Tuesday 31 January 2017

#hrdsummit17 blog 3

Resisting the temptation to grab the available lunch before my allotted lunch slot in half an hour, I'm now listening to the talk Being at our Best by Susan Yell, HRD at Warburtons. 

Susan was the first speaker I've seen for a long while work entirely from a detailed script. It had the feel of a presentation at a job interview. 

The slides she had were colourful but detailed and the font on some of them was way too small to be read from my position in the middle row. It did make following what she was presenting very difficult. From what I could see though, she had put in place a well structured people strategy and the Warburtons Wheel helps people to see their place in it and contribution to the business. 

The Warburtons culture comes across as very inclusive and they seem to have a focus on employee engagement and their employer brand. But the presentation was hard to follow because of its pace, the level of detail being imparted and the small font size used. 

It's a real shame as Warburtons does come across as a great place to work and there were some important messages being delivered, but this talk seemed like one that originally been designed as a 45-50 minute talk for a small audience, and was now being delivered in 25 minutes to a larger audience without any alteration to the slides or delivery, hence being very very fast. 

I would like to hear more about the Warburtons approach and Susan comes across as a very knowledgeable person, but I think needs a different format to get her best ideas across (and she had lots of ideas that look to have worked very well from the brief detail I heard). 

Now it's lunchtime. Although that in itself was tricky as I had ten minutes to eat it before the next session started, one I dare not miss or be late for. 

It's #connectinghrafrica time

Ian Pettigrew, Kate Griffiths-Lambeth and Lisa Leighton presented their talk about what made them go to Africa along with several others, and what they achieved along with what else needs to be done. 

This story isn't really something you can blog about as it would be doing an injustice to the power of the words and stories they were using. Suffice to say, though, that they shared in a powerful experience and felt as if they made a major contribution to the welfare of children in Africa. 

 
I wanted to go live on Periscope for these stories but the acoustics wouldn't have helped. I had the headphones in so I could hear, but I couldn't have recorded it easily. Sorry. 

To hell with that. After I wrote that last paragraph I thought I'd go live on Periscope anyway as even if I could share some if it that was better than none. So there's a 7 minute Periscope video stream you can watch on my Twitter feed. 

Great session. Humbling to listen to and a good insight into how HR professionals can REALLY make a difference. 

Till next time...

Gary 










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