Innovation in HR: New Digital HeRoes

This blog post is part of our Digital HeRoes Day coverage. Digital HeRoes Day is PeopleDoc's largest customer event of the year, gathering over 400 HR professionals, thought leaders, and partners for a day of provocative panels and speakers.

Innovation is woven into the fabric of PeopleDoc. Our culture is one of constant innovation. You can see it in how we transform the lives of our customers. You can see it in our product. You can see it in our offices and our daily work habits. 

As a further commitment to innovation during Digital HeRoes Day, we hosted a startup competition where several HR startups pitched their ideas, and one winner received the PeopleDoc Trophy for Innovation. For this competition, we partnered with Lab RH, a startup exchange devoted to moving HR innovation forward through think tanks and collaboration between startups. Three finalists joined Jonathan Benhamou, PeopleDoc CEO & Co-Founder and Jeremy Lamri, CEO of Le Lab RH on stage at DHD to pitch their ideas and showcase innovation in HR.

The first pitch came from Romain Guitton of Bonnet de Jour. An osteopathic doctor himself, Romain and Bonnet de Jour used digital tools to understand patterns in workplace injuries, helping organizations to reduce the instances of workplace injuries and the cost of workers’ compensation.

Next came Margaux Raab of Neojobs. Neojobs assists with the candidate experience at organizations. By understanding that a job seeker’s first action is to go to google, as well as other typical user behavior, Neojobs uses gamification to communicate a company’s employer brand to potential candidates.

The third and final pitch came from William Peres of SeriousFactory. SeriousGame is SeriousFactory’s e-learning tool for behavioral situations, such as how a manager should deal with a difficult employee. SeriousGame places the employee into everyday, real-world scenarios, asking you to apply what you have learned in classroom training.

The Trophy for Innovation was awarded to SeriousFactory based on an audience vote. I believe SeriousGame has some compelling characteristics that resonated with the audience. The virtual training editor is where learning and development teams can build out the different scenarios. It was built to be user-friendly, so without coding or graphic skills, the L&D teams can determine the right training scenarios and adjust as needed – without IT or support from SeriousFactory. Additionally, this training is available 24/7. Unlike a trainer in a classroom, SeriousGame is never sick, never on leave, never on vacation. Employees can use self-service to conduct the training when its best for them.

These ideas ring true for us at PeopleDoc as well. We believe the most innovative solutions in HR are built for employees to utilize self-service and for HR teams to be able to administer systems on their own. Startups are well-poised for disruption and innovation, and at PeopleDoc we’ll continue to foster that spirit both within our own company and in the startup community.