Wait, what year is this? With Omicron finally on the wane in the US, I flew to Las Vegas in mid-March for an epic bender HR Transform 2022, a three-day conference for HR leaders and entrepreneurs with a focus on the modern workplace. Aside from requiring proof of vaccination, the conference (almost) felt like 2019, with a majority of maskless faces, no social distancing, and attendees chatting over drinks—indoors!

This year’s conference, at the Cosmopolitan hotel, centered on four tracks: workplace transformation, social impact, human first, and digital future. Executives from Microsoft, TripAdvisor, Zoom, Nextdoor, and others held discussions for three days about ways HR professionals can shape the workplace and the employee experience.

Catchphrase of the conference. It didn’t matter the conversation or the panel topic, before leaving the stage, nearly every speaker dropped the F bomb: flexibility. According to HR Transform’s panelists (and at least one recent survey), employees want to control their employee journey, and it’s up to HR leaders to provide that flexibility, whether it’s the option to work remotely, a career path with upskilling opportunities, or a better menu of employee perks.

In a session on the changing workplace, Beth Grous, SVP and chief people officer at Tripadvisor, said, “part of our shift for our executives is thinking about being in the office is not an obligation, but a destination. And something that entices people when the work is meaningfully better. There’s a return on that, that you can see, and that we’re also meeting people where they’re at, and allowing us to continue to have this flexibility in their [lives].”

One panelist went so far as to propose leaving behind the very notion of human resources…or at least HR as we know it. Uzair Qadeer, chief people officer at Carbon Health, declared at one session that “we have to move on and abandon the idea of human resources, and particularly start focusing on the end-to-end employee experience.” He went on to discuss what he called the “five E’s of employee experience,” which included such familiar HR ideas as employee engagement and empowerment.

Employee wellness. With employees continuing to work remotely at least part time, some discussions revolved around keeping the human connection and making time for “shoot-the-shit conversations,” as explained by Deborah Hanus, co-founder and CEO of Sparrow, which provides employee-leave software to companies. She said, “I think the more connections we can make on a personal level, particularly when we’re just not with each other, I think the better off we’ll be in a working relationship.”

But if Zoom happy hours and coffee with coworkers aren’t enough to boost employee endorphins, maybe just bring in some puppies? Puppy Love, a company that brings rescue puppies to workplaces and corporate events, made a splash by welcoming attendees into a playpen full of puppies on the expo floor.

To see the puppies and read more, head right this way.—KP

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @Kris10Parisi on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Kristen for her number on Signal.

On Monday, March 21, President Biden told the private sector in no uncertain terms that Russian-led cyberattacks may be coming, warning business leaders to “harden your cyber defenses immediately.”

In preparation for possible attacks, the White House issued a fact sheet advising companies on how to ramp up defenses. Suggestions include mandating multi-factor authentication, encrypting and backing up data offline, and running drills of emergency plans in case of hacks.

Should we panic? The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) first alerted companies to the heightened possibility of Russian-led ransomware attacks via a February 26 announcement, which warned of “malicious cyber activity” targeting the “critical infrastructure sector” in the US. The agency implored businesses to “shore up their systems.”

As the crisis worsened and NATO allies imposed economic sanctions on Russia, Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, told The New York Times that Russia might use cyberattacks in retaliation. He believed Russia could levy “direct cyberattacks against NATO countries or, more likely, in effect [unleash] all of the Russian cybercriminals on ransomware attacks at a massive level that still allows them some deniability of responsibility.”

Rob Shavell, co-founder of Abine, an online digital-privacy service, and who has over a decade of experience in cybersecurity solutions, told HR Brew that remote work has generally made companies easier targets.

Shavell explained that remote work has “increased the surface area of [company] data” as employees communicate with each other back and forth across often-insecure personal home networks. He said the result is over “10 times as many” possible entry points for malicious attacks in remote or hybrid work arrangements compared with a traditional in-person work environment.

Shavell also warned that cybercriminals have gotten smarter—he says they’re buying or scraping executives’ personally identifiable information (PII) from the internet to craft highly personalized messages to trick employees into falling for phishing schemes.

Hyper-personalized. “The problem is that the hackers, and the Russian hackers in particular, have gotten very good at personalization at scale. They can run basically massive amounts of [phishing] attempts [where they] send very realistic messages to literally tens of thousands of people that are hyper-personalized,” Shavell explained. “And, unfortunately, because people are busy, and they’re on their phones, or they’re at home or what have you, they have a higher conversion percentage [than other attacks].”

Taken together, Shavell called March 2022 “perfect” for increased cybersecurity incidents. Keep reading here.—SV

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SusannaVogel1 on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Susanna for her number on Signal.

HR Transform 2022 in Las Vegas was my first slide back into in-person work events since the start of the pandemic, and wow, have things changed.

First, swipe right? I’m not talking about a Bumble-esque meetup (although it was in Vegas, so you never know). The app for HR Transform was particularly interesting to me, because it allowed you to connect with other attendees by swiping right or left, just like Hinge, Tinder, etc. The app even provides recommended connections based on similar interests or people that are of mutual interest to you and others you’ve “liked.”

Receiving a notification of a new match is akin to a quick dopamine hit, but it is also rather practical. Users have the option to send the person a virtual handshake and take the conversation from there, whether through in-app messages or a coffee meetup.

As cool as it seems, it raises the question: how many people actually use apps like this for their intended networking purposes? It left me wondering how many conference-goers actively seek out new people or if they stick to spending time with established connections and coworkers.

Closing in. Let’s say attendees took those first few steps of finding someone interesting through the app and meeting in-person—exciting! But how do scheduled meetings expand beyond that 15-minute chat? 

I noticed that business cards have quickly gone the way of MySpace—hardly ever used and feeling pretty outdated. Fear not; badges at HR Transform were equipped with a QR code, so I could scan with my phone and be connected that way, too. This part was nothing new, but still felt unnatural.

Badge bumping. The more uncomfortable aspect for this reporter? An electronic square on the back of the badge. It made a noise as I pressed the square against another attendee’s badge, automatically connecting us digitally via an email notification. This step meant we had to get within a foot of each other, which felt oddly unnatural after three years of maintaining at least 6 feet of distance.

Yes, YOU, there, in the back: I’m still undecided on this new way of networking. How do you feel about swiping right or left in a professional setting? Are you noticing a change in your conference networking style? Join the discussion here on HR Brew’s LinkedIn page, or reply to this email with your thoughts.—KP

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @Kris10Parisi on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Kristen for her number on Signal.

Stat: 50% of business leaders responding to an international survey say they are already requiring or plan to require workers to report back to an in-person office in the next year, according to Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trend Index report.

Quote: “If he’s going to come in, expecting his old tactics to work, he’s going to find a whole new reality that is extremely different.”—Sydney Durkin, a shift supervisor at a Starbucks in Seattle that recently voted to unionize, when asked if she had a message for returning interim CEO Howard Schultz

Read: Despite the popularity of anti-work online communities and people leaving their jobs in record fashion during the pandemic, we’ve lost a fundamental piece of the conversation: Working is a new kind of religious and spiritual dogma, especially in Silicon Valley, argues Carolyn Chen, an associate professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. (The Atlantic)

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