Building Flexible Work Models & Resilient Teams

Luiza Paludo Gomes is Employment Policy Lead at the British Retail Consortium, where she works with retailers, government and regulators on the policies shaping the world of work. She heads BRC’s HR and D&I networks and has played a key role in shaping the sector’s response to issues like the Employment Rights Bill, minimum wage and associated employment costs.

Prior to the BRC, Luiza worked at the Recruitment and Employment Confederation and UKHospitality, leading on labour and skills shortages, immigration and food and safety policies. An overseas qualified lawyer, Luiza worked as a civil litigator for 8 years in Brazil before relocating to the UK.

Rebecca Harrop is a Senior Consultant at Mercer, advising organisations on how to leverage employee experience and listening strategies to drive culture, leadership effectiveness, and organisational performance.

With a background in psychology and nearly a decade of consulting experience, she works with senior leaders to design enterprise-level listening approaches, translate insights into strategic priorities, and enable leaders to act on feedback at scale.

Rebecca’s focus is on helping organisations move beyond measurement to sustained behaviour and culture change, ensuring employee experience becomes a core lever for business impact and long-term transformation.

Frankie Watkinson is Mercer UK’s Strategic Workforce Planning and Future Skills Lead, and a Manager in the Workforce Transformation practice.

She has extensive experience leading cross-industry clients through large-scale skills and talent transformations, and is focused on optimising the employee experience, driving HR and workforce productivity and future-proofing organisations with the agility and skills required to succeed in the evolving world of work.

Frankie brings deep HR functional expertise through her background in in-house generalist and specialist HR. As such, she prioritises a human-centric approach to embedding strategic and sustainable change, ultimately enabling organisations to pivot from reactive to proactive transformation.

Rebecca Jordan is Mercer's Op Model & Org Design Lead, specialising in strategic people transformations that ready her clients for the future of work. This involves designing work for an AI-powered future, refining team structures and the skills needed for success, and developing people strategies to deliver business goals and enhance the employee value proposition. Becky also brings deep HR functional and culture change expertise to embed these strategic, organisational, and behavioural changes sustainably.