Flare launch lights the way to a super future.
Thank you to everyone who made it to our launch event on Tuesday the 31st of May. Over a hundred people joined us to mark the beginning of something big and exciting.
The morning was a great success. Thought provoking futurist and keynote speaker Phill Nosworthy kicked things off after a quick introduction by our own Jan Pacas. Next, Rich Hirst (CEB) lead an executive panel discussion with Evelyn Jackson (Corporate Crayon) and Paul Migliorini (Amazon Web Services) where they shared their perspectives on significant local and global HR trends. Jan Pacas and Dan Cohen (Flare co-founders) rounded out the day with discussion about the future of HR and what Flare can bring to the industry
Phill Nosworthy, our keynote speaker of the day shared his ideas about the 4th industrial revolution and how it will affect people at work. Phill is a futurist and has worked in over a dozen countries, inspiring more than a thousand audiences.
His views are largely that of excitement as we are living in the 4th industrial revolution now, a blending of technology and biology. “This is a once in a decade opportunity” businesses have unrivalled access to technology that enables them to reach an ever expanding audience through the internet.
Phill says the result of this will be that while a small percentage of jobs will be taken by “the robots”, in actual fact all the mindless, analytical and automatic processes that can be taken over will enable humans to have greater focus on the value creating tasks.
“This is once in a decade opportunity.. we are now at the end of the third industrial revolution and at the start of the fourth.” – Phill Nosworthy
Only 18% of leaders trust data from HR, 25% of CEOs feel like they get sufficient info from HR and just 12% of CFOs feel HR spend the right amounts in the right areas.
Source: CEB 2012 L&D Team Capabilities Survey
Our executive panel discussion was world class with Rich Hirst, Director of CEB, Evelyn Jackson, former VP of Global Development, Engagement and Culture at Beam Suntory and Paul Migliorini, Managing Director of Amazon Web Services ANZ. The panel focused on the changing nature of HR in business today and the impact that technology will have on the future. The better technological systems will equal greater productivity and more time to engage people and culture in companies, allowing HRD’s to truly shine.
Rich supplemented the discussion with some interesting statistics from a range of sources. Data suggests that the typical organisation has undertaken 5 enterprise changes in the last 3 years with 78% of these companies undergoing a change in culture. Evelyn and Paul both agreed that company culture is increasingly important, both for company morale and to attract talent.
Flare co-founders Jan Pacas and Daniel Cohen were the last to speak giving a brief overview of Flare and the future of HR. Currently, routine admin tasks take up most of an HR team’s time, with value creating tasks being put aside. Flare aims to reduce the time spent on those routine tasks and flip this ratio so that HR professionals can spend more of their time on value creating processes.
Jan and Daniel has a great reception from the attendees with their interactive Q&A presentation. The audience could respond to questions on their smartphone by following along on a website. When asked how their HR was managed, 87% used either spreadsheets or systems that didn’t talk to each other. Dan then asked how many people know how much money is in their superannuation (within 10% of balance) with 54% saying they didn’t know.
“We believe that employees are first and foremost people, not numbers. We believe that technology can change the world.” – Jan Pacas
A hands-on experience followed the speakers with Saul Kaplan (Flare CTO and co-founder) and Colin Mierowsky (Flare Solutions Architect and co-founder) manning one station, and Richard Breden (Flare Director of sales and strategic partnerships) on the other. The software demonstration was received with excitement by the attendees who were impressed with the depth and breadth of the system. Needless to say there were plenty of questions about how to get involved with the Flare ecosystem.
Overall it was a bright start to the first of what will be many great events. Stay tuned for more amazing speakers in the future as we build up a community of thought leadership around HR and technology.
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