Last week, people leaders from workplaces across the globe gathered at Great Place To Work's For All Summit in Las Vegas.
Visionary leaders of award-winning great workplaces took to the stage, revealing how they are creating new solutions and strategies to meet the changing needs of their people and business.
Amidst already turbulent times, the stock market and the impact of tariffs have been top of mind for many business leaders this week. The rollercoaster effect on the global market has left leaders wondering what to make of this kind of volatility.
For the CEOs speaking at the For All Summit, the answer comes down to people.
Hear from leaders at Hilton, Cadence, World Wide Technology, Marriot International, DHL Express and Trek Bicycle about how investing in people offers answers for a complicated business landscape:
Laura Fuentes, EVP, chief human resources officer and head of Hilton supply management, talked about the importance of listening to employee voices – and how their feedback is changing how the company operates.
“In a way, we have a global listening crisis right now,” Fuentes says of the political and economic upheaval around the world driving lower levels of trust in institutions. To combat this, she asks herself and her team to act as “chief listening officers.”
What does that look like? Listening twice as much as speaking. “If I find myself talking too much, I’m not doing my job well,” Fuentes says.
The global hotel chain's focus on trust has seen them steadily rise up the ranks as an accredited great workplace, placing No.1 as a UK's Best Workplace (Super Large) and Fortune 100 Best Company To Work For® in 2025. At the same time, from 2014 to 2024, the market cap for Hilton doubled. Their story proves what the data already shows: creating a great workplace leads to impressive business results.
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How can you measure the performance of your leaders? Trek relies on data from Great Place To Work surveys.
“I can’t tell you how big of an effect Great Place To Work has had on Trek,” Burke says. “You can go leader by leader. The best leaders have the best Great Place To Work scores. The worst leaders have the lowest scores.”
In this way, the Great Place To Work survey is a “fire detector” that offers essential insight into your company. And the impact of a leader is massive. “Leaders have a multiplying impact,” Burke says, “either multiplying positively or multiplying negatively.”
A foundation of trust is what unlocks potential for companies, a point that was driven home by Anirudh Devgan, PhD., CEO of Cadence.
“Culture is super critical,” he shared with the Summit audience. “Everyone says they are customer focused — but if you don’t have the right team and the right technology, you won’t have the right customers.”
For Cadence, building a high-performance culture has three layers. At the foundation is trust and integrity. On top of that are the opportunities offered to every employee, regardless of who they are or what they do. From those layers of trust and opportunity is a meritocracy that drives excellence across the organisation.
“Opportunity for all is a competitive advantage to get the best talent,” Devgan says. “If we build a culture where we attract the best people, we will perform better for our customers.”
Like Cadence, great workplaces know that empowered employees deliver exceptional experiences for customers.
For leaders like Jim Kavanaugh, co-founder and CEO at World Wide Technology, the experience customers and partners have working with his employees is a source of deep pride. “The amount of feedback I get from our partners on how much they enjoy working with our employees is amazing,” he says.
“The one thing that I think is a constant are your values and your culture,” he says. “If you have a really strong set of values that you commit to, it’s amazing how that culture helps navigate through challenging times … and present opportunities.
One of the things driving the rapid change and disruption in the marketplace is the rise of generative AI. Company values are crucial touchstones for how this technology can be used to innovate and level up the impact of every employee.
Leaders like Anthony Capuano, president and CEO of Marriott International, are looking for efficiencies that increase human capacity.
After a long day of travel, he explained, the potential of AI to allow a desk clerk at a hotel to quickly check-in a traveler and have 120 seconds of extra capacity to offer a warm welcome make all the difference. “We’re using AI everywhere,” he shared. “We want to use it to create capacity for better more impactful human interactions.”
The impact of workplace culture isn’t confined to the marketplace. How employees feel about their work follows them home, a sacred responsibility that leaders like John Pearson, CEO of DHL Express take very seriously.
“The biggest part of my job is to send people home happier than they arrived in the morning,” he shared from the mainstage at Summit. The reason why? “When people leave work unhappy, they take it out on the people they find at home.” For Pearson, creating a great workplace is his way of preventing domestic violence, alcoholism, and child neglect.
“I like to think people are right in the middle of everything we do,” he says. His aspiration: Be a great place to work, not for some or for many, but for all.
That doesn’t mean it’s an easy task, but it’s an essential part of DHL’s business strategy: People plus quality equals growth.
Discover more about the business benefits of a great workplace culture in our report The Culture Dividend, or watch the keynote from Alex Edmans.
The For All Summit will return to Las Vegas in 2026! Get early tickets now.