Building Teams Where Humanity Meets High Performance: Angela Briggs-Paige (LIVE @ Transform 2026)

WATCH: https://youtu.be/_wvfaqw7v68 Recorded live at Transform 2026, this episode brings together host Adam Poser and Angela Briggs-Paige — Chief People Officer, founder of People Power, and one of the most candid voices in the HR world on what it actually takes to build workplaces where people thrive. Angela's path into HR was anything but planned. She went to college intending to become a doctor, majored in biology, minored in classical languages, and stumbled into HR through a work-study job for a dean. What started as an accident became a calling — and eventually a mission to push organizations past the compliance-and-process version of HR toward something far more human and business-driven. In this conversation, Angela gets genuinely vulnerable — sharing a story from early in her career when she followed policy over people and terminated an employee who needed more support, and the lasting lesson that taught her. She lays out her three-layer framework for thinking about employee benefits (foundations, flexibility, and growth and recognition), makes a compelling case for caregiver benefits as one of the most overlooked tools in total rewards, and introduces a concept that stops the conversation cold: presenteeism — the hidden cost of employees who are physically present but mentally checked out. She also walks through exactly how she'd pitch a skeptical CFO on life concierge benefits, using absence data, leave costs, and retention math to build an airtight ROI case. This is a tight, high-signal episode with real frameworks, real stories, and a perspective on HR that's hard to find anywhere else. Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angela-briggs-paige/