Red hot ideas to kill off dinosaur thinking

At the recent annual Technology in HR event, hosted by AOTAL, specialists in cloud-based talent management solutions and held at GridAKL, attendees enjoyed the convenience of having sixteen vendors on-site, offering a host of tools designed for human resources professionals.

Recent technological advances can assist in reducing time spent on administration in general while streamlining processes such as onboarding, payroll, reference checking and other essential but repetitive functions.

Andrew and Fleur Braae, of CheckPlease, say that ordering online identity and criminal checks from The Ministry of Justice, via their CheckPlease system, is an easy and straight-forward operation.

"You can order Ministry of Justice checks yourself but it's a very time intensive process with loads of forms to fill in, whereas with CheckPlease there is no need for any paper whatsoever, and we can provide quick turnaround times when required."

Aware that reference checking can be tiresome for HR managers, Xref has been designed to undertake the job, freeing recruiters to actually find good talent. Account executive, Marley Merton says that in general about 3% of references are falsified.

"There was a case in Australia in 2014 when a man was appointed by department store Myer as a senior manager on the basis that he'd held a similar position with the Zara fashion chain. Only he hadn't!

"Our aim is to stop this kind of thing happening."

Other products offered by vendors included payroll solutions for companies of various sizes, psychometric testing services, business healthcare products, systems for managing casual workers, recruitment by video, and compliance.

Guest speaker Nicky Raistrick spoke to event attendees about progress in making workplaces more 'human' while dealing with a juggernaut of new technology and the need to deliver value at an ever-increasing pace.

She says that teamwork is more vital then ever before and by being agile and creative; harnessing each person's specific skill set, companies can deliver a better service to their customers.

"Every person on the team needs to challenge the status quo, with a growth mindset and a commitment to continuous learning," she says.

"The key words in this process are curiosity, transparency, collaboration, innovation, and experimentation."

The second keynote speaker, corporate anthropologist Michael Henderson discussed the definition of culture, and its place in the working world, where silo mentality is sometimes still a problem.

Pointing out that the same old thinking inevitably brings the same old results, he regards culture as a thought virus and because humans tend to work best in groups once several people buy into that thought, it becomes a culture.

His high-performance internal culture checkpoints are clarity, compatibility and confidence while external factors are competition, customers and change.

Henderson says that a culture of risk aversion and scrupulous adherence to old ways of doing things will ultimately be unsuccessful for an organisation.

"I call it 'we always do it this way' and it's a dinosaur approach.

"Culture comes from the Latin word 'cultus' which means 'to care, so we have to ask ourselves what we care about, and how do we demonstrate that to one another for positive results to come from our work."

Organiser Lisa Collins, head of partnerships at AOTAL, was pleased with turnout to the event and says that she's received positive feedback.

"People were impressed at the number of useful tools and systems were on offer and the fact that there was no hard selling involved.

"Attendees felt that both speakers addressed topical and very important issues in terms of managing change and finding new ways to work together.

"The fact that we were able to make a donation to Cure Kids added another level of meaning to the day."