President’s Column

Alexis Fink, Meta

Decades ago, I started describing our annual conference as my “annual intellectual honeymoon.”  Every year, I am excited by the ideas presented and delighted by the connections made with friends old and new. In an effort to keep that conference buzz going just a little longer, I’m sharing a slightly shortened version of my closing plenary remarks below.

Every year, our SIOP Annual Conference is full of new ideas, inspiration, and friends. I hope you left the 2024 conference happy and excited about the power of industrial-organizational psychology, the impact we can have on the world, and the bright future ahead.

I love the description of things happening gradually, then all at once. It seems like we are at an intersection of two of those at the same time. First, industrial-organizational psychology has a century of science behind us, and yet in the past few years, we are suddenly the hot new thing! Second, in the larger world, remarkable computer power is available enough that advanced models have taken off in a way that felt like science fiction just a few years ago.

For many of us, SIOP *IS* the annual conference and the content and relationships we find here. You might not know that SIOP also produces a second conference—the Leading Edge Consortium, which will be on leadership and hosted in Minneapolis this fall. We also help set educational standards, support members with activities like our regular salary survey, advocate on issues related to work and workers, and of course, partner with the SIOP Foundation to fund awards and grants, among many other activities.

SIOP, as an organization, needs to adapt and evolve to meet this moment. In good news, this work is already underway. We are looking ahead and determining how our Society needs to evolve in support of our members, our profession, and society; we also need to evolve how we operate our organization.

We are incredibly lucky to have both a dedicated professional staff and an ENORMOUS number of volunteers. I know that, for me, volunteer roles within SIOP have helped build professional relationships and useful skills that I wasn’t able to develop in my day job. Although it is definitely extra work, I have found it to be incredibly rewarding. Like so many things, you get out of it what you put into it!

As we refresh our strategy, we also need to refresh our operations as an organization. Some of this you will notice—like our website refresh that is coming later this year. Other things will be less obvious to most of our members. Like so many organizations, we have evolved over time, and in many cases, we’ve had the same good idea more than once, resulting in duplication and inefficiency. After a decade or two, that results in thousands of web pages (literally), dozens of orphan social media accounts (also literally), and time- and energy-wasting duplication of activities.

And why are we doing all this? Now, more than ever, the world needs our insight, our scientist–practitioner approach to addressing essential questions of work and working, for example, supporting fair and effective hiring practices as organizations experiment with the new capabilities enabled by advanced techniques.

At this year’s annual conference, we saw tremendous content brought forward by our members—content that helps position us as a community of scientist–practitioners to support effective organizational practices. The richness and depth of the work we do matters, and helping ensure a bright future for work of this rigor and quality is the animating force behind our plans and aspirations for the coming year. 

SIOP has been a foundational community for my adulthood. I’ve had opportunities to stretch and grow, made friends across the country and globe, and built a spectacular professional network. It is the honor of a lifetime to have the opportunity to play a role in stewarding SIOP through this pivotal moment, and in so doing, to support healthy workers, effective organizations, and a thriving society. I am excited to do this work in partnership with literally hundreds of you as volunteers, as well as our professional staff, colleagues, and partners. I am so excited for what the future will hold, and I am looking forward to seeing you all next year in Denver!