PeopleOps Oxford, October 2026

Last Thursday we welcomed over 30 people from across Oxfordshire's HR and People community to our latest PeopleOps Oxford event at the BIPC in Oxford.

The idea behind PeopleOps is pretty simple. Bring people working in HR, People, Talent and related roles together, give them a relaxed environment to meet others in the industry, share experiences and hopefully learn something useful along the way. And, of course, provide plenty of tea, coffee and pastries!

I had the pleasure of hosting the morning before our founder introduced Humand Talent Solutions, as well as Laburo, our outplacement business and the support we can provide to both organisations and individuals going through redundancy. https://www.laburo.io/

That led perfectly into our first speaker, Melanie Guy, with her talk "Fifty Not Finished".

Melanie spoke openly about her own recent experience of redundancy at the age of 50 and some of the challenges older workers can face when trying to find their next opportunity.

It was a really personal and thought provoking talk, backed up by some fairly uncomfortable statistics around age bias in recruitment. Melanie highlighted research suggesting that experienced candidates can find it considerably harder to progress through recruitment processes as they get older, despite the knowledge and experience they can bring to an organisation.

After Melanie's session we had a short break, which gave everyone another chance to grab a drink, have a chat and meet some new people.

Our second speaker was Lisa Lloyd, a Business Psychologist and People & Performance Consultant. I first got in touch with Lisa at the beginning of the year, so I was really pleased that we finally managed to pin her down to speak at PeopleOps!

Lisa's session, "What if the problem isn't the problem?", looked at how organisations can get beneath the surface of their people challenges rather than immediately trying to fix what they can see.

One of the messages that really stood out was the difference between what an organisation notices, such as poor engagement, retention, performance or wellbeing, and what might actually be contributing to it underneath the surface. Things such as trust, workload, management, relationships, autonomy and whether people feel comfortable speaking honestly can all play a part.

Lisa summed it up brilliantly with the idea that performance doesn't live inside individuals, it lives within an ecosystem. Sometimes, rather than immediately asking "What should we do about it?", the better starting point is "What don't we understand yet?"

We wrapped things up at midday, although plenty of people stayed behind for a final chat, which is always a good sign!

A huge thank you to Melanie and Lisa for giving up their time and sharing two very different, but equally relevant, perspectives with the group.

And thank you to everyone who joined us. With over 30 people in the room, there were plenty of conversations, introductions and shared experiences, which is exactly what we want PeopleOps Oxford to be about.

Good people, useful conversations and a chance for Oxford's People community to learn from each other.
Looking forward to the next one on Thursday 3rd of December.

Thanks,
Jamie