Diana Wong, Director, Total Rewards, Arc'teryx (Facilitator)Pelin Sambells, VP, Total Rewards, Beem Credit UnionShruti Chamoli, Associate Director, Vancouver Community College

Total Rewards professionals spend their careers designing systems, benefits, and compensation structures to support everyone else—often while navigating significant organizational change themselves.

To kick off BC Total Rewards Connect, this opening keynote panel explores the human reality of modern HR leadership. Senior Total Rewards leaders will share candid perspectives on navigating industry shifts, building cultures of care, and fostering a genuine sense of belonging across our workplaces.

Designed to ground and energize the room, this session sets the stage for the day ahead by highlighting the power of connection, community, and human-centered leadership.

Compensation decisions are becoming harder as organizations balance constrained budgets, changing labour markets, talent pressures, internal equity and increasing expectations for transparency. 

This session will explore how organizations can move beyond broad market responses and make more deliberate choices about where to invest compensation dollars, where targeted action is needed, and what should drive those decisions. Using the Canadian and BC environment as context, we will consider both employee and executive compensation and the trade offs Total Rewards professionals are increasingly being asked to navigate.

Join Us to Explore: 

• What current economic and labour market conditions mean for compensation decisions

• Where to invest and how to prioritize compensation dollars across market competitiveness, critical talent, internal equity, compression and retention

• How increasing transparency and scrutiny are changing expectations for defensible compensation decisions

• A practical approach to balancing market data, internal equity, business priorities and affordability

A panel discussion featuring three senior leaders in the Total Rewards and HR in different industries 

Join Us to Explore:As our world evolves, so do our rewards programs. We are delighted to invite three senior leaders in Total Rewards and HR from three diverse sectors, BC Children’s Hospital Foundation, KPMG and Wesgroup Properties, to share their experiences, lessons learned, and perspectives on navigating the changes ahead in the total rewards landscape. We will cover a wide range of topics, including optimizing total reward budgets, refining organizational offerings, navigating transparency challenges, and developing competitive advantages to stay ahead of the competition. Audiences are encouraged to ask questions and share their thoughts, fostering an interactive and engaging dialogue.

AI in Total Rewards: From Chatbot to System

A working session on building an AI system that is NOT a document reader dressed up as innovation. Join to know how to build agents that actually talk to each other with embedded governance systems. 

Join Us to Explore:Two analysts evaluate the same job and land on two different grades. Your pay philosophy lives in a 2022 PDF, your architecture in someone's spreadsheet, and your glossary in one person's head. AI cannot fix that.

But once you set the standard and govern who can change it, AI will enforce it every single time.

In this session we will build a working Compensation and Benefits agents live: source of truth, edit rights, version control, then job matching logic on top. We will finish by showing what happens when comp, benefits and hiring stop operating in separate rooms.

If your current AI is a chatbot with some documents uploaded, come see what the next step looks like.