ANNOUNCEMENT: The Citi Smarter Worklife Challenge

I had a call last week with some really cool folks from Citigroup, often shortened to just Citi, one of the world's largest banking and financial services organizations. Even for such a large, well-known global brand, the challenges facing Citi are not that different from the ones facing just about every size or type of organization - the need to innovate, to become more agile in a fast-moving and competitive marketplace, and perhaps most importantly, to find, engage with, develop, inspire, and achieve great business performance through people.

Citi describes this last element of improving outcomes with and through people in the context of the 'Employee Journey' - the full life cycle of actions and interactions that people have with the organization, with their colleagues, and crucially, with the many technologies that help shape these experiences along the journey.

And one of the ways Citi has identified that will be of primary importance in improving their employee's journeys is through innovative HR and workplace technologies, which after learning more about what they are working on in that area I was interested and glad to help Citi get the word out about their new initiative called the Citi Smarter Worklife Challenge.

The Citi Global Digital Acceleration team has created the Smarter Worklife Challenge, an open contest to help find and identify innovative human resources technologies designed to improve this Employee Journey. Citi is inviting both startup and established technology solution providers to submit their ideas and concepts, (submissions must be at least advanced, working prototypes), in the areas of recruiting, onboarding, career development, social/collaboration, analytics, executive management, and more, to compete for a prize of $50,000 in cash, and the opportunity to enter into commercial terms with Citi and be incubated and/or accelerated.

For HR technology solution providers interested in applying for consideration for the Smarter Worklife Challenge, a few important dates you need to know: The deadline for submissions is December 4^th, and finalists will be announced December 18^th, and challenge finalists will be invited to demonstrate their solutions to Citi senior leadership in February 2016.

Full details about the challenge, including submission timelines and contest rules can be found on the Smarter Worklife Challenge site. Also, a PDF version of the challenge process, timelines, and guidelines can be downloaded here. 

I think this is a really neat and interesting challenge and thanks to the folks at Citi for bringing it to my attention and for supporting innovation in the HR tech marketplace. Please do share the information about the Smarter Worklife Challenge to any HR technology innovators that you think might be interested in participating.

Disclaimer: I am sharing information about the Smarter Worklife Challenge because I like the idea, I am not being compensated in any way by Citi, and this challenge is not affiliated with the HR Technology Conference.