HRTech Conference 2016 Recap: The Future of Work is Bright and Happening Now

Last week, the Door Space team packed our bags and flew up to Chicago for the 2016 HR Tech Conference. It was easy to see that HR tech is on the brink of some big changes. Our 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 is doing this and no other company is doing anything similar.

On the first day we attended “pre-conference” sessions led by women about women in HR Tech. Nearly everyone in the audience was a woman and each one that we met 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.

We made several connections with Senior HR Information Systems professionals from several organizations 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 resonates with us because this is precisely what we are trying to do with our approach to tracking knowledge and learning. We are mindful of both the knowledge worker and the organization as we develop our product and our product is not just about measurement and data, it is about aligning the two through transparency and technology.

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 technology companies they partner with to work faster and they want to be more like partners and less like customers.

Despite all the ‘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 working in silos and not developing based on their employee or customer needs. And, surprisingly though funded to the nines and with fancy booths and click through demos, many were not as far along as they claimed and had a highly manual and expensive implementation process for each deployment.

They want to be these things [fast, agile, customer/employee-focused], but instead they are still doing it the old way.

After seeing our “competition” and a contingent of our future customers in one place, we can tell you we are doing it right and we will succeed.

“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! We’re so grateful to be able to experience this and look forward to future HR Technology conferences as attendees, speakers and exhibitors.

Images are from @jasonaverbook’s presentation given on October 5th, 2016