A mantra that was instilled in me by undoubtedly the best ‘leader’ I have ever had the pleasure of working with. I use leader with inverted commas because he was much more of a servant leader than anything else – he wanted everybody in his team to be the smartest person in the room and did everything he could to empower people to be confident in making decisions, encourage new learning, supported the right of everybody to contribute and be heard. But the philosophy went beyond personal development and into how we actually delivered on the work. (The general philosophy however is something we hold very close to our hearts at Expandify).

At Expandify we know that there is a fairly large landscape of HR Technology out there, and they all cater for specific needs. At one end of the spectrum you may have an Application Tracking System (ATS) and assessment provider to cover recruitment, and at the other you may have a performance management system linked to your Human Resource Information System (HRIS) – and there can be any number of tooling along the way. What this can create is a disjointed, fractured view of employees and their experiences in the workplace. Which ultimately means less visibility and less value.

Given the ‘work smarter….not harder’ mantra, we know that our tooling has to fit around the existing HR Technology that our clients use. As much as we would love to be a one-stop-shop for all of their HR needs, we know this is not practical and to be honest is not really our area of expertise. With that in mind we have started to reach out to ATS, HRIS, Assessment Providers and other HR Technology tools to start discussions about how we could integrate the Expandify offering into existing products. I know for many this may feel like a premature step, but we have a (potentially Utopian) belief that opening up these discussions can help shape product development but also move us some way to creating a more harmonious HR eco-system; where we accept that solutions have their own niche and can act as silos but can also work cooperatively to give a much more complete picture of an employees experience in the workplace. Creating an eco-system in this way means that there can be effective follow through from attraction, screening, selection, on boarding, learning, development and performance management – we have the opportunity to look at the bigger picture whilst also been able to drill down into the fine detail. For Expandify specifically, this will help to enrich the user experience not just in terms of content that goes into their learning journey but how they engage with it. So we are currently in partnership mode, looking to have those conversations to see what hooks we can add and what we can expose to fit into this eco-system.

I encourage everybody to follow the principle of working smarter, not harder as much as possible. Whether it is tweaking your schedule to give you time away from your desk, using a different tool more tailored to your needs so you are not fighting against the technology or stopping having unproductive meetings in favour of short conversations – whatever works for you to keep productivity up but striking a better work-life balance.

Thanks

Mark