Breaking out of breakout sessions at SHRM

Lunch time at #SHRM09

Sitting in the press room at SHRM using their free computer connections to do a quick update.

I am really enjoying the conference so far. Spending a fair amount of time on the vendor showplace floor. There is actually a lot of cool stuff going on, especially in two areas: on-the-spot recognition and big prizes.

So here is what I liked so far today in no particular order:

Winners of the small and medium sized company Best Place to Work awards for 2009 were announced today and both winners were repeaters. The small business winner was Badger Mining Company and the Medium business winner was Ultimate Software out of Florida, where I live. I will publish the full list and links to the other sites later this week.

Comments by both CEOs were worthy of notice. Badger Mining mentioned two key factors in their success several times: employees and flexibility. The CEO at Ultimate Software said that the measure of a company is shown more by how you treat the lowest paid employee, and not based upon how well you treat the highest!

I liked some of the spot recognition products I saw at Baudville. I also like Baudville because they tweet.

I also liked UltimateResume.com and need to look at it further. More to come.

Mark Stelzner and I tweeted about HR as well.

stelzner@stelzner the courage to speak frankly and move HR forward? (via @MikeVanDervort) it's exactly what we need mike!

stelzner@MikeVanDervort Submit it for next year Mike and we'll co-present.

So maybe that will happen in San Diego.