Beyond the Expo: UNLEASH America with Reejig CEO

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My name is Siobhan Savage and I’m one of the Founders and CEO of Reejig. Reejig is a workforce intelligence platform that’s on a mission to create a world with zero wasted potential in people, business, and society. 

You speak about not leaving people behind when it comes to AI. What do you mean?

At Reejig, our mission is to create a world with zero wasted potential. 

And, for us, that means zero wasted potential in your people. So, making sure that every single person has access to a meaningful career. 

Zero wasted potential in your business. So, making sure that your people are in the right place, with the right skills, at the right time, and that you’re fully optimized and utilizing your people in the right way. 

And, zero wasted potential in society. And this one’s really personal to me. I want to make sure that the product that we build has a recurring impact on society, and we make sure that we leave no one behind. 

Zero wasted potential is all about a movement in our category, and in our space, that as leaders, we’ve got a responsibility now to make sure that as the world is changing, and as technology is coming into play, we’re bold but also super responsible at the same time.

So, making sure that anyone who is being impacted by changes in technology, that they’re not left behind.

I think that’s going to be really important for us as HR leaders, to really think about that responsibility factor when it comes to our workforce transformations. 

What would you say are some of the top trends shaping HR right now?

I think there’s a lot of talk, and there probably has for the last couple of years, around skills and I think, that won’t go away.

I think we’re all desperate to try and find a new way of freeing up our people, moving around our organizations. And, I think skills is that currency that is really going to help orchestrate work to workers.

We’re also starting to see now a lot more of the genAI come into play and organizations themselves now trying to figure out, ‘how do we bring this into our workforce?’.

GenAI as an actual worker, rather than just a tool is becoming something that we’re really starting to see. So, I think those two key factors will be things that continuously play out. 

When we do that, what you’re going to see is the world and our workforce will change. 

If we’re adopting more of the generative AI, that is going to have an impact on our current workforces. So, really rethinking our work design, starting to think about, ‘what actual workforce strategy and workforce DNA are we going to have at a high level?’ And then, how do we bring that into our workforce today to make sure that we’re thinking about how we use our current employees, how we think about using our flex workers, but also these digital workers as we call them at Reejig, your AI workers, how do we integrate them into our workforce so that we are all playing in harmony?

I think that’s starting to become a really common conversation that I’m having with Chief People Officers because at C-Suite we’re seeing a lot of the CEOs and shareholders really starting to think about ‘how do we bring AI in from a cost perspective in these kind of tricky markets that we’re in right now?’. So, we’re definitely seeing that that’s really a core factors that’s going to start to play out over the next 12-18 months.

Do you have any inspirational customer anecdotes around transformation?

Reckitt, who is one of our top favorite customers that we work with at Reejig, they’re in 68 countries around the world. 

What we heard Amy Cook, who is the Global Head of Talent, talk about, was the path to zero wasted potential that they are on.

We don’t advocate at Reejig to change the world overnight – it’s not possible. What we advocate for is taking people on the journey of first making sure that you have full visibility of your work and understand deeply what makes up your work, making sure that you deeply understand your workforce, and then going on a journey of transforming your business bit by bit. 

As you’ll start to see a lot more in the conversation in this space, we want to make sure that customers are not overwhelming their organizations because that’s where they’re not going to do so well. 

What we’re really talking about, and I did a session yesterday here, where we talk about taking them on the path, what that would look like, and how you equip them to do the transformation, how to think about changing their business and then what impact they should expect to see out of this journey. 

It’s been a really exciting time, but I do also think we’ve got to be realistic. We’re talking with big, large organizations who will take time to go through this journey of transformation and to really embed this.

You’ve got to think about it in a longer-term strategy, and not a quick six-month pilot. That’s not going to change your way of working. 

What have people at home missed out on by not being at UNLEASH America in 2024?

This is probably a personal one for me of why UNLEASH has been exceptionally special for me this year. 

This time last year, we were at UNLEASH and it fell on Mother’s Day and also my birthday. And, what we wanted to make sure that we were doing was not leaving my kids behind. I’ve got two little kids. I’ve got Tierna, who’s 10 and Indie, who’s six –  they were pretty upset that I wasn’t able to be at home for that and I obviously didn’t want to miss out on UNLEASH this year. 

The UNLEASH team were incredible at helping us facilitate really rethinking how we show up. 

We’re all about community at Reejig, (we’re not really into the super salesy booth style) and you can see our booth, it’s pretty different. We’ve got Camp Reejig, and this is where folks can come around, sit around the campfire, and start to think about solving some of the world’s most complex problems. 

We’ve been able to create a space here where we are actually embedding ourselves into the community, rather than here as a booth. That’s something that we just don’t feel like in any other conference around the world. 

It’s been really incredibly special and a bit thank you to the team at UNLEASH for giving us the opportunity to be ourselves, to feel confident in being able to just create that space, and for my kids to come and serve lemonade at the booth. 

It’s been very exciting and a personal highlight of my actual life, to be honest, so far!