Workhuman Live 2026 Gives Attendees Joy, Permission To Be Compassionate Leaders, and More

By Laurel Donnellan and Chelsea Stoll (Originally published at Forbes.com)

At most professional conferences, the goal is simple: collect insights, exchange business cards, and return to your desk with a notebook full of action items. Workhuman Live 2026, held in Orlando this past May, had other ideas. The conference is run and co-sponsored by Workhuman, a recognition platform with a broader mission: “We believe that for employees to do their best work, work needs to change.”

Workhuman has built a reputation as the conference where the human side of work is not a breakout session — it is the entire point. The 2026 edition leaned into that identity fully, opening with a dramatic visual arts performance that signaled immediately this was not a standard convention center experience. Live music played throughout — not as ambient filler, but as a deliberate atmospheric choice that kept energy visceral and present. The effect was a total environment, carefully designed to lower defenses and open people up.

"Doesn’t this feel like Disneyland for HR people?" one attendee observed mid-conference. It landed — because it’s true. And like Disneyland, what Workhuman actually sells is not content. It is permission. Permission to feel wonder. Permission to care openly. Permission to believe, without embarrassment, that work can be more human than it currently is. Permission to use heads and hearts to inspire and influence others, which is the definition of compassionate leadership. 

Chelsea Stoll, Chief Compassion Officer at Compassionate Leader Circle, was among the thousands who traveled to Orlando. Weeks later, she is still processing what happened there. "The joy is still here," she told me. "And, I'm not letting it get away this time."

That kind of residue is worth paying attention to.

The Case for Play

Jeff Harry, founder of Rediscover Your Play, speaker and consultant who applies positive psychology to workplace culture, has spent his career arguing that play is not the opposite of productive work — it is the condition for it. Harry's framework holds that organizations struggling with toxicity, disengagement, and disconnection won't find the answer in another policy or performance review. They'll find it in the experience of play itself — in creating, as he puts it, a "playground workplace atmosphere" where people feel safe enough to do their most vibrant work.

Workhuman engineers exactly that atmosphere. The result is that conversations which would ordinarily stay surface-level — the kind exchanged in hotel lobbies between strangers with name badges — go somewhere else entirely. Strangers become colleagues. Colleagues become mirrors. People say things they didn't know they needed to say, to someone they just met, who understands exactly what they mean.

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson's decades of research on psychological safety help explain why. Edmondson describes psychological safety as an environment of low interpersonal fear — the specific conditions under which people feel safe to speak up, take risks, and be honest without fear of humiliation or punishment. When that fear is absent, something opens. People contribute more fully. They connect more genuinely. They become, paradoxically, more themselves. Psychological safety allows space for failure in organizations, making room for big ideas and intelligent failure. 

In sitting down with Amy, we got to dive a bit deeper into what intelligent failure looks like and how to operationalize it in your organization. According to Amy, failure becomes intelligent “when it happens in new territory, in pursuit of a goal with a hypothesis, and is no longer than necessary.” She said that it is one of the most important components of operationalizing failure. 

Workhuman design creates psychological safety. The art, the music, the intentional design of shared space, the self-selected community of people all oriented toward the same mission — together, these lower the interpersonal temperature of the room. Conversations stop being transactional. Community becomes possible.

Courage and Compassion 

Keynote speaker Hamza Khan — author, speaker, and doctoral researcher exploring the intersection of courage, compassion, and leadership — delivered a session that reframed how attendees might think about fear itself. His TEDx talk, "Stop Managing, Start Leading," has been viewed over 2 million times.

"Courage is being afraid and doing it anyway," Khan told me when we asked him about courage, and he quickly added,  "And discipline is doing that like you love it." His research draws on the conservation of resources theory, which identifies three sources of psychological stress: actual loss of resources, the fear of losing resources, and insufficient reward following investment. Khan's argument is that courage is the capacity to feel fear — in any form — and move forward regardless.

Khan also connected courage directly to compassion, describing what he called an orientation of other-ish-ness — a disposition toward others that does not require the sacrifice of self. "I'm not truly flourishing if you're not flourishing," he said. "If I'm flourishing and I know that you're not, then I'm accepting or neglecting your suffering." He attributed this belief to his parents and watching how they navigated the world. He said they instilled in him that “our collective flourishing depends on everybody acting in this way, being the caregivers, being the tenders of other people's lights, with the supreme hope that if we do this sincerely, without any expectation of return, it will come back to us.”

That framing — that individual flourishing is inextricably tied to collective flourishing — sits at the heart of what Compassionate Leader Circle was built to advance. Hearing it echoed from the Workhuman stage into a room of thousands suggests the conversation is reaching critical mass.

The Belonging That Stays

The familiar arc of a conference high follows a predictable trajectory: energized on the flight home, motivated through Monday, back to baseline by Wednesday. By multiple accounts, including from my colleagues who attended, Workhuman 2026 has not followed that arc.

The reason, I’d argue, is belonging. Most professional environments ask people to manage themselves — to be strategic about what they share, careful about how much they care. Workhuman asks the opposite. It invites attendees to bring their idealism, their frustration, their hard-won conviction that people deserve better from the organizations they give their lives to. And then it surrounds them with thousands of others who feel exactly the same way.

That kind of recognition — of being known, not just networked with — does not evaporate on the flight home. It is the difference between fitting in and belonging. Fitting in is a performance. Belonging is what happens when you walk into a room and feel, without calculation, that you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

For HR professionals who spend their working lives advocating for the humanity of others, that experience is rarer than it should be. Stoll put it simply: "I belong at Workhuman. And I will keep coming back."

That, more than any keynote or curriculum, may be Workhuman's most significant achievement — building a community so grounded in shared purpose that its members leave more certain of who they are than when they arrived. In a landscape where employee disengagement remains stubbornly high and burnout is endemic, a conference that sends people home more human is not a luxury. It is a model worth studying.

Look here to learn more about Workhuman Live, coming to Nashville in 2027.