Ahead of the Melbourne HR Summit, HRD talked with Monica Watts, chief human resources officer at event partner ELMO, on how important events of this nature are to the human resources industry and why ELMO has been a part of the event for more than five years.
Returning as a face-to-face event, the HR Summit is your opportunity to rediscover a powerful network of peers and engage in strategic discussions on the future of work.
“These events are terrific opportunities for our industry to come together, but also to applaud one another’s successes and also, in this covid world, to share our war stories, we’ve got war stories up the Wazoo,” said Watt.
HR leaders have had to be resilient through Covid, reacting to and rewriting the playbook at every turn of the pandemic. There’s no role in a business that has evolved more through COVID. Watts told HRD, “HR is the senior leader inside the business. Businesses would have failed without us.”
“Continuous learning is the habit of highly successful people, continued Watt. “What you want to be focusing on is how are you going to drive and engage your highly successful people, and that has to be through connection with others and that’s through conferences.”
The HR Summit will cover everything from managing a hybrid workforce and supporting mental wellbeing to redesigning the employee experience and retaining employees. You’ll gain new perspectives from HR peers who are facing the same challenges and be able to generate ideas, share real-life experiences and hear proven strategies to help you develop actionable strategies for the next set of workforce challenges.
“Long gone are the days of having to find or reprioritize why you would attend a conference,” said Watt. “These events are so important; they give us time and space away from the tools. I know getting back into conferences, whilst it’s quite surreal and euphoric, gives the space to take that separation from the workplace, it’s a space to learn from one another and grow our profession in a really strong direction.
ELMO has been involved with the event since 2014, coming on board as the national event partner in 2018. “It makes sense as a tech company that we sustain and support the people that are utilizing our solutions but also driving the engagement of people and the community that we’re in.
