Join a pre-event networking lunch on Thursday 25th June at Touch Wood, Sydney Fish Market. Designed as a smaller, informal gathering, this offers the opportunity to connect with fellow attendees ahead of the conference in a more relaxed, conversational setting. Add-on tickets for conference attendees: $70 (limited availability, booking link sent following a conference ticket purchase)

The discussion will explore how organisations are moving beyond return-to-office debates to ask what the workplace now needs to deliver for people, culture, collaboration, and performance. Focusing on workplace strategy for complex organisations, where the challenge is not simply designing around a single head office model, but balancing flexibility, service delivery, mobility, employee experience, and performance at scale.

The legal sector is undergoing a significant workplace transformation. Across Australia, law firms are rethinking their offices, operating models and cultural practices as they respond to hybrid work, rapid advances in technology and new expectations from both clients and talent. For a profession built around collaboration, mentorship and deep focus, the workplace plays a uniquely important role.
Today we’ve brought together leaders who are directly shaping workplace strategy inside their firms. Rather than discussing design alone, we’ll explore how the workplace is becoming a strategic tool for enabling performance, supporting culture and preparing firms for the next phase of legal practice.

As workplace data becomes more central to property strategy, the next challenge is not simply collecting more information — it is making that data usable, connected and ready for the next wave of intelligent decision-making. In this presentation and fireside chat, Nicholas Tiedt of Macquarie Group will share how the organisation has used data to inform portfolio optimisation, connect property decisions with workplace experience, and build the foundations for AI-enabled insights.

AI is in technical and practical chaos, blurring spaces between skills, futures, leadership, economics, and environmental consequences. You need to understand the basics of AI – risks, opportunities, and the essential facts behind the marketing and the headlines. But what does it all mean for design, property, and the future of work? Let’s discuss the value and impact of design in today’s Age of Digital Disruption, and in the potential futures we face.

Your mindset doesn’t exist in a vacuum, your environment shapes it. In this session, Marcus Rose, CEO of Valeo Technology, reveals how Moodsonic adaptive sound scaping and other sensory technology is transforming how workplaces feel, function, and perform. Drawing on award-winning projects across APAC, Marcus explores the neuroscience of sound, how intelligent sensory systems respond in real time to support focus, collaboration, and wellbeing, and why sound is the most overlooked and most powerful dimension of workplace design.

Frazzled people in a great environment won't produce anywhere near what focused people in the same environment will. This session is about how people can control their attention and nervous system, so they can do the great work the fit-out was designed to amplify.

White Fox Boutique – Australia’s globally ascending Gen Z fashion brand – has just moved into a purpose-built 13,000sqm workplace precinct in Sydney. This session offers a rare inside look at how a youth-driven, multi-million social media brand translates its identity, culture, and ambition into a physical workplace ecosystem. Kate Gibson (PMG Group, workplace strategy lead) and Anika Meza (White Fox, Head of People & Culture) reveal the unexpected lessons, the bold people and brand-led design decisions, and the early results for talent attraction and retention.

Most organisations treat their workplace planning cycle as a project with a finish line. It isn’t. Drawing on expert perspectives and more than 1,000 workplace transformations, Katherine Divett and a panel of senior practitioners consider each stage — from Exploration through Strategy and Design, Build and People Readiness, to life in the occupied space. Expect candid conversation about what’s genuinely changing, where organisations stumble, and the practical shifts that make the difference between a workspace people tolerate and one they actually want to come to.

As artificial intelligence reshapes the nature of work, LinkedIn’s Workplace team is advancing its flexible workplace strategy by reimagining how physical space supports emerging forms of collaboration. This session will present insights from recent research, including 40 leadership interviews, and findings from an 11-week experiment designed to test dedicated, AI-embedded environments for small, autonomous, cross-functional teams ("pods").
The “Pod Work Area” pilot at LinkedIn’s headquarters assigned two pods (9 and 13 members) to dedicated zones with sit-stand desks, collaborative spaces, and Agile Project Rooms equipped with agentic technology. Using surveys, interviews, observations, and simulations, the pilot explored how proximity, space design, and embedded AI help close the gap between decision-making and execution while fostering performance and psychological safety.
This talk offers a glimpse into how LinkedIn—operating in 35+ global offices with 25,000+ employees—is preparing for a future where collaboration is faster, smarter, and more human.