Why HR Budgets Get Cut (And How to Get Yours Approved)

When performance dips, the cause is often diagnosed as motivation when it is really capability, or the other way round. A skills gap analysis is how you tell the difference before spending money on the wrong fix.

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This session covers how to map the skills a role actually needs, assess where the team stands against them, and turn the gaps into a training plan people will use.

Learning and development is easy to fund and hard to defend. Completion rates and satisfaction scores rarely convince a leadership team that training changed anything.

This session looks at how to tie L&D to the outcomes the business already cares about, choose the few capabilities worth investing in, and report on them in a way that holds up.

The mid-year review is the last real chance to change the outcome of the year, yet it is often treated as a formality. This session looks at how to run it as a course-correction rather than a status update.

Constance Onyeji-Jarret, People Operations Lead at Moniepoint, shares how her team structures mid-year conversations so the second half of the year actually looks different. Hosted by Seni Sulyman, Co-founder at Talstack.

This session covers how to frame people initiatives in the language executives use, what evidence lands in a leadership meeting, and how to handle the pushback that follows.

Olubukola Oluwamese, Head of HR at Bisedge, shares how she builds the case for approval of ambitious HR work. Hosted by Seni Sulyman, Co-founder at Talstack.

A live, hands-on workshop showing how AI genuinely saves HR teams time today, which tasks to hand over first, and how to keep quality and confidentiality intact while doing it.

Facilitated by Omonuwa Olulano, CHRO at Zone Payments, and hosted by Seni Sulyman, Co-founder at Talstack.

Goals set in January are often abandoned by March. Usually the problem is not ambition but design: goals that are too vague to track, disconnected from daily work, or owned by nobody in particular.

Ebenezer Akintomide, AVP, People and Culture at Cowrywise, walks through how to set goals that survive contact with a real quarter, and the check-in rhythm that keeps them alive. Hosted by Seni Sulyman, Co-founder at Talstack.

Most HR initiatives do not fail on the idea. They fail on sequencing, sponsorship and follow-through. This session unpacks what separates the programmes that stick from the ones that quietly stall after launch.

Chidinma Obiejesi, Group Head, Human Resources at MegaLectrics, shares how she scopes, sells and sustains HR initiatives across a large organisation. Hosted by Seni Sulyman, Co-founder at Talstack.

Pay is rarely the only reason good people leave, and it is rarely the only lever HR teams have to keep them. This session looks at what actually moves retention: manager quality, career visibility, workload, and the everyday experience of working at a company.

Monica Njoroge, Senior HR Manager at Kentaste Products Limited, shares the practical steps her team takes to understand why people leave and what to change first. Hosted by Kayode Oyewole, Co-founder at Talstack.

Discover how HR teams can use AI agents to reduce repetitive operational work, move faster and focus more time on strategic priorities. In this session, Ojotule Opaluwa Alagbe, VP, People and Culture at Zone, shares practical ways HR leaders can apply AI agents to real HR operations.

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Leave and absence management can become difficult to manage as companies grow. Different managers follow different approval processes, policies are applied inconsistently, and HR teams often lack a clear view of who is away and when.
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In this session, we’ll speak with HR and People leaders about what a more structured approach to managing time off looks like in practice.
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Ayodeji Kayode, Head of HR at Samsung West Africa, will share how his team approaches leave policies, approval processes and compliance tracking at scale.

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We’ll also introduce Talstack’s Time Off module, built to help organisations manage leave, absence and other time off requests, simplify approvals, improve workforce visibility and support compliance.