Flow of Work Co wins top Australian spot in She Loves Tech competition

She Loves Tech describes itself as "the world’s largest startup competition". Flow of Work Co took out the top place at the finals for Australia on 20 October 2022, with WIRL and Lockpick Games coming in second and third respectively. The grand finals, which are global, will take place from 3pm on 5 November 2022 (GMT + 8).

She Loves Tech wants to help female entrepreneurs close the funding gap, stating that: "We seek out and accelerate the best entrepreneurs and technology for transformative impact."

There were 8 finalists for the Australian competition, and Flow of Work Co secured the top spot for Australia.

Helena Turpin, co-founder of Flow of Work Co says her business, "is an internal talent marketplace and career development platform that helps organisations develop and retain their people by connecting employees' skills and aspirations with internal opportunities like projects, mentors and learning so that they stay and grow."

Ms Turpin shared with HR Leader that they are planning to expand Flow of Work Co into the US in 2023.

HR Leader has previously sat down with Ms Turpin and Reece Group's people data and analytics lead for a podcast episode delving into talent and how organisations can look a bit more creatively at their talent pools. When speaking to The HR Leader on 8 July this year, Ms Turpin gave the following example of cross-purpose talent, thinking about EAs moving into project management roles.

"We're seeing some really fun examples out in the market of people thinking a wee bit differently about talent. We've been working with customers recently, [and] we've got one customer who's been thinking about project management capabilities. If you look at the underpinning skill sets of people like EAs for instance, they've got amazing transferable skills. [Then] if you look at the outlook for people in roles like EAs where increasingly customers or organisations are looking at how they can reduce cost and redeploy people... The underpinning skill sets of people in support roles, coordination roles, and EA roles transfer beautifully into roles like project management."

Flying the flag for the role of tech in HR, Ms Turpin also shared with The HR Leader that: "Technology allows you to understand your people at scale and offer career progression opportunities at scale. It gives you the chance as an HR team to be really strategic, to come to the table with data, and then the analytics to back up any initiative that you want to invest time or money in."

She added: "I do also believe that there's a role for people within this as well. I don't think tech is going to solve all our problems together. So, I think there's an important role to play for humans in this experience as well. I think there's a chance to augment what we are trying to do with technology, with increasing your leadership capabilities, your employee coaching capabilities, using it to review your learning and development programmes, the ROI on those programmes and where you invest your money and other efforts as well. So, it's got a really important role to play for sure."