Where the “People” People Find Their People: Workhuman Live Reflections
4 min read
Table of contents
- I'm Honestly Still Thinking About It
- Grit Showed Up in Orlando
- Humans are the Difference
- The "Community" Thing Is Legit
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Work is broken. We all know that. It's been building for a while. Things are changing fast, and nothing’s going back in the box.
How exactly it’s broken is up for debate. Maybe it’s broken like shattered glass? Or maybe it’s just broken like an eggshell that delivered something better? But for now, we all can agree that it’s broken in ways that are real and serious and not going away.
If you’re feeling confused, you’re not alone. The best minds in HR are still figuring out what to do about it – which is exactly why about 3000 of them showed up at the annual Workhuman Live conference two weeks ago.
Because it turns out, remaking work is a challenge that is best worked on together.
I'm Honestly Still Thinking About It
First, a confession. This blog post is about a week late.
It’s because I’ve been synthesizing! Honestly, what happened over those four days in Orlando surprised even me, and I helped to launch this conference eleven years ago. Knowing the kind of year it’s been, I was expecting a lot of traumatized HR leaders. I was not expecting so much pure… joy.
Workhuman Live started in Orlando in 2015 – same city, very different scale – with a few hundred people and a pretty simple premise. HR conferences at the time were, in the words of our creative genius Jen Perry, “the beigest beige that ever beiged.”
We wanted technicolor.
We wanted to build something so completely different. A place where the people who spend their careers taking care of everyone else could come and be taken care of in return. Where the “people” people could find their people.
Connection has been a pillar of the conference every year since, as (under the stewardship of the incredible Jill Kazanjian and her team of all stars) Workhuman Live has really become more of a movement.
But this year, with everything going on in the world, it was something unique.
There are big looming questions, but nobody walked in with the answers. Not the consultants, not the researchers, not the keynote speakers, not the HR leaders who've been doing this for thirty years. But it turns out no one was looking for answers. They were looking to compare notes, share ideas, explore solutions, be heard.
And in that sense, the answer was in the room. It's always been in the room.
Grit Showed Up in Orlando
If you want to understand the vibe in Orlando this year, look no further than Angela Duckworth’s keynote on grit. Her research – passion and perseverance for long-term goals, the willingness to stay on a learning curve even when it’s hard – has always resonated.
I think we were all feeling pragmatic. We know we’re on a rough road.
Our 2026 Humans at Work Barometer Report, released at the conference, made clear just how much pressure people are under. Moreover, AI’s relentless advance means companies laying off workers based on what they think AI will eventually do, not what it’s doing now.
We don’t want to be told there’s an easy way. There isn’t. We want to know that walking the rough road will be worth it.
That was the week’s energy. It was like there was a collective decision to show up anyway, that we were going to figure this out together.
That’s grit.
Humans are the Difference
One of the other things I keep coming back to is something Eric Mosley said in his keynoteOpens in a new tab. As AI gets ubiquitous it’s also commoditized, he argued. We all have access to it, so you can essentially cross it out on both sides of the competitive equation.
What you’re left with is your humans against their humans. Same as it ever was.
That reframe is important because it means that no matter how much tech we’re fielding, humans are the common denominator, which keeps HR in the driver’s seat.
Keeping humans and human wellbeing at the center of decisions while the organizational structures around them are being rebuilt. Putting AI in a human world, as Eric put it, instead of the inverse.
That sort of pragmatic, clear-eyed, human-first optimism is what this community is all about.
The "Community" Thing Is Legit
Okay, don’t let your eyes glaze over because I said community. I know how that word sounds in a conference context. Community gets used a lot. It usually means a mailing list or a hashtag and not a lot more.
I promise you, this is not that.
If you have ever been to this conference, you know. The way people come together – at the Gratitude Bar, the hallways between sessions, the conversations that were clearly continuations of ones started in Denver or Nashville or Atlanta years earlier – was genuine.
Workhuman Live delivers a candor you don’t usually get at industry events, where everyone is performing their own version of competence. Hamza Khan made the case from the main stage for replacing the heroic individual leader with what he calls the Great Many: the idea that what actually works is a collective of people who lead and support each other.
I watched that play out in real time all week long.
The result is the kind of optimism that comes from realizing you are not the only one wrestling with work right now, and that people you respect are working on the same problems – and that the community you’ve found is going to help you carry it.
Angela Duckworth calls it surrogate grit: the understanding that every world-class performer has someone in their corner who won’t let them quit on a bad day. (Eric called it out in his wrap up in ForbesOpens in a new tab.)
Workhuman Live, at its best, is surrogate grit at conference scale. I think everyone went home not just with new ideas but with renewed belief that this work is worth doing.
And that’s a conference worth building – and being part of. I'm really proud to be part of it. and I hope we'll see you on the attendee list next year!
Darcy Jacobsen
Darcy is a passionate storyteller and champion of workforce transformation, human connection, and recognition-driven culture. As an author on the Workhuman Live Blog, she loves to connect deep research insights with modern workplace dynamics to uncover what really drives engagement, belonging, and happiness at work. With a background in communications and a master's in medieval history, she brings a unique perspective to her writing, taking deep dives into all topics around organizational psychology and the science of gratitude.
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