Key Takeaways from HR Masters Summit 2023

HR Masters Summit from Bucharest Tech Week is a highlight among my yearly doses of inspiration. I’m so honoured to share the stage with such inspiring professionals - I always leave with the hope that I’ll get to work with them someday.

Also, quick shout out to the entire #TechweekRO team ( Alexandra Danciu , Andreea Neam?u , Andreea A. Antipa , Catalina Dobre , Anda Emilia Alexandru & the rest) - you guys are amazing!

In the spirit of the popular “I attended HR Masters Summit so you don’t have to” (although you definitely should next year), here are some key takeaways:

Kelsa Albert from Farfetch shared how, inspired by The Squiggly Career (book by Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis )? they ditched the Personal Development Plan and replaced them with a process that is much more personable and much more easy to use, showing that there is still a lot of room for innovation in L&D:

• Learning is much more than goals, it’s about having clarity on your career priorities, but also about having the confidence to discuss you career aspirations and, of course, taking meaningful actions. So they challenge their colleagues to Reflect-Connect-Act.
• Additional food for thought (to help you with that “reflect” part): when thinking about your possible career goals,? think about what are your obvious possibilities, but also your ambitions possibilities, your pivots and your dream possibilities.?

Diana Fayad from GE set a high benchmark for Reward professionals, keeping an eye on the business, but still managing to put people first.?

• She proposes an improved definition for the EVP: a set of attributes that PEOPLE FEEL as the value gained IN THEIR LIFE through employment in an organisation
• “64% of the people who left their jobs said <I did not feel appreciated>”
• There is data to support a business case for proper recognition (ex: “When employees feel recognized they are 23% more effective and productive. When they feel valued and cared for they are 43% more productive”)

Sam Fletcher from PayPal made Talent Intelligence sound cool and approachable.

• “Data can help us understand skills. AI can help us process and create value from skills data.”
• “Digital Identity as a trust mechanism will unlock the future of work”. No more countless CVs sent to various organisations - they all should be able to access your digital identity.
• Chat GPT can be tricky - it may sound extremely credible while sharing wrong information (especially as he becomes too familiar with a data set - more on Chat GPT’s hallucinations here).
• Data is the way to start thinking strategically. For example, 1 job advert tells you a Job Title, but 1M job adverts tell you standard industry titles.

Smaranda G. from Quantum Black (AI by McKinsey) made a strong case about how “a higher share of female talent delivers higher financial success, more innovation and a fairer society” yet we still have a huge gender gap. She proposed 4 levers:

• Ramp up - increase the overall number of women in STEM education
• Retain - improve the experience and opportunities women have in tech careers (esp. offering support in promoting to their first managerial role which seems to be a main blocker)
• Reframe - encourage a mindset shift within tech and its leadership, educate around DEI and biases
• Re-deploy - get more women into and through the hiring pipeline outside of traditional hiring pools

Also, here are three amazing women you might not know, but maybe you should.

李心仪 from EY brought energy in a talk about data and analytics, “bridging the gap between <finance speak> and <people speak>”

• With data you can turn “I have a feeling” statements to “I have some evidence” ones to make a stronger business case and better decision
• You can have up to 150% increased ROI if you improve employee experience

Maarten Hansson from Novartis invited us to focus on work, not just on people because looking beyond roles, jobs, talent can help you solve challenges in relation to talent, workforce cost and risk control.

• A manager will make a better decision when guided to look at job outcomes rather than at his hiring needs - going beyond presumptions, discussing what job success looks like, clarifying key action steps to job outcome
• We should expand the way we look at the workforce and have an integrated mindset - think about the whole network of talent around your organisation (full time employees, part-timers, contingent workers, consultants, freelancers and so on)
• Should all those above be handled by HR rather than procurement or other functions? Probably yes.

Andrea Illes from Nokia, delivered such an engaging Masterclass on how to create an employee experience focusing on moments that matter.?

• You can’t have employee experience priorities if you don’t first understand the vision statement and how it connects to your business
• We don’t talk so much about gamification nowadays, but having a simple game to encourage sharing stories about the employee journey can be a cool trick to gather feedback and ideas
• There are 5 distinct elements of Moments that Matter to employees (emotion-generating, scalable, frequent, business-aligned, critical-talent-aligned) and we should aim to use them in a balanced way to define the moments that matter
• Stay interviews don’t help just to gather feedback, but also to help the people to remember the nice parts of their onboarding and to celebrate their first year (“first year” is the milestone Nokia has).

Dear reader, hope you found at least one interesting idea.

What did you learn this week? ;)