Conference Schedule: Wednesday, October 14, 2026​​

Employment law continues to evolve, bringing new challenges and increased complexity for employers. Join a panel of experienced employment law attorneys as they discuss today’s most pressing workplace issues, share practical guidance, and answer your toughest questions.

Through real-world scenarios and interactive discussion, our panelists will explore current legal developments, emerging workplace trends, and best practices to help employers reduce risk, strengthen compliance, and make informed decisions with confidence.

Topics will include:

• Accommodation and leave management
• Employee performance and discipline
• Hiring, retention, and termination practices
• Workplace investigations
• Wage and hour compliance
• Artificial intelligence and emerging workplace technologies
• Employment policies and legal updates
• Audience-submitted questions

Whether you’re navigating a difficult employee situation, responding to new legal developments, or looking for practical strategies to protect your organization, this session provides valuable insights you can put to work immediately.

Intended Audience: Private Sector / Public Sector

The labor and employment landscape continues to evolve at a rapid pace, making it more important than ever for employers and HR professionals to stay informed. This session will provide a fast-paced review of the ten most significant labor and employment law developments that shaped 2026, along with practical insights into emerging legal trends and workplace issues expected to impact employers in 2027. You’ll leave with a clearer understanding of what has changed, what lies ahead, and the actions your organization should consider now.

Session Objectives:

• Identify the ten most significant labor and employment law developments that affected employers during 2026.
• Explain how recent legal, regulatory, and court decisions may impact workplace policies, employee relations, and compliance efforts.
• Recognize emerging labor and employment issues that organizations should monitor as they prepare for 2027.
• Develop proactive strategies to reduce legal risk and help ensure their organization remains compliant in an evolving employment law environment.

Intended Audience: Private Sector / Public Sector

Practical perspectives around what it takes to create a workplace where employees feel respected, valued, supported and accountable.

Session Objectives:

• We will review the leadership behaviors to model that create safety and accountability.
• We will discuss what a healthy workplace culture looks and feels like.
• We will discuss how this shift will affect your bottom line.

Intended Audience: Private Sector / Public Sector

Labor shortages are affecting industries across the board, presenting significant challenges for organizations. In this session, we’ll delve into strategies for enhancing employee benefits to attract and retain top talent while increasing employee engagement. We’ll also discuss key marketplace trends, compliance updates, merit adjustments, the evolving hybrid work environment, and innovative employee benefit solutions. Additionally, we’ll share best practices for employee engagement and communication, drawing insights from the latest Holmes Murphy 2026 employer survey.

In today’s fast-changing workplace, leaders must balance compliance, innovation, and engagement. This session shows how culture is the key to all three. Nick Paoli shares how engaged teams drive accountability, embrace AI and new tools, and strengthen HR compliance from the inside out. Walk away with practical strategies to build buy-in, reduce resistance, and create a culture where people don’t just follow expectations – they champion them.

Session Objectives:

• Identify how workplace culture and employee engagement directly influence HR compliance, accountability, and organizational performance.
• Evaluate strategies to increase employee buy-in and reduce resistance when introducing AI, new technologies, or organizational change initiatives.
• Apply practical frameworks to build a culture of trust, communications, and shared ownership that supports both compliance and continuous innovation.

Intended Audience: Private Sector / Public Sector

You’ve got the handbook. You’ve got the policies. You’ve got job descriptions on file. But do they actually protect you or are they quietly building the plaintiff’s case?

This practical presentation breaks down the three documents that shape every Iowa employment relationship: what makes each one different, where they overlap, and how each can either defend you or be used against you in an EEOC charge, an Iowa Civil Rights Commission complaint, or a wrongful-discharge suit.

What you’ll walk away knowing:

• The real differences in scope, audience, and update cadence between handbooks, policies, and job descriptions – and why mixing them up creates risk.
• How to preserve Iowa’s at-will doctrine with the disclaimer language too many handbooks get wrong.
• The Iowa-specific requirements you can’t afford to miss – drug & alcohol testing (§730.5), wage payment (ch. 91A), smoke-free workplace rules, personnel records access, and required leave.
• Why your job descriptions carry real legal weight under the ADA, FLSA, and equal-pay laws and how ‘aspirational’ and vague descriptions get impeached.
• How your obligations shift as you grow – the 4, 15, 20, 50, and 100-employee thresholds that change what every document must contain.
• A size-by-size playbook from the 3-person shop to the 100+ employer, plus the special rules for public and unionized workplaces.

Whether you’re making your first HR hire or auditing documents across multiple locations, you’ll leave with concrete steps to keep your handbook, policies, and job descriptions working as a system – not contradicting each other on the witness stand.

Session Objectives:

• Understand legal obligations on an employer for job descriptions, policies, and handbooks.
• Apply knowledge to documents to conform with State and Federal laws.
• How to edit, revise, and improve existing policies, handbooks, and job descriptions to help your managers and best defend against claims and complaints.

Intended Audience: Private Sector / Public Sector

• A practitioner-led case study on scaling AI adoption at Pella Corporation.
• Focus on shifting from a technology-first rollout to a people-first AI literacy model.
• Real examples of what worked: training, community, leadership, and cultural behaviors.
• Key results, including 95%+ monthly active usage of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Lessons learned and recommendations for accelerating adoption in similar organizations.

Session Objectives:

• Pella’s People-First Strategy Made Copilot a Breakthrough Success.
• AI Is Now a Core Capability – Not a Tool.
• Change Management + Community + Continuous Feedback = Sustained Impact.

Intended Audience: Private Sector / Public Sector

Healthcare costs continue to rise, leaving employers searching for practical strategies to maximize the value of their health benefit investments. This session explores the systemic factors driving escalating healthcare expenses, including the impact of misaligned incentives across the healthcare ecosystem. Participants will learn how to use data-driven governance practices to improve transparency, strengthen vendor accountability, and align health plan spending with organizational goals. The session also examines the rapidly evolving role of GLP-1 therapies, providing practical guidance for evaluating their financial impact and implementing sustainable management strategies that support both organizational budgets and employee wellbeing.

Session Objectives:

• Explain how misaligned incentives throughout the healthcare system contribute to escalating employer healthcare costs and diminished value.
• Apply data-driven frameworks and governance strategies to increase transparency, monitor vendor performance, and better align health plan spending with organizational goals.
• Evaluate the opportunities, risks, and financial implications of GLP-1 therapies and develop sustainable approaches for managing demand while supporting employee wellbeing.

Intended Audience: Private Sector / Public Sector

Iowa employers are facing a wave of retirements that threatens to drain critical expertise and widen talent pipeline gaps as seasoned workers exit faster than new talent enters. At the same time, AI is rapidly reshaping job roles and workplace expectations. This session will show how work-based learning (WBL) can be a practical bridge over that gap by accelerating the readiness of emerging talent while preserving institutional knowledge. You’ll see how internships, apprenticeships, and applied AI projects embed real experience and knowledge transfer into career pathways that reduce hiring friction and strengthen retention.

Speakers will share models for integrating WBL with AI skill-building and succession planning to help organizations replenish expertise and sustain competitive advantage. Join iJAG, the Iowa Association for Business & Industry, and Kuder, Inc. to explore actionable strategies for turning workforce transitions into opportunity in 2026 and beyond.

Session Objectives:

• Assess the impact of retirements and AI-driven job changes on their organization’s talent pipeline and identify emerging workforce risks and opportunities.
• Identify work-based learning models (internships, apprenticeships, and applied AI projects) that can accelerate talent readiness while supporting knowledge transfer from experienced employees.
• Develop actionable approaches to integrate work-based learning with AI skill-building and succession planning to strengthen hiring pipelines, reduce onboarding time, and improve employee retention.

Intended Audience: Public Sector / Private Sector

The employment and human resources world has seen dramatic changes in labor and employment policy. This momentum does not seem to be letting up with changes in technology, federal administration and state regulation. When the federal government attempts to whittle back workplace protections for employees, the states have stepped in to try to fill the voids. This presentation will discuss changes to EEO and DEI policies and priorities, impact on labor relations, outlook on wages and overtime regulation, increased state regulation and AI regulation and landmines.

Session Objectives:

• Understanding the shifting labor relations world.
• Understanding increasing state regulation and how it affects employers.
• Become mindful of AI landmines in the human resources arena.

Intended Audience: Private Sector

A no-spin look at the hidden fees, spread pricing, and middlemen quietly inflating your costs, and the questions that put you back in control. This one is provocative without being gimmicky. It promises an insider exposé, which is exactly what HR leaders drowning in renewal increases want to hear, and it positions you as the person willing to say what brokers usually won’t.

Session Objectives:

• Identify the hidden fees, spread pricing, and third-party markups.
• Distinguish real medical cost trend from administrative profit-taking.
• Apply a practical set of questions to put to brokers, carriers, and PBMs that surface hidden costs and force accountability, giving them concrete leverage to take back control of their benefits spend.

Intended Audience: Private Sector / Public Sector

AI has leveled the playing field. Every competitor now has the same models, the same data, the same playbooks, so strategy is no longer the differentiator it once was. What stays scarce is belief, whether your people still think their effort matters. Drawing on twenty years leading transformation at AT&T and RTX, including a front-row seat to the iPhone and AI inflection points, Jen Asplund shows why fear of AI quietly turns into resignation, and what leaders do about it: set a direction people can get behind, spread ownership beyond a few shoulders, and create movement that holds. Practical, story-driven, built to use Monday.

Session Objectives:

• Explain why rapid technology change, especially AI, commoditizes strategy and makes belief the scarce advantage and recognize how fear of AI shows up as resignation rather than resistance.
• Use the three drivers of hope, Direction, Ownership, and Movement, to diagnose where an AI or digital transformation is stalling on a team.
• Apply specific ways to distribute ownership and rebuild belief so change holds through the uncertainty AI brings, even when systems break.

Intended Audience: Private Sector / Public Sector

Discussing the most complex and costly FMLA and ADA traps including FMLA key employee exception, retroactive designation of FMLA leave, mistaken FMLA designations, determining the eligibility of employees who leave the employer for another job and then return, handbook errors regarding FMLA leave, monitoring FMLA abuse, the FMLA and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and the FMLA/ADA waterfall.

Session Objectives:

• Expose attendees to the exotic aspects of the FMLA.
• Provide real world advice based upon FMLA trials.
• Teach attendees how to identify, avoid or fix FMLA mistakes.

Intended Audience: Private Sector / Public Sector

The presentation will give an overview of Iowa Code section 730.5, Iowa’s private sector drug testing law. The presentation will focus on how the law came to be, the important sections of the law, the important cases on the law, and current issues.

I represent plaintiffs in these matters, so I believe my insight may be valuable when speaking to an audience predominantly made up of defense attorneys and businesses.

Session Objectives:

• The history and goal of the law.
• Understanding the different parts of the law through the statute and relevant cases.
• The issues currently popping up in 730.5 litigation.

Intended Audience: Private Sector

Today’s HR leaders do far more than manage people. They influence hiring, leadership, organizational change, and the workforce decisions that shape business performance. Yet many have never been shown how executives evaluate competing priorities or make the decisions that move an organization forward.

Drawing on more than twenty years of executive leadership experience, including eight years as president of a family-owned manufacturing company, Molly Varangkounh gives HR professionals an inside look at how executives think. Participants will learn how business leaders connect people decisions to organizational performance, communicate through the lens of business outcomes, and contribute more effectively to strategic conversations.

Whether you’re supporting a department or sitting at the executive table, you’ll leave with practical tools to strengthen your influence and become the strategic partner executives rely on.

Session Objectives:

• Understand how executives evaluate business decisions and identify where HR can have the greatest strategic influence.
• Translate people initiatives into business outcomes that resonate with executive leadership.
• Apply an executive mindset to ask better business questions, contribute more effectively to strategic discussions, and strengthen their executive presence.

Intended Audience: Private Sector / Public Sector

Change is messy. Even when leaders are trying to improve things in response to market, workforce, economic, or environmental pressures, change often takes longer than expected because bringing people along is hard. Change efforts often stall, not because leaders lack good intentions, but because everyday language can unintentionally create resistance, confusion, or mistrust. In this practical and engaging session, change management expert Sinikka Waugh shares hard-won lessons and immediately usable strategies to help leaders communicate change in ways that build trust, reduce friction, and increase engagement. Drawing on real-world examples that will resonate across industries, attendees will leave with actionable tools they can apply right away to lead change more effectively and create better workdays for everyone involved.

Session Objectives:

• Hear and recognize false assumptions behind common phrases.
• Encounter and draw a simple and reusable model that helps move people forward from where they are today to where we want them to be, with minimal drama, active engagement, and maximum participation.
• Commit to one takeaway to apply, starting right now.

Intended Audience: Private Sector / Public Sector