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Dena
House
Chief People Officer
Adverum Biotechnologies
Dena House is a senior people executive with deep experience leading human resources, organizational development, and learning across the biotechnology and life sciences sectors. She currently serves as Chief People Officer at Adverum Biotechnologies, where she leads the company’s people strategy, culture, talent, and organizational effectiveness agenda. Since joining Adverum, Dena has progressed through senior HR leadership roles, including VP of Human Resources and SVP of HR, Organizational Development and Learning. Her work focuses on building scalable people practices, developing leaders, and strengthening the organizational foundations needed to support scientific innovation and business growth. Before Adverum, Dena held senior HR and organizational development roles at Myriad Genetics and Counsyl. She is known for combining strategic HR leadership with a strong focus on learning, culture, and employee development in complex, mission-driven environments.
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22 September 2026 15:30 - 16:15
Panel - Culture drives performance. But can we measure it?
Culture gets blamed when performance drops, credited when teams outperform, and brought into almost every conversation about trust, retention, productivity, and leadership. But when the room asks for evidence, the conversation often gets thinner. Pulse scores, sentiment trends, engagement comments, attrition patterns, manager feedback, and performance data all tell part of the story. None tell the whole story alone. For People leaders, the challenge is knowing which signals are useful, which are being over-read, and how to connect culture to business outcomes without pretending the data is cleaner than it is. This panel gets into the practical work of measuring culture with more discipline. What can be quantified? What still needs judgment? Where do soft metrics help leaders see what is happening beneath the surface, and where do they create false confidence? Expect a candid discussion on culture, evidence, and performance, and how People leaders can bring more rigor to a topic that matters too much to leave vague. Key takeaways: - Understand why culture is hard to measure, and why that does not make it any less important to performance. - Learn how to read soft metrics, sentiment, and behavioral signals without overstating what the data can prove. - Explore how leading organizations connect culture to performance, trust, retention, and leadership effectiveness. - Gain practical perspective on presenting culture as a credible input into senior business decisions.