The greatest HR event of the year, the fifth year of the EVOLVE! Summit, is about to be held in less than four months. Being the organisers, we have plenty of work to do to make sure it all goes at least as well as in the past years. This time, over 500 of us will gather at the Sono Centrum, Brno, and the most interesting news from our field will be presented on four stages over two days. You can look forward to lectures, case studies, workshops, and newly also to product presentations. Over 30 speakers and coaches will join us from all around the world. Most of the names have already been confirmed and will be disclosed to you gradually at the conference web, yet we are still awaiting a few speakers to confirm, so stay tuned.

This article will bring you all the topics you can look forward to this time. In order to be able to select the most interesting content, we read hundreds of articles every year written by people from all over the world. We also watch hundreds of videos and listen to as many podcasts. If we wanted to show you all the things we find interesting, there is no way we could do that on four stages and over two days. Let’s have a look at the topics we have selected for this year’s event:

Work skills development in the future

If you ask the recruiters about what is the ideal personality of a potential new colleague, the majority of them will emphasize communication skills, independence, a good level of assertiveness, etc. Not many things have changed in the past 15 years since I have been working as a recruiter.

Nevertheless, one of the main stars of this year’s conference, Johnny Campbell from Social Talent, is of a different opinion. At Social Talent, an extensive survey has been carried out which found out that we need to start thinking of personal skills differently. Thanks to technologies, companies change their business models in such a way that people inside will be able to offer something different. What do we mean? Come and hear for yourself.  

Working with people inside a company and their development

This area has always been and will always be the key to company stability. It’s not about how well we can hire people, but about how well we can work with them.

We are very pleased that Jill Christensen from the USA has accepted our invitation this year, as she belongs among the most globally-esteemed authors focusing on Employee Engagement. She says that two thirds of every company are formed by people who just “sit through” the day there. This can certainly be prevented by quality recruitment, but unless you work with your colleagues properly, even high-quality colleagues will still be falling into this bad habit. It’s a much more complex issue that cannot be solved by recruitment only. Jill will show us how to at least reverse this trend and how to maintain that.

Olinka Vlachynská is one of the people behind the phenomenal bars and restaurants of Brno, such as “Bar, který neexistuje” or “4 Pokoje”. These businesses have been praised even by the New York Times and they are the unique phenomenon of building a company culture (each business has its own culture, yet the entire group has its overall company culture) and of keeping employees satisfied and motivated.

I met Jana Meniarová, to her friends known as Meňa, a few weeks ago and we got on perfectly right away. A totally easy-going, open and emphatic person with a fantastic story about Bonami where she works. Jana is the perfect example of what a strong HR management should look like. She is the one who could bring up the company managers with great care and turn them into leaders. She outgrew Bonami very fast and needed to build a managerial structure. Along with her colleagues, Jana decided that instead of hiring external managers, it would be better to teach the existing staff to become managers. Not an easy task, indeed, yet they managed it perfectly. What did they have to deal with? Meňa will share her story at the conference.   

Martin Svoboda worked as the HR manager at Rohlik.cz at the times of its greatest transformation and growth. I guess he must really enjoy change management, as he has experienced much of it over the past few years at Astratex. Martin will tell us all about the right moment to apply process changes and functions within a company and how to classify everything to ensure that people perceive the changes as positive. How and when should you start making process changes and internal functions if you are growing fast or falling down? Let’s become inspired.

Vojta Bednář is a company consultant. He helps solve problems in companies which cannot manage to do that themselves any more. The problems which usually occur if the management underestimates something or fails to take action. Then you need all the advice you can get. How to avoid having such problems? How to find out that you’re heading to trouble and it’s high time to start acting? Thanks to Vojta’s experience, you will become much more far-sighted.

Burnout syndrome – all of us know someone who has been through it. According to certain statistical reports, a quarter of all people have been through some kind of burnout. Zuzka Relovská is one of them. A few years a go, she couldn’t work properly, she just kept going to doctors who couldn’t find out what was wrong with her. Then a psychologist told her she had been through serious burnout. That was the moment when she became more interested in this issue and in Slovakia she started helping people avoid or overcome the burnout syndrome. Zuzka will help us realise that someone is about to go through this and that it’s high time to help them. At the same time, she will show us how to train our line managers, so that they are able to find out that their team members could do with some help.

Marketing as a key skill of HR department

An area which we look forward to so much and, at the same time, an area which will become crucial in the upcoming years. Most companies have learned to understand that marketing forms an integral part of HR, but creating a content that’s interesting and well-communicated is a complex task where the future success of our company will be reflected by how well we can handle it.

Dan Kelsall comes from Manchester and belongs among top British experts in content marketing. Dan will teach us how to create the content and how to arrange it, so that it affects our brain and subconscious. At the beginning of the year, I read his book called F*cking Good Content which uses an original way to show how to create an eye-catching content at times when all of us are overwhelmed by information from all around. People trained by Dan have been getting hundreds of followers at social networks continuously despite having had five or ten of them at maximum in the past. How to achieve that? Dan will show you the tricks.

Stan Wasowicz has been living in London now and belongs among top experts in HR marketing.  Stan will guide you through the psychological world of communication with candidates and your employees. He will explain to us that mistakes often occur right at the start of communication campaigns and that these are caused by misunderstanding of “shopping” behaviour that takes us through day-to-day situations.

Oliver Jakubík is one of the kindest marketing guys I have ever met. His name is well-known to people in his home country, Slovakia, and also in the Czech Republic. Oliver will show you how to process visual content in such a way that you will never need to wait for a graphic designer to be available any more. You will be able to create attractive visuals for your video, campaign, photo montage or aftermovie yourself by means of applications which Oliver will teach you to use. What’s more, the costs for the company will be much lower than having a graphic designer do it.

Matěj Matolín belongs among the greatest fans of the Summit and the most innovative professionals within our community. Last year he joined us as a listener only, but this year we invited him as a speaker, as he has done a very interesting recruitment campaign based on sequence marketing which you simply need to see. For those who know Matěj already, you are aware of the fact that there will be a lot of practical tips and fun in his presentation.

Petr Němec is a magician who can shoot the most authentic and funniest HR and recruitment videos I have ever seen. This year, Petr will show us how you can make people truly feel your company values and mission by means of a video. Personally, I look forward to seeing Petr very much, as I can still see various companies building their values and mission during a two-day workshop at a hotel where a part of the company or a department meets thinking that’s all there is to it. However, values and missions often remain only on a piece of paper and are not really integrated in people’s real life. Petr has had a few super-projects where employees were left to live through the company values by means of a secret reality show – you simply can’t miss that.

Another topic we will be dealing with is the career web – I have known Gábina Jakabová for ages, I have done some recruitment for her myself and I know she is one of the most demanding persons on the market. Gábina will show us how to make a high-quality recruitment web and what she has learned when creating it.

Next week we will reveal the second part of the topics. 🙂