaced a growing argument among benefits leaders. Housing support is no longer a niche perk for tech workers in expensive cities. For hourly and frontline workers in most major markets, it has become a pay necessity.
"We've been led to believe that housing is a personal issue, but I don't think that's true anymore, because when your team shows up for work stressed out because they've got 40% plus of each paycheck going to rent, that's not a personal issue. That's a workforce issue."
George Fatheree — "Pitch the Future Competition"
Treating housing costs as a workforce problem opens new solutions. Employer-assisted housing programs, down payment support, and housing stipends are in active use. Companies that have run the numbers understand why. If a large share of your workforce is stressed about housing costs, your compensation is worth less than the number on the offer letter. Closing that gap is a retention strategy.
The session "Designing Compensation for the Modern Workforce" confirmed what is now conventional wisdom. Pay transparency is a talent tool. Candidates compare offers with more data than ever before. Pay transparency laws have changed what employers can legally withhold. Companies that still hide comp ranges are losing candidates who assume the worst.
The sharper finding was about internal equity. When companies audit their pay data (often triggered by transparency laws), they often find that pay for similar roles is more consistent than they feared. They can document it and defend it. That documentation becomes a recruiting asset. You can tell candidates not just what the range is, but why.
"Now at the end of the day, like people have to make ends meet and if you're noticing that you're continually fighting against, you know, that your offer accept rates low and you do want to look at the comp packages to say like, are we even in market? Like, are we within the bands that's reasonable or are we low?"
Patrick, Talent Acquisition at Cognition — "How Hypergrowth Companies Compete for Talent in the Age of AI"
Asking that question with data, not defensiveness, separates companies that stay ahead on pay from those that only discover gaps when offer accept rates fall.
Tracy Laney and Eric Severson delivered the sharpest talk in the featured track. Both are former CHROs. Both now teach at University of Chicago Booth. Their argument is simple. Companies that win on comp and benefits over a full business cycle operate from a compass, not a pendulum.
The pendulum model is common and costly. Tight labor market? Add perks. Recession? Cut them. Employees notice. They remember. That trust damage builds over time. It makes retention fragile when the next talent crunch arrives. The compass model means setting a pay and benefits philosophy that holds no matter what the market does. Then you communicate it clearly and stick to it, even when cutting would be easy.
Employees who know your non-negotiables can plan their lives around the job. That predictability is itself a form of compensation. It never shows up on a competitor's offer letter.
"Sometimes we get caught in the technology, like what solution are we gonna use? But we forget that we really should be talking about the outcomes. What are the outcomes we're trying to achieve, not just what is the tool that we will use."
Donna Dorsey — "Driving HR Excellence in an AI-Centered World: Alight + IBM"
The same idea applies to benefits philosophy. Define what you are trying to achieve for employees. Let that anchor every design decision. Companies that do this stop making reactive cuts that destroy goodwill. They start making smart investments that pay off over time.
The session "The Multi-Generational Care Mandate: How Workplaces Are Rising to the Sandwich Challenge" documented a real pattern. Many workers are caring for both children and aging parents at the same time. In most companies, this describes a large share of mid-career employees. Many are also high performers and managers.
Companies that have made the investment are seeing returns. Paid family leave, backup care programs, and smart leave management tools are retention tools. They keep the workers most likely to leave, and most likely to take key institutional knowledge with them.
This session also showed what happens when admin burden drops. When AI-powered tools handle routine leave management and benefits questions, HR leaders get time back to focus on bigger structural problems.
"And all of a sudden, he became a very transactional interface for me, as opposed to now... our relationship is materially different today. We spend a lot more time on culture. We spend a lot more time on organizational capacity. We spend a lot more time talking about how org design decisions impact our productivity."
Jordan, Carbon — "Driving HR Excellence in an AI-Centered World: Alight + IBM"
Well-designed benefits infrastructure frees HR from the transactional grind. What those leaders do with the time they recover is where the competitive advantage actually lives.
The global hiring panel separated confident international expanders from reactive ones. The key difference: treat global compensation as a design problem first and a compliance problem second. You can meet every local legal requirement and still fail to attract the talent you want. Leading companies run local pay benchmarking before they post a role, not after.
"There is no perfect answer. It is really based on the strategy. And you can have 2 companies with the same strategy and pick very different approaches because it's about what they want in that location and who they are as a company."
David Hewson, Chief Strategy Officer, Remo First — "Growing Beyond Borders: Tactical Approaches to Faster Growth Through Global Hiring"
There is no universal template. The right answer depends on what you are building in a specific market, what talent you need, and what your pay philosophy signals about who you are. Companies with clear answers to those questions move faster and make fewer costly mistakes.
"I think the common thread that I see is organizations not aligned as to why they're going about expanding into this market."
Brandon Baukamp, Head of Talent, Procore — "Growing Beyond Borders: Tactical Approaches to Faster Growth Through Global Hiring"
Alignment on the why, established before the first role is posted, turns global expansion from a compliance task into a talent advantage. The Finland story becomes preventable.
The Horizon Stage talk on psychedelic-assisted therapies drew large crowds and serious interest. The framing was rigorous. Ketamine-assisted therapy is FDA-cleared. It is reimbursable in some contexts. It produces strong outcomes data for treatment-resistant depression, a condition most EAP programs fail to address at scale.
Standard mental health benefits have high treatment-resistance rates and poor outcomes data for severe cases. A new category of clinical treatment now has scientific standing. In some forms, it qualifies for benefit-plan coverage. For companies willing to engage the data and bring it to their boards, this is a concrete way to improve outcomes for the employees most underserved by the current system.
Concrete actions from the Transform 2026 comp & benefits track