Inspire Day 2025

Inspire Day 2025

Inspire Day is the highlight of the year for us at Humankind – connection, learning and building Humankind for the future.

Instead of our usual wrap-up post, we wanted to share a fresh perspective. So, we asked one of our newest team members, Sophie McLernon, to reflect on her first Inspire Day with us. A reminder of why we do what we do, who we do it for, and what makes Inspire Day truly special.

Day one at Humankind set a high bar. I arrived in Wellington for Inspire Day, our full-team offsite designed to live our Inspire value: to redefine, innovate, and stay ahead. For Humankind it’s not just about talking about the future, it’s about creating it. We explore technology and trends, with the intention of leading by example. It’s a day to pause, connect, learn, and actively invest in the future of our business and ourselves.

We kicked off with Gallup CliftonStrengths skits - a fun (and slightly uncomfortable) way to step out of our usual roles, even for someone whose number 1 strength is Positivity! The goal was to explore how each of us contributes and how we can work better together by playing to our strengths. It was an immediate insight into how deliberate Humankind is in building team dynamics and culture, for someone who has come from outside of P&C, what they call their Ways of Working.

A powerful introduction to the value we bring through our PerformancePartnerships was a panel hosted by KP with leaders at Ideally, MRCagney, andChristchurch Call, sharing what high performance means to them as organisations. It was a clear demonstration of the impact we have when we embed exceptional HR capability into ambitious organisations, helping them scale, lead, and thrive. As we continue to aspire to be the world’s best performance partner, this reinforced my view that HR isn’t just a support function, it’s a critical lever for growth, leadership, and long-term success.

In the afternoon, we turned our attention to the future: AI. Olivia Dyet from Empathix led a practical session exploring the leading LLMs: GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity and how using the SAGE model we can start to build our own agents for client (and our own) problems. I was amazed that several groups walked out of this session with v1 of the agent built and that next steps with these have been followed up in subsequent team meetings.  What stood out was Humankind’s stance: AI is a people shift as much as a tech shift. Rather than fear it, we’re encouraged to understand it, experiment with it, and embrace it as a tool to enhance how we work, with people always at the centre - I am a People person now.

The onboarding experience itself was as you'd expect from a People & Culture organisation, thoughtful and considered. I loved that they’d automated so many of the processes with time carved out to orient myself, absorb tools and systems, and meaningfully connect with the team. Onboarding here is treated as both a cultural and operational investment.

Now, nearly two weeks into the role, I can see the business operates with clarity, ambition, and pace, and is a best-in-class example of what it recommends to its clients - it's always a relief to see it does what it says on the tin! Humankind is deeply committed to building the future of work and I’m excited to be part of a progressive and ambitious company. I just have to keep up!

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