The Future of Work is Bright and Happening Now! My experience at HR Tech Conference 2016.
Sarah and I returned last week from Chicago where we attended the HR Tech Conference for the first time. It was easy to see that HR tech is on the brink of some big changes. My main takeaway from the conference was that we, at Door Space, are on the forefront of the agile model for knowledge and credential management. No other company was doing this and no other company was doing anything similar.
There were several moments in the conference that stick out for me. On the first day we attended “pre-conference” sessions led by women about women in tech. Nearly everyone in the audience was a woman and each one that I met at my table held an HR executive position at her company. They expressed a lot of frustration with being under represented at the top of their organizations.
There was a palpable hunger for these women to have themselves and their peers become present and more visible in the C-Suite.
I made several connections with Senior HR Information Systems leads at several organizations. It was good for Sarah and I to make connections with women who are having similar problems to those we are solving.
One of the main themes at the conference was personalization and treating your employees as good or better than you treat your customers. This resonated with me because this is precisely what we are trying to do with our approach to tracking knowledge and learning. We are mindful of the knowledge worker and the organization as we develop our product and our product is not just about measurement and data, it is about bringing the two closer through transparency and technology.
It also struck me that these CHRO’s and “thought-leaders” are asking for us to build technology fast and agile. There was talk of the need for tech inside an organization to be in perpetual beta so that when something wasn’t working it wouldn’t take years of living with bad technology to change things.
They need tools to be changeable and personalized not just to the employee but to the organization itself. They want the tech companies they partner with to work faster and they want to be more like partners and less like customers.
With all this fast, agile and perpetual beta talk, there was a dearth of this type of development present at the conference. These were the leaders in HR tech yet very few were ready to move to a more agile way of working. Further, there were several companies, who if they were working in such a manner, were doing so in silos and not developing based on their customer needs. And, surprisingly though funded to the nines and with fancy booths and click through demos, many were not as far along as we are in having actual live users to demo.
They want to be these things [fast, agile, customer/employee-focused], but instead they are still doing it the old way.
I have always been confident in Sarah’s vision. After seeing our “competition” and a contingent of our future customers in one place, I can tell you we are doing it right and we will succeed. As Sarah said to me many times during the conference:
“We are the only company who will help customers become agile, continuous learning cultures. We can give people the information they need to find the right culture and companies the tools to maintain and change their cultures as the markets and technologies continue to evolve and change.”
This is what they need and this is what they hunger for. It is a great feeling when you know you are on the cusp of something big! I’m so grateful to be able to experience this.
Katie Sunstrom is CMO and General Counsel for Door Space Inc. She is on twitter as @beingkatie and you can find out more about her company on the web. Images are from @jasonaverbook’s presentation given on October 5th.
