Matt Macri-Waller, Founder & CEO – Benefex

Matt Macri-Waller is a global thought-leader in the employee experience space, specialising in how technology can help bridge the gap between a company and its employees. He is the Founder and CEO of Benefex, the award-winning global employee experience provider. 

Matt’s vision is now impacting the lives of millions of people at work every day, but he also believes we’re just getting started.

He’s helped hundreds of organisations understand what’s impacting their employee engagement, and has then worked with them to design and deliver an employee experience which enables them to achieve their strategy.

Kathryn Kendall, Chief People Officer, Benefex

Kathryn joined Benefex in October 2014 and has overall responsibility for managing the HR function within Benefex. She has over ten years’ experience of HR management across a variety of sectors.

Kathryn’s remit at Benefex covers a wide spectrum, from developing a recruitment strategy to bring in the very best people to deliver to our clients, to designing and delivering in house training solutions, to ensuring our company values are at the heart of everything we do. 

She is passionate about ensuring work becomes a great place to be for absolutely everyone, and believes that life is far too short for us to spend it dreading Monday mornings.  

Keith Williams – Owner, KMW

Keith Williams is owner of KMW3, a consultancy which supports organisations (both commercial and governmental) by demystifying the process required to successfully integrate digital tools into the Employee Experience with a particular focus on chatbots.

As HR Services Technology Director at Unilever he was the Product Owner for “Una”, a suite of multi-lingual technologies incorporating a global chatbot that understands nineteen languages through cognitive artificial intelligence and computer-based translation; a notifications hub and a global Case Management system (which was developed in 12 weeks).

Allison English, Deputy CEO at Leesman 

Allison joined Leesman in 2018 as Client Services Director with a clear desire to involve herself in impactful work which would help improve the employee experience. Having started her career in the US, honing project and account management skills,

After spending time in dozens of offices around the Americas, APAC and EMEA, Allison’s exposure to various work environments and cultures results in a unique perspective of the workplace and how people interact with it. Client collaboration and developing strong partnerships have been central throughout Allison’s career, which has now seen her appointed as Leesman’s Deputy CEO in March 2020.

Emma Codd – Global Inclusion Director, Deloitte

Emma is a Partner of the professional services firm Deloitte, where she is Global Inclusion Leader. Prior to her appointment to her current role, Emma was the Managing Partner for Talent for Deloitte UK (a role she held for 6 years) and Deloitte NWE, sitting on the Executive Committees for both.

In September 2019 Emma became a member of the Lead the Change board, a board established by the UK Government to take forward work to increase the diversity and inclusion at the top of the UK’s leading organisations.

Ange Pattico, Chief People Officer at MVF
 

Ange has led the People function at MVF (1st in the Sunday Times Best Company to Work for in 2020) for the last 3.5 years and along with her fantastic team is responsible for co-creating and executing a People Strategy and Experience that makes MVF a great place to work.

Ange’s passion is people - she is dedicated to coaching and developing colleagues to support organisational growth and help people achieve their personal purpose.

Cheryl Morgan, Director of The Diversity Trust. 

She heads up their Trans Awareness training programme. Cheryl is an expert on trans history and works closely with organisations such as LGBT History Month and Queer Britain. She also has an interest in trans themes in science fiction, and is the first openly trans person to win a Hugo Award from the World Science Fiction Society.

Her other interests include running a publishing company, co-hosting a feminist radio show on Ujima Radio in Bristol, and being an active member of the Women's Equality Party.

Cynthia V Davis – Founder, Diversifying & BAME Recruitment

Cynthia is a multi-award winning founder and Chief Executive of diversity and inclusion consultancy firm, BAME Recruitment and also Co-Founder of purpose led Digital Career Platform, Diversifying.io.

Cynthia has over 20 years’ experience at senior level, a specialist in identifying diverse talent and understanding their barriers.  She has won numerous awards and received both national and international recognition for her entrepreneurship and determination to champion and campaign for a fairer and just society.

Mike Adams – CEO, Purple

Mike Adams is CEO of Purple, an organisation changing the disability conversation with businesses and disabled people.

Purple see disability as a value opportunity and Mike is leading the development of products and services which are beginning to transform the landscape across all business sectors.

Purple Tuesday, created and co-ordinated by Mike, has achieved national acclaim for its contribution to changing the customer experience for disabled people. 

Trish Driver – Founder and CEO of A New Normal

Trish (pronouns she/ her) is a Diversity and Inclusion and Culture Change Strategist with experience through the end to end talent management cycle. She has worked with organisations as diverse as Capgemini, Salesforce, Audible, NTT Data and Bauer Media, both in-house, and as a consultant, designing and implementing inclusive talent management practices and driving true culture change. 

Simon Fanshawe – Partner, Diversity by Design 

Simon co-founded Diversity by Design, a ground-breaking consultancy that uses their proprietary process ‘Recruiting for Difference’ to support organisations to expand the diversity of their senior staff in order to build greater performance.

He is currently chair of Hexagon Housing Association and on the Board of POWERful Women.

Rachel Clacher – Co-Founder, Moneypenny

Rachel Clacher co-founded Moneypenny with her brother Ed Reeves in 2000.

Today Moneypenny is the world’s lead provider of telephone answering, outsourced switchboard and live chat, with US and UK offices.

Here Moneypenny’s team of 600+ annually handle 13million+ calls on behalf of 12,000+ companies from its award-winning HQ – known as ‘the happiest office in the land’ - and the company is one of the ‘Top 5 Best Companies to Work For in the UK’.

Dominic Monkhouse – Business Coach

Dominic is a proven architect of business growth. As managing director he headed up teams that scaled two UK technology service firms; Rackspace in Uxbridge and Peer 1 Hosting in Southampton to £30m in the UK and $200m globally in 5 years; with a sensational turnaround at IT Lab sandwiched in between. 

Dominic now helps others as a business coach and works with his clients and their teams in the “Management Lab” he has built on his farm near Salisbury.

Emma O’Toole – Facebook

Emma is an innovative reward leader with 15 years’ experience of strategic business partnering and leading reward teams in the telco, retail and media industries uniquely all under one FTSE company.

Her specialities include total reward strategy design and execution, large scale mergers and acquisitions, designing reward frameworks and reimagining employee benefits.

Emma has recently become lead compensation expert for Facebook’s technology organisation in the EMEA regions.

Karen Weeks, VP of People at Ordergroove in New York

Karen D. Weeks is a strategic partner whose drive is to help companies build and scale their culture to meet their business goals and help people find their career passions.  Her passion is around talent development, organizational effectiveness, individual career development, and helping teams through change. 

Currently, Karen is the SVP of People at Ordergroove and was named one of the 2020 Notable Women in Talent by Crain’s New York Business. 

Ruth Dance, Managing Director – Employee Engagement Alliance

The membership organisation dedicated to helping the world create workplaces that people love. Through it’s global network of individual and corporate members, The EEA delivers learning events, online webinars, conferences, training, content, resources and networking opportunities throughout the year.