According to Workday's Cristina Goldt, who attended the world's fastest-growing HR event
Cristina Goldt, vice president of HCM product management and strategy at Workday, attended the HR Tech World Conference in San Francisco and provides three of her main takeaways on the Workday blog.
HR Tech World has grown from an event with 400 attendees to one with 6000 attendees. In 2017, there were three locations – London, San Francisco and Amsterdam, with attendees from over 120 countries.
Here are Goldt’s takeaways from the conference:
1. Employee engagement was a hot topic in so far as it is important for improving the working experience. Because, employees who are not invested in their jobs lead to lower productivity and, ultimately, impact business outcomes. Goldt says that, instead of identifying and addressing engagement issues well into an employee’s tenure, companies need to start engaging from the beginning stages of an employee’s interaction with the company, including the onboarding experience.
2. The importance of diversity and inclusion was also well highlighted, reflecting the amount of research supporting the correlation between a company’s performance and the diversity of their workforce.
“We heard a great example of a long-standing diversity effort in the Combating Workplace Bias Panel Discussion, where Shariq Yosufzai, VP of global diversity and university affairs at Chevron, shared how many orchestras host blind auditions. Musicians trying out for a spot on the orchestra perform behind a screen with their shoes off so there is no indication whether a man or woman is playing—an effort to eliminate unconscious bias,” writes Goldt.
3. Lastly, she says that the corporate social impact of companies was key in so far as it drove and motivated people. Leighanne Levensaler, Senior Vice President of corporate strategy at Workday, made a keynote presentation on how HR technology can be used for good and underlined the idea that companies dedicated to the greater good are also companies where people want to work, invest, and partner.
