The World is at Work working hard to attract, motivate and retain the bestest of the rest.

HR is relevant. No doubt about it. In fact, as HR evolves, learns the business behind the business and then helps to grow the business throughout the enterprise, it'll be even more relevant.

Right on.

Plus, when you're in larger organizations with lots of HR staff, then you've got specialists like compensation and benefits folks.

The physicists of HR.

I say that because, although I joke about having played HR on T.V. in the 80's, I certainly have never played a comp or benefits specialist.

Mercy, their jobs are intricate and complicated -- salary and benefits do make up a huge swath of company budgets and are still pretty big carrots to attract talent.

Just listening anecdotally to these HR pros talk about their jobs was almost enough to make me and my savvy HRmarketer and HR Vendor Phonebook team pass out on the expo floor of this year's WorldatWork Total Rewards Conference & Exposition.

*clap-clap-clap-clap*

Deep in the heart of Texas.

Let's also not forget the performance management, employee recognition and rewards, and work-life architects that also attended the event.

It's not called Total Rewards for nothing -- and now more than ever companies are doing everything they can, as creatively as they can, to keep their best in lieu of investing more money.

Now, this isn't to disparage the equally as intelligent specialists in training, learning and leadership development folks up in Chicago at the ASTD International Conference & Exposition going on at the same time.

But we weren't there, we were here, at the Gaylord Texan in Grapevine. Like the Disneyland Alamo, complete with a river walk and all. An amazing venue (everything's so big in Texas).

While we were relegated to the expo floor and did not attend any sessions this time, the buzz on the floor was that the session content was high-caliber and motivating.

Jeff Taylor was one of the keynotes -- founder and former CEO of Monster.com -- and he was quoted as saying:

"If you want your people to make some noise, you [leaders] have to make some noise."

Then he made everyone take off one shoe. Sorry I missed that. To actually motivate people enough to take off a shoe. Crazy cool.

Per my conversation with Kenneth Shafton, North American Leader of Marketing at Towers Watson, who had center stage on the expo floor:

• Attendance was up almost 30% this year. Not quite to pre-meltdown levels, but a positive sign nontheless.
• The attendee titles and corresponding company sizes were much more conducive to sales conversations. This was representative of many of the major shows in the past year and what makes the HR suppliers very happy!
• Having the event at such a landlocked venue like the Gaylord prevented attendees from heading out on their own. They were there for the duration and again helped with booth traffic -- with the exception of the Sunday night reception, something W@W will change next year.

Audrey Johnson, Visibility Manager for WorldatWork, confirmed these observations as well. (Love that title -- Visibility Manager, and once again Audrey's festive painted toenails below.)

The World is at Work working hard to attract, motivate and retain the bestest of the rest.

Thank goodness for that.

Post by Kevin W. Grossman (join me on Twitter, Facebook andLinkedIn - and now join HRmarketer on Twitter, Facebook andLinkedIn!)

Labels: marketing, trade show exhibiting, WorldatWork