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Though three-quarters of U.S. employers now offer hybrid work, some retailers have been slow to embrace emerging hybrid work models, even for corporate employees. We spoke with Ashok Krish, Global Head of Digital Workplace at TCS, about how hybrid work will impact employers – and their employees – in the retail industry.

Do you believe hybrid work is here to stay?

Hybrid work is absolutely here to stay. While retail has always had a sizeable frontline workforce, there has always been an asymmetry in technology investments. Knowledge workers in a traditional office setting have historically been more invested in technology than frontline workers. But the pandemic has forced a rethink. Digital enabled frontline workers are more crucial to the organization’s long-term success than ever before.

How will hybrid work change the employee experience in the retail industry?

In the context of retail, where one might argue that a hybrid model of work has always existed (frontline workers vs. knowledge workers), the transition required now is more subtle. The focus now is on technology investments that allow more fluidity between frontline and knowledge work and slowly blur the distinction between these roles. Retailers that invest in workplace technologies that allow anyone in any role to work effectively in both a frontline as well as a traditional office/home capacity will succeed.

Empowering frontline workers with better real-time analytics, decision support, and devices that help them spend less time doing boring, repetitive work is a crucial investment for retailers to make.

What are some of the challenges hybrid work poses for employers in the retail sector?

One of the biggest challenges hybrid work poses for retail is churn. Retailers employ a large number of transient/temporary workers who need to be onboarded and offboarded rapidly, while enabling others’ contextual knowledge to be delivered to them and simultaneously capturing their tacit knowledge while they are working. This means that traditional ways of managing knowledge and enabling collaboration simply do not scale for this workforce. The investment in AI-backed continuous skilling and just-in-time training experiences for frontline workers will be crucial in overcoming this particular challenge.

Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that 48% of employees and 53% of managers say they are burned out at work. What can employers do to improve employee engagement and reduce stress in the hybrid workplace?

Employers need to rethink the rituals of work. Retail organizations need to rethink how their frontline workers collaborate in real time with the rest of the organization. Employees waste time finding information, finding people, setting up meetings, and cleaning data. Everyone spends more time looking for information than acting on information. It’s a discouraging, stressful environment. To change it, managers must transform their processes and their culture. They must embrace new technology stack metaphors (such as Microsoft Teams vs. email) to become more efficient. They must learn to become effective facilitators of digital processes and distributed teams.

How can retail organizations use technology to improve communication, collaboration, and productivity, while maintaining security and preventing fraud?

Companies can no longer expect employees to attend town hall meetings and read company newsletters. Technology can help them target the right messages to the right demographic in the right form factors. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to reduce a 900-word report to a 50-word summary or generate a video, which you can send on a mobile phone.

Tools like Microsoft Teams break down silos and enable collaboration across the organization. Once managers set access controls, the platform worries about security, freeing people to exchange ideas without constraint. But at the same time, the design and configuration of these collaboration systems will make the difference between creating a noisy, unproductive culture of collaboration and a personable, productive one.

Automation, AI, and the cloud can save employees tremendous amounts of time. Instead of attending two-week training sessions, employees can receive nudges from a virtual assistant to acquire new skills as they work. In the near future, knowledge assistants powered by large language models, purpose-built for specific industry domains, will augment every employee’s productivity by providing contextual knowledge on demand.

Retail companies have historically been early adopters of technology and will need to continue to increase their momentum of change. The traditional dichotomy between build vs. buy has given way to a “no-code vs. pro-code” approach – employees will expect new capabilities to delivered quicker than ever before.

With cloud-based software, front-line employees can see back-end customer information in real time, increasing upselling, cross-selling, and client satisfaction. Bringing business tools into the flow of collaboration will create more frictionless experiences and enable more agile collective decision-making.

These capabilities can help to eliminate workplace pain points, greatly improving the employee experience. Without a great employee experience, you cannot create a great customer experience.

At the same time, companies must maintain secure environments and prevent fraud. Companies must invest in newer tools that give them wider and deeper visibility into their threat landscape and leverage built-in AI and machine learning to proactively manage threats and reduce alert fatigue. The future of security is to largely automate responses to standard threats while investing in education and change management to prevent social engineering and attacks on individuals.

How does TCS help organizations reimagine the future of work for their employees?

We provide a comprehensive solution combining infrastructure, applications, and human resources expertise into a single package that helps retail organizations deliver an outstanding hybrid work experience. My group includes people who do everything from designing applications to mapping workflows to managing the inner workings of a cloud framework, including reinventing productivity and the future of work with AI using Microsoft 365 Copilot.

TCS also invests in behavioral science research to help organizations prepare for the workplace of the future. How can retail companies accommodate gig work? How should AI collaborate with human beings? No one knows the answers to these questions yet, just as no one knew until recently how to manage hybrid work. By peering into cutting-edge technology, we can pass along insights that keep our clients ahead of the curve.

Discover how you can transform meeting culture, help managers to be more effective, and drive employee engagement.

Tata Consultancy Services

Ashok Krish Global Head of Digital Workplace, TCS
Ashok Krish is the Global Head of the Digital Workplace unit at TCS, which helps customers reimagine the future of work for their employees. His team works at the intersection of design, technology, and behavioral science, and helps conceptualize and implement modern, persuasive, and immersive employee experiences. Outside of work, he is a columnist, musician, and a food science enthusiast.

Employee Experience, Remote Work, Retail Industry

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , ,

You heard about a nightmare scenario playing out for peers at other companies and hope it doesn’t affect yours. Trouble tickets are rolling in, and there’s a lack of qualified people to address security alerts and help desk issues right when customer demand, supply shortages, and potential threats are at their peak.

Even with flexible remote work policies, the most seasoned employees in roles such as customer support, data science, business analysis, and DevSecOps move on to greener pastures and leave—just when they finally seemed to figure out how everything works.

Why is an exodus of skilled knowledge workers becoming a recurring pattern in customer-oriented organizations, and what can IT leaders do to improve their digital employee experience (DEX) to convince them to stay?

The great hybrid office migration

A few lucky “born on the web” companies were built on the premise of 100% remote work. The pandemic of 2020 forced the rest of the world to move knowledge workers out of the office into fully or partially remote work models. 

Migratory employees in technology roles appreciated the newfound ability to work from home in sweatpants and avoid the daily commute. Many idealistically vowed never to return to work for an employer that required them to come back to the office.

Employers benefitted too, releasing some of their real estate for savings on facility costs and reducing travel expenses. Less scrupulous bosses took it a step further, capturing additional hours in the workday by implementing draconian attention monitoring tools or letting employees stay on duty beyond typical office hours.

Now that the pandemic has become endemic, some companies are reversing their position on remote work and asking employees to come back into the office, at least some of the time. We’re settling on a hybrid model of digital work. In 2023, 58% of knowledge workers in the United States will continue to be able to work remotely at least one day a week, while 38% will continue as full-time remote workers.

Despite the initial novelty of having pets and kids hilariously interrupting Zoom calls, this new normal of blurring the lines between work and home life has not turned out to be all unicorns and rainbows for digital employees.

Dealing with digital work friction

Employers used to be able to tell teams to stay late in the office to fulfill a rush of customer orders, or be on-call to respond to issues on weekends. The signs of employee burnout were easy to predict even before “the great resignation” of the 2020s. 

CIOs built or bought applications to allow virtual work, which allowed more team members to be available online to respond to requests through remote access, without coming into the office. This was helpful, but unfortunately the burnout rate has only increased for today’s digital worker who may have lost separation between work and home life, and staffing still couldn’t keep up with workload. 

A Gartner HR study recently estimated that 24% of workers would likely shift to a new job in 2022–and this turnover rate is especially true of knowledge workers who must interact daily with the company’s systems. Compared to pre-pandemic employee sentiment, 20% more respondents cited their digital work experienceas a significant contributing factor to job satisfaction.

Even with some arbitrary job cuts happening at larger companies, skilled team members can find work elsewhere if they are frustrated, and unfilled roles in customer service, SecOps, and engineering positions are still common. 

Potential recruits can check any number of salary disclosure sites to figure out what they are worth on the market, and they can also look on Glassdoor to see why employees are dissatisfied working at a company. In a hybrid work world, a bad employee experience is not always about low pay, long hours or “mean bosses” anymore–it’s about digital work friction that inhibits their ability to deliver meaningful value.

Employee expectations of DEX

All employees want to work for employers with fundamentals, like fair compensation, a harassment-free workplace, and work/life balance. In specific, digital employees have a unique set of concerns about the technology environment they must work within, since in many cases it is their only connection to co-workers and customers.

This is why CIOs spend so much of their time researching the digital tools employees use and spinning up new projects to upgrade that experience.

A successful DEX technology suite can positively impact employee sentiment if it delivers for them on three dimensions:

Engagement: Are employees using the company’s suite of productivity tools, issue tracking, collaboration, and system monitoring tools on a daily basis? Individuals want self-service platforms that will work on their target workstation or devices, but they also need education, documentation, and expert support from the organization to maintain successful adoption.

Companies can measure improved engagement through monitoring and visibility into organizational, team, and individual usage patterns, but more importantly, they should offer mechanisms for a positive feedback loop, so employees can register their preferences and concerns about the suite.

Empowerment: Are individuals, teams and regions authorized for just the analytic, management, and problem-solving tools and data they need without unnecessary friction or distractions? Employee empowerment is a continuous struggle for many companies to deliver, as permissions for analytics, user data, work items, and access privileges are usually highly customized to meet overlapping work, customer requirements, and regulatory regimes.  

Empowered employees proactively identify emerging demands and roadblocks, and effectively take action to collaborate with the right team members to find solutions. 

Efficiency: Intelligent automation triages and prioritizes important customer issues for teams, and helps individuals filter through irrelevant alerts from disparate systems and services. Employees progress through tasks with fewer interruptions, spend less time on pointless root cause analysis, and remediate resolutions with automated actions.

All employees want to make progress on goals. The upside of efficiency is almost limitless because as one productivity constraint is removed, another bottleneck will appear upstream or downstream.

Enterprise expectations of DEX

From the CIO’s perspective, DEX is best thought of as an enterprise-wide transformational initiative that increases the value of critical talent over time, rather than as a project that delivers short-term gains.

The customer still comes first. But let’s face it, there are already enough customer-facing performance metrics in the world. 

DEX turns measurement and metrics inward, then captures even more value from the intentional feedback and non-verbal cues provided by employees.

This virtuous cycle of continuous feedback and improvement of the ‘three E’s’ of DEX will fuel engagement, empowerment, and efficiency for employees and executives–and better performance, not just on meeting revenue and cost targets, but in terms of employee satisfaction and higher retention rates.

The Intellyx Take

Work has changed forever. 

From a morale perspective, remote workers might miss something about the camaraderie of an office: the exciting pre-launch demo, an in-person standup, an informal desk visit, or a coffee break to share ideas about a particular issue with colleagues. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make DEX the best it can be, wherever the team is located.

Therefore, every organization will need to define a digital employee experience that engages and empowers employees, making every working minute a more efficient use of time, including taking some well-earned time off to unplug from the digital world.

©2023 Intellyx LLC. At the time of writing, Tanium is an Intellyx subscriber. No AI chatbots were used to write any part of this article.

Digital Transformation

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Though three-quarters of U.S. employers now offer hybrid work, some banks and insurance companies have been slow to embrace this emerging work model. We spoke with Ashok Krish, Global Head of Digital Workplace at TCS, about how hybrid work will impact employers – and their employees – in the financial services industry.

How will hybrid work change the employee experience in the financial services industry?

It will enable employees to shift from work processes designed for the last century to a fluid environment where they can easily share information, discover a wider range of people to collaborate with outside silos, exchange ideas, and create new products and services. Banks developed the traditional office model, using physical inboxes, outboxes, and carbon copies to transmit information. Early software programs simply digitized these desk-based procedures, and banks still use them.

Modern technology vastly broadens communication modes and enables real-time analytics and immersive experiences. In a hybrid workplace, you need to give everyone access to these capabilities, whether they are in the field, at home, in the office, or in transit. Financial services organizations that succeed with the hybrid model will greatly enhance the employee experience. They will attract a global talent pool, building a highly skilled, diverse, and motivated workforce, which is critical for an industry whose business model is innately digital in nature.

What are some of the challenges hybrid work poses for employers in the financial sector?

Banks and insurance companies carry large volumes of sensitive personal information and are heavily regulated. As a result, they have developed an information-security mindset that focuses on prevention rather than enablement. Systems and departments are very siloed, making it difficult for employees to gain access to the tools and information they need.

To succeed with hybrid work, financial services organizations will have to rethink how information flows. Decision-making cannot be restricted to the top—it needs to happen at the edge, among teams and individuals. To make informed decisions, employees must be provided with better access to corporate analytics, reports, and tools.

Another challenge is legacy technology. Financial companies often have multiple types of hardware and 20 or 30 versions of similar software, each with its own set of tools. Their rate of adopting new technologies is exceedingly slow. This makes it challenging to innovate and provide the seamless, integrated experience employees expect.

Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that 48% of employees and 53% of managers say they are burned out at work. What can employers do to improve employee engagement and reduce stress in the hybrid workplace?

Employers need to fundamentally rethink the rituals of work. Financial services managers spend about 80% of their time in meetings, which aren’t necessarily productive. Every minute spent being muted in a meeting is a minute wasted. Employees waste time finding information, finding people, setting up meetings, and cleaning data. Everyone spends more time looking for information than acting on information. It’s a discouraging, stressful environment.

To change it, managers must transform their processes and their culture. They must embrace new technology stack metaphors (such as Microsoft Teams vs. email) to become more efficient. They must learn to become effective facilitators of digital processes and distributed teams.

How can financial organizations use technology to improve communication, collaboration, and productivity, while maintaining security and preventing fraud?

Financial organizations can no longer expect employees to attend town hall meetings and read company newsletters. Technology can help them target the right messages to the right demographic in the right form factors. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to reduce a 900-word report to a 50-word summary or generate a video, which you can send on a mobile phone.

Tools like Microsoft Teams break down silos and enable collaboration across the organization. Once managers set access controls, the platform worries about security, freeing people to exchange ideas without constraint. But at the same time, the design and configuration of these collaboration systems will make the difference between creating a noisy, unproductive culture of collaboration and a personable, productive one.

Automation, AI, and the cloud can save employees tremendous amounts of time. Instead of attending two-week training sessions, employees can receive nudges from a virtual assistant to acquire new skills as they work. In the near future, knowledge assistants powered by large language models, purpose-built for specific industry domains, will augment every employee’s productivity by providing contextual knowledge on demand. Robotic process automations streamline approval processes and free IT workers from pushing updates and patches.

These capabilities can help to eliminate workplace pain points, greatly improving the employee experience. Without a great employee experience, you cannot create a great customer experience.

At the same time, companies must maintain secure environments and prevent fraud. Companies must invest in newer tools that give them wider and deeper visibility into their threat landscape and leverage built in AI and machine learning to proactively manage threats and reduce alert fatigue. The future of security is to largely automate responses to standard threats while investing in education and change management to prevent social engineering and attacks on individuals.

How does TCS help organizations reimagine the future of work for their employees?

We provide a comprehensive solution combining infrastructure, applications, and human resources expertise into a single package that helps financial organizations deliver an outstanding hybrid work experience. My group includes people who do everything from designing applications to mapping workflows to managing the inner workings of a cloud framework, including reinventing productivity and the future of work with AI using Microsoft 365 Copilot.

TCS also invests in behavioral science research to help organizations prepare for the workplace of the future. How can financial companies accommodate gig work? How should AI collaborate with human beings? No one knows the answers to these questions yet, just as no one knew until recently how to manage hybrid work. By peering into cutting edge technology, we can pass along insights that keep our clients ahead of the curve.

Discover how you can transform meeting culture, help managers to be more effective, and drive employee engagement.

Tata Consultancy Services

Ashok Krish, Global Head of Digital Workplace, TCS
Ashok Krish is the Global Head of the Digital Workplace unit at TCS, which helps customers reimagine the future of work for their employees. His team works at the intersection of design, technology, and behavioral science, and helps conceptualize and implement modern, persuasive, and immersive employee experiences. Outside of work, he is a columnist, musician, and a food science enthusiast.

Financial Services Industry, IT Leadership, Remote Work

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

The metaverse—a fast-emerging combination of technologies including augmented and virtual reality, IoT, and blockchain—is poised to change the way financial services organizations and other companies do business.   

“By blending the physical and the digital worlds, the metaverse is changing the rules of engagement and enabling us to connect without barriers,” says Anupam Singhal, a Senior Vice President at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). “For financial institutions, it can transform the way they offer services and training, making them more convenient, engaging, accessible and inclusive.”   

Metaverse applications are developing quickly. According to Gartner, 25% of people will spend at least an hour in the metaverse by 2026. While financial institutions are starting to experiment with pilot programs, they must ensure that they have the right infrastructure and security protections in place to reap the full-scale benefits the metaverse has to offer.  

Innovative products and services 

In the metaverse, financial institutions can offer customers and employees personalized experiences that leave a lasting impression. For example, clients can hold virtual consultations with investment advisors across the globe and improve their financial knowledge by using 3D interactive tools. Financial institutions can also cater to underserved and underbanked customers with minimal to no charges.  

Employees, even the ones situated in isolated, remote locations, can take virtual tours and gain knowledge faster. TCS is developing an application, for example, that leads new employees on a lifelike journey through a bank’s corporate buildings and history as part of their onboarding experience. And with virtual training, employees can practice skills in a realistic, risk-free environment. 

Metaverse services can also help banks attract new customers.  

“We have a lineup of exciting projects, including creating a virtual bank for retail transactions and a non-fungible token marketplace using blockchain,” Singhal says. “We have already implemented augmented marketing and branding solutions in retail, and we are working on pilots in the business-to-business and business-to-consumer spaces.”  

A seamless, secure infrastructure 

To make these dynamic services possible, organizations must create digital replicas of the real world, supported by dedicated offerings on Microsoft Cloud. Seamless connectivity and extremely low latency, enabled by specialized graphics and edge processing, are also critical to providing vivid experiences and near-real time interactions.   

“With decentralized Web3 technology, users can also take advantage of peer-to-peer capabilities, running some tools and platforms on their devices instead of relying on the cloud,” Singhal says.  

In addition to creating ground-breaking experiences, the metaverse, like other emerging technologies, brings a new set of security challenges. Rogue actors could attempt to steal target NFTs and tokens, or use deepfake techniques to impersonate financial advisors. Personal data collected by AR and VR applications creates greater opportunities for identity theft.  

“We must rethink how we address data privacy and security in the metaverse,” Singhal says. “We need strong regulations like GDPR to define clear boundaries. We also need more security measures like multi-factor authentication and digital encryption to ensure secure experiences.”   

Getting started in the metaverse 

Every organization must carve its own path to the metaverse, a process that starts by examining existing technology and defining services to prioritize.   

“TCS has a successful history of helping businesses grow and transform through technology and make a meaningful difference. We can help leaders identify areas where they can improve, whether that means upgrading infrastructure, investing in new technology, or bringing in new talent. We can co-develop metaverse strategies that align with their business goals and objectives,” Singhal says.  

Organizations can then co-create experiences on the TCS AvapresenceTM platform, which uses blockchain, AI, AR, VR, and mixed reality technologies to address customer needs. For financial services companies, TCS has developed a specialized program that involves training their associates to become proficient in using several 3D engines and platforms to address industry challenges, including security, data privacy, and compliance concerns.   

Financial organizations that want to gain a competitive edge should get started soon.  

“Banks that offer virtual services are going to have a larger consumer mindshare, particularly among younger generations,” Singhal says. “By engaging with the right experts, leaders can break boundaries and take advantage of the metaverse’s limitless opportunities.” 

Learn how to master your cloud transformation journey with TCS and Microsoft Cloud. 

Financial Services Industry

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Flexibility and lifestyle are critical concerns for the modern employee. While the “Great Resignation” – a trend that has caused unprecedented rates of employees quitting and churn over the past few years – looks like it is finally starting to ease, the changes it drove in how business is done will persist. Companies were incentivised to invest in employee welfare and development, and those that do that best are now seeing massive improvements in retention. Going forward, IT and the CIO will play a critical role in facilitating that.

The Human-Centered Insights To Fuel IT’s Vision 2022 report, conducted by Reach3 for Lenovo, highlights the importance of IT in delivering employee satisfaction. According to the report:

85 per cent of employees believe technology delivers greater flexibility and control over work.84 per cent say that flexibility has made them more satisfied with their jobs.75 per cent say they are more productive when working from home.

CIOs, meanwhile, also want to deploy technology that will do more than boost productivity and operational efficiency. A full 83 per cent of IT leaders want to deliver digital transformation that is focused on contributing to the greater good.

Delivering hybrid work environments that work

As the Reach3 and Lenovo report notes, driving a hybrid working environment across the organisation is key to meeting employee expectations around flexibility and work/life balance. Employees want to access the office one time per week, and for CIOs, the challenge then is to continue to find ways to enhance the remote working experience so that it can continue to deliver seamless and stress-free working conditions.

Currently, while most organisations allow some form of hybrid work, 29 per cent of employees say that difficulty reaching co-workers is more of a work-from-home issue. Meanwhile, only 47 per cent of IT leaders say that collaboration tools have improved overall productivity and efficiency.

There is a gap between the expectation and experience with hybrid work that technology can address.

As cited in a report on CIO from earlier this year, this means that CIOs need to proactively invest in transformative technologies:

“In its Future of Work predictions for 2023, IDC called hybrid work “a mainstay for our global future work landscape,” adding that “hybrid work will drive new technology solutions across functions and industries alike.”

Technologies cited by IDC include intelligent space and capacity planning tools, which the firm predicts 55 per cent of global enterprises will use to reinvent office locations by 2024. IDC also predicts 65 per cent of G2000 companies will consider online presence to be at parity to real life across their engaged workforce by 2025, with 30 per cent of those same organisations adopting immersive metaverse conferencing tech by 2027.”

With IT budgets being increased by around 50 per cent across the board towards these transformative goals, CIOs have some runway to make these investments. Some of the areas that they should be looking at include:

5G. As 5G rolls out to more locations across Australia, it will become a more viable tool for working. With speeds that are greater than what the typical home Internet connection can provide, as well as better latency and mobility, 5G is set to underpin a new wave of changing work styles and remote capabilities.Secure solutions. The kind of BYOD that tends to come with remote working environments does present security implications, and while VPNs and zero-trust security solutions can help, many organisations need to go further than that. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) such as the Lenovo VDI Hosted Desktop seeks to address this challenge by maintaining secure control over corporate data while still allowing employees to access it remotely as they need to.Peripherals and accessories that promote wellness. CIOs will also find benefits in providing employees with headsets that have AI-powered noise cancelling features, as well as standing desks and computers that feature eye care modes. Additionally, webcam privacy shutters are essential – people want to be able to use their webcams for meetings, but also to guarantee their privacy outside of work hours, given that the technology is in their homes.

A good example of technology built to capitalise on these trends is the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, powered by Intel vPro, An Intel Evo Design. With leading connectivity, security and built-in capabilities, it has been built for what IT needs and users want.

There are benefits to partnering with an end-to-end supplier for remote work

One of the challenges that many CIOs face is that in the initial rush to enable remote work, a few years ago, many organisations adopted technology piecemeal. This has consequently resulted in a large portfolio of vendors to manage. This creates inefficiencies and can frustrate employees when connections don’t work, and technology incompatibilities hinder what they need to do.

Consolidating the number of vendors down to a single end-to-end provider, and delivering technology that has been designed to be seamlessly interoperable is going to significantly enhance the remote working experience for employees, while freeing the IT team up to shift focus from support to further transformation and innovation.

For more information on Lenovo’s end-to-end solutions and the benefits that delivers to hybrid work environments and employee satisfaction, click here.

Lenovo

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

One of the first things Patrick Thompson (pictured) did on becoming chief information and digital transformation officer of specialty chemicals manufacturer Albemarle in 2017 was to introduce an annual survey to gauge employee attitudes toward services IT staff provides. Now he has a self-service bot delivering some of those services through Microsoft Teams, and providing real-time feedback on what employees want its help with, and whether they get it or not.

Albemarle is growing fast. Net sales have more than doubled in the five years Thompson has been with the company, and its goal is to double them again in the next five. One of Albemarle’s biggest businesses is producing lithium, the low-density, highly reactive metal that revolutionized phone and laptop batteries. However, demand for lithium is now being driven by electric car batteries, each one of which contains thousands of times more lithium than a typical phone battery.

Like other lithium producers, Albemarle is scaling up, and with new production facilities and expanding existing ones, the number of workers is growing, as are their demands on the IT department. Thompson’s annual survey has been key in matching resources to those demands.

“We measure three characteristics: people, process and technology,” he says. Employees rate on a scale of 1 to 4 the performance of the IT people that provide the service, the efficiency of the IT department’s business processes, and the technology IT provides — whether it provides all the necessary features, or is sitting on the shelf unused. Those scales, he adds, give great insight into what to do.

While headline numbers provide a helpful indicator of progress, it’s the detailed feedback that employees provided — such as requests for more self-service tools — that enabled Thompson to fix a poor score on the help desk.

“Some of the simplest things like password resets were requiring people to call in and get a person on the phone to make these changes, when they could easily be automated through a bot with a job aid,” he says.

While the initial need was to automate password resets, Thompson also had an eye on the future, and the possibility to automate other mundane tasks, perhaps avoiding the need for employees to log into particular software tools altogether.

In fact, Albemarle had already developed a number of job aids using ServiceNow and other platforms, but they couldn’t capitalize on it from a self-service point of view. “People were having to thumb through catalogs,” he says. “They couldn’t just ask a question and get an answer.”

Several of Albemarle’s existing software suppliers, including ServiceNow and Workday, offered bots that could respond to questions and automate workflows, but they were specific to those applications. “We really wanted a federated solution, something that could be independent of those, and then create APIs,” he says.

Buy before build

Thompson also briefly considered tackling things in-house and building their own bots, but that would have been very expensive. Instead, he settled on Moveworks, developer of a chatbot that integrates with a number of identity management, enterprise software and collaboration platforms.

Albemarle’s first application of Moveworks was automating password resets.

“Our help desk at the time was about a million-dollar budget, and we had about 45 external providers,” Thompson says. “We were wasting a lot of money on password resets and simple things that a bot should be able to do. We drove that down to $100,000 a year and reduced our tickets by 90%.”

The first implementation arrived just as COVID hit, and Thompson saw the number of colleagues working from home jump from 500 to 5,000 within a month. “Now all of a sudden, the self-service capability had to come faster,” he says. “Moveworks really helped us accelerate that.”

The potential for automating non-IT functions also became apparent during that time. “Everybody [was asking if they could] have a robot for HR, facilities and accounts payable, So all these other departments are now using Moveworks as well.”

Over time, Albemarle has enriched the capabilities of its bot ALbot to include federated workflow approvals, a move that’s also enhancing adoption of other platforms even though users now rarely have to log into them.

An exercise in consolidation

“We deal with a lot of different systems like SAP, Ariba, Concur, Workday, Salesforce,” says Thompson. “What Moveworks allowed us to do is federate some approvals so we can have one experience around approvals instead of having to log into multiple systems. They just get an approval request through the bot.”

Maintaining these isn’t placing an additional workload on the IT department either, Thompson says. He has an application management services agreement with Moveworks, and one-and-a-half staff supporting the platform from a technical perspective. For the rest of it, he says, it’s not about extra effort but leveraging what you already have, and pointing it in the right direction. By that he means ensuring that documentation, like training manuals or job aids, is available in a form ALbot can ingest, or devising processes that ALbot can participate in.

ALbot is helping in other ways, too. When an employee asks a question it can’t answer, the information is logged. “We’re constantly doing this root cause analysis: somebody asked a question and there wasn’t an answer,” he says. “We’re taking that data, categorizing it, and then sending it out to the right content experts and saying, if you answer this question, if you build some content we can point to, this will no longer show up in the queue any more.”

These days, some of that analysis is handled by ALbot itself, he says. “I don’t have to go through all the questions that the bot didn’t answer,” he adds. “It’s putting it in an analytic portfolio for me to give to the right managers.”

The bot has also helped the centralized helpdesk respond to the demands on it in other ways, as it can offer 24/7 support in multiple languages for the questions it’s been trained to answer. “We’re a global company,” says Thompson. “We’re completely covered around the world with the language capability. That’s another powerful adoption accelerator.”

Paths of progression

Thompson has learned some lessons about how automation can save time and cost from his work with ALbot, but his experience with automation — and with Albemarle — goes back much further. His first contact with Albemarle was as a CIO of the company that built one of its plants, industrial construction contractor Turner Industries. That role, and his work automating parts of Turner’s project planning process, earned him a place on the March 15, 1999, cover of CIO magazine, CIO.com’s predecessor.

Over that long career, he says, 37 of the people who worked for him have gone on to land roles as CIOs, CTOs or CISOs. The part he played in their advancement is one of the accomplishments he’s proudest of, he says.

“I’m a big fan of investing in people, not only on a business level, but a personal level, and teaching techniques and skill sets to make those kinds of things happen. It’s the same playbook each time — a clear vision of basic IT transformation first.”

Thompson’s playbook has three chapters: First IT transformation, then business transformation, and finally digital transformation.

“First get your IT right: your network, infrastructure, security, collaboration tools, and cloud strategy,” he says. Then tackle the business side of things. The goal here, he says, is “One ERP, a single instance, with no code change, no custom code.” It’s also the time to “get your back office synergized, and payroll centers and accounting offices optimized.” The third chapter is digital transformation in customer excellence, the supply chain, manufacturing, and the back office. “Once people are taught that framework, and you back it up by aligning their performance goals with the strategy and empowering them to help enable that strategy, people want to do that,” he says. “They’re motivated. The playbook is there. It’s all in the execution.”

Application Management, CIO, Collaboration Software, Data Management, Document Management Systems, Employee Experience, IT Leadership, Remote Work

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

With employee experience increasingly vital to business success, enterprises are rethinking how they deliver applications to business users to ensure greater productivity and efficiency. Global consulting and IT services company Infosys is one such company doing that at scale.

Rapid digital transformation at Infosys over recent years had resulted in a multitude of applications both homegrown and acquired. However, driving the adoption of these applications by its 270,000 employees had become a burdensome undertaking for the IT giant, which offers its business users access to over 200 homegrown applications alone.

Although the company had a rich bank of information to cater to almost every requirement of its employees, there was no unified channel through which to experience it. Employees had to visit each application separately — a cumbersome process that was sapping productivity.

“Infosys was struggling with many tedious and time consuming internal operational processes that were taking away precious time from employees,” says Narendra Sonawane, vice president and head of information systems at Infosys. “The internal systems and processes were not available on mobile devices, and neither were they intelligent enough to be able help employees anticipate and respond early and be more productive. For instance, a new joiner needed to access seven different web apps to become functional.”

To empower its knowledge workers with efficient access to assets they need to perform their day-to-day work, Infosys created an intelligent core platform that would in turn support several other platforms and applications.

“The company philosophically refers to this core platform as Live Enterprise, a platform with agility built into its DNA so that it can quickly sense changing business needs and continuously evolve in response,” Sonawane says. “The platform was to make Infosys a more agile organization that could respond to business needs impeccably backed by the availability of resources and knowledge workers.”

The platform has won Infosys a 2022 US CIO 100 award for IT innovation and leadership.

Intelligent automation at play

To create a platform for ensuring a unified experience across capabilities such as CRM, ERP, and custom-apps, Infosys leveraged extreme automation, taking a mobile- and cloud-first approach to ensure agility and speed at scale.

The hybrid-cloud strategy for Live Enterprise provided Infosys with the opportunity to move away from proprietary technology in favor of an open-source stack. In addition to Live Enterprise, the resulting Polycloud architecture also supports Infosys Meridian, Infosys Assessment Platform, Infosys NIA, and other key company platforms.

As part of its core, the platform leverages a knowledge graph to identify the right projects for the right talents and to recommend learning options to employees. The knowledge graph, which establishes relationships among objects, events, situations, and concepts, has more than 23 million nodes and 109 million relationships and provides employees recommendations such as adjacent skills to learn, skills popular in their unit, future skills of need, trainings to undertake, career path guidance, and best fitting projects.

In developing Live Enterprise, Infosys also used process mining across 20-plus processes to help streamline business operations. “Several tools were enabled to constantly monitor IT systems against established KPIs and identify root causes of business disruptions and eliminate them quickly,” says Sonawane.

The platform also makes extensive use of AI. For example, with Document AI and optical character recognition, key data points can be extracted from a statement of work to create a draft project plan. Also, with AI-enabled Resume Parser, the company can extract personally identifiable information (PII), skills, educational details, and professional summary from CVs. “With Resume Parser, nearly half a million resumes are parsed every month, thus helping with quick turnaround, saving about two million minutes,” says Sonawane.

A platform for platforms

Live Enterprise itself hosts a range of platforms aimed at enhancing user experience, including InfyMe, a mobile-first self-service digital platform that brings together information and transactions an employee needs together in one place, drawing from Infosys’s 450-plus applications.

Another platform, LEX, gives employees access to learning content from anywhere, from any device, at any time. It contains courses for enhancing technical and professional skills to help engineering students become industry ready.

“With collaboration platforms such as MS Teams and WebEx in place and with the availability of one-stop employee app and learning apps, collaboration, productivity and employee experience was restored and enhanced during the time of the pandemic and beyond,” says Sonawane.

Live Enterprise is equipped with a cloud proxy solution for comprehensive endpoint security. As part of that security strategy, endpoint systems have been integrated with Intune. Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager also ensures 95% auto remediation of known vulnerabilities.

The platform also integrates DevSecOps practices supported with tools such as app monitoring, resulting in significant test automation and automated code-quality analysis. Chatbots deployed across applications respond to 31,000 user queries per month, while ticket automation has expedited ticket resolution without manual intervention.

“The compounded outcome of these features was a 4X increase in automated deployments, 80% test automation, and 70% automation in code-quality analysis. These automations have led to a 50% improvement in deployment lead time, 48% defect reduction, and 15% ticket reduction due to better quality releases,” says Sonawane.

Live Enterprise also makes extensive use of robotic process automation (RPA).

“There were more than 500 RPAs implemented across functions in the last year, which resulted in 7,900 plus man hours of effort being saved every month. Also, 44 bots were deployed across applications, with which cumulatively nearly a million queries have been answered to date,” he says.

Employee-centric transformation

Live Enterprise has facilitated the transformation of a wide range of business operations at Infosys, from recruitment to code delivery, by integrating siloed applications and streamlining processes informed by data insights.

“Our digital transformation yielded cost reduction of $10 million. There was a 90% improvement in hardware and software readiness for better utilization and billing,” Sonawane says.

Moreover, the platform has helped Infosys keep its workforce fresh on the necessary skills to push the organization forward.

“Over 25,000 employees were digitally reskilled through the platform,” says Sonawane, adding that Live Enterprise has helped Infosys become a “smarter workplace” by “achieving major-league knowledge sharing,” AI-based continuous learning, and more streamlined business operations through process simplification and automation.

“With the reaffirmed confidence in the organization, we were able to bag some of the biggest deals during the peak of pandemic,” he says. “With many digital transformation journeys going astray after initial momentum, Infosys has been able to achieve set milestones along the way assuring client confidence, employee experience, and operational excellence.” Equipped with these advantages, Infosys is also taking this platform as a go-to-market solution to its clients under the brand name Orbit.

CIO 100, Employee Experience, Infosys

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Over the past few years, many enterprises saw much of their knowledge workforce move away from the office to work out of their homes. This move beyond the traditional firewall setup created security issues and device management issues for many IT departments.

Adding to these issues was an increasing need to keep employees happy once people began returning to the office. For example, a recent Gallup poll found that four in 10 white-collar workers prefer to work from home despite hybrid workforce options. In addition, many employees continued to feel empowered to begin actively looking for new jobs or watch for openings.

In the age of the “war for talent,” it’s more important than ever to gain competitive advantage by reinventing the employee experience. Workers want to be engaged in their workplace and feel that their companies value them. That means businesses need to create a modern workplace that proves they do. Interestingly, enterprises are discovering that adopting the Apple® Platform in their environment can tackle several of these hybrid workplace and demographic challenges.

Consider these four major themes driving more Apple adoption within the enterprise:

A move to a hybrid workplace, where employees work either at home or in an office, and need access to the same tools no matter the location with seamless experience.Digital acceleration efforts to make sure workflows and processes are computing-based.Security and privacy acceleration of devices that are located beyond traditional closed environments.A demographic shift of younger workers expecting the same performance from devices that they have used their entire life before entering the workforce.

With these themes in mind, it’s not surprising to discover that employees prefer using Apple devices over other options. Some recent stats prove that employees would be happier at companies that offer Mac®solutions:

67% of students would be more likely to join and stay with a business that offers a Mac.Three out of four employees would choose Apple when given the choice.76% of companies report the use of Apple devices has increased over the past two years.

The benefits of adopting Apple devices extend well beyond just ensuring employees’ satisfaction:

With an increase in cyberattacks against corporate networks, understanding Apple platform security is key. Apple builds security into the hardware platform at the start, and provides hardware, encryption, application, and services security across the ecosystem. Mac is the most secure personal computer on the planet, thanks to built-in features like hardware-verified secure boot, on-the-fly encryption, Touch ID®, and Gatekeeper.From a performance standpoint, MacBook Air® with M1 offers up to 2x faster Excel performance, up to 50% faster web application responsiveness, up to 2x faster browser graphics performance, and up to 2x longer battery life when video conferencing with Zoom on a single charge.Cost: Mac ownership also costs less than PC ownership in the long run, since Mac users are less likely to need computer support. According to an economic impact report by Forrester, Mac ownership costs less in the long run providing 336% ROI. Also, according to a leading SI only 5% of Mac users needed support vs. 40% of PC users.Sustainability: Enterprises focusing on sustainability trends also enjoy Apple for its commitment to the environment – MacBook Air cases are made of 100% recycled aluminum, 90% of Apple’s packaging features recyclable fiber, zero waste is sent to the landfill from final assembly supplier sites, 35% or more of their products used recycled plastic, in products like MacBook Air, energy consumption is reduced by up to 60% when in active use.

Enterprises looking to assess their environment for Apple device support or grow the use of Apple devices in their environment don’t have to do so alone, however. The recently launched FlexSpace for Apple solution provides a seamless path to device choice by enabling a secure, personalized employee experience that fosters collaboration and productivity on all Apple devices. The solution can craft the right digital experience by using the power of Apple to provide seamless and secure experiences.

Starting with understanding customer goals, capturing user experience, then mapping collected data to a plan to meet the customer’s vision, FlexSpace for Apple provides detailed readiness and network assessments before a broad and consistent deployment. FlexSpace for Apple can also modernize an identity infrastructure, build self-service choice portals, and provide end-to-end lifecycle management at a per-user/per-month consumption model. Users can take advantage of seamless support backed by AppleCare® for Enterprise where available through the FlexSpace solution.

Regardless of an enterprise’s experience with Apple devices, from just exploring the ideas to intermediate or advanced users, the FlexSpace for Apple solution provides companies with help along every stage of their Apple journey.

Benefits for enterprises also span their landscape:

CEOs will see digital transformation and business agility goals met.      CFOs can reduce their IT costs through zero-touch deployment.      CISOs will gain data encryption, malicious attack prevention, and backup and recovery benefits.Chief Human Resource Officers add an extra tool to their talent retention toolbox through offering device choice and support.Employees remain actively engaged and increase their productivity.

For more information on FlexSpace for Apple offering, click here. HCL is running a limited time free Mac assessment offer for customers.

Fine print

© 2022 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, AppleCare ,Mac,  MacBook Air, and Touch ID are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries and regions.

Digital Transformation

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Over the past few years, many enterprises saw much of their knowledge workforce move away from the office to work out of their homes. This move beyond the traditional firewall setup created security issues and device management issues for many IT departments.

Adding to these issues was an increasing need to keep employees happy once people began returning to the office. For example, a recent Gallup poll found that four in 10 white-collar workers prefer to work from home despite hybrid workforce options. In addition, many employees continued to feel empowered to begin actively looking for new jobs or watch for openings.

In the age of the “war for talent,” it’s more important than ever to gain competitive advantage by reinventing the employee experience. Workers want to be engaged in their workplace and feel that their companies value them. That means businesses need to create a modern workplace that proves they do. Interestingly, enterprises are discovering that adopting the Apple® Platform in their environment can tackle several of these hybrid workplace and demographic challenges.

Consider these four major themes driving more Apple adoption within the enterprise:

A move to a hybrid workplace, where employees work either at home or in an office, and need access to the same tools no matter the location with seamless experience.Digital acceleration efforts to make sure workflows and processes are computing-based.Security and privacy acceleration of devices that are located beyond traditional closed environments.A demographic shift of younger workers expecting the same performance from devices that they have used their entire life before entering the workforce.

With these themes in mind, it’s not surprising to discover that employees prefer using Apple devices over other options. Some recent stats prove that employees would be happier at companies that offer Mac®solutions:

67% of students would be more likely to join and stay with a business that offers a Mac.Three out of four employees would choose Apple when given the choice.76% of companies report the use of Apple devices has increased over the past two years.

The benefits of adopting Apple devices extend well beyond just ensuring employees’ satisfaction:

With an increase in cyberattacks against corporate networks, understanding Apple platform security is key. Apple builds security into the hardware platform at the start, and provides hardware, encryption, application, and services security across the ecosystem. Mac is the most secure personal computer on the planet, thanks to built-in features like hardware-verified secure boot, on-the-fly encryption, Touch ID®, and Gatekeeper.From a performance standpoint, MacBook Air® with M1 offers up to 2x faster Excel performance, up to 50% faster web application responsiveness, up to 2x faster browser graphics performance, and up to 2x longer battery life when video conferencing with Zoom on a single charge.Cost: Mac ownership also costs less than PC ownership in the long run, since Mac users are less likely to need computer support. According to an economic impact report by Forrester, Mac ownership costs less in the long run providing 336% ROI. Also, according to a leading SI only 5% of Mac users needed support vs. 40% of PC users.Sustainability: Enterprises focusing on sustainability trends also enjoy Apple for its commitment to the environment – MacBook Air cases are made of 100% recycled aluminum, 90% of Apple’s packaging features recyclable fiber, zero waste is sent to the landfill from final assembly supplier sites, 35% or more of their products used recycled plastic, and more than 60% of their products are more energy efficient.

Enterprises looking to assess their environment for Apple device support or grow the use of Apple devices in their environment don’t have to do so alone, however. The recently launched FlexSpace for Apple solution provides a seamless path to device choice by enabling a secure, personalized employee experience that fosters collaboration and productivity on all Apple devices. The solution can craft the right digital experience by using the power of Apple to provide seamless and secure experiences.

Starting with understanding customer goals, capturing user experience, then mapping collected data to a plan to meet the customer’s vision, FlexSpace for Apple provides detailed readiness and network assessments before a broad and consistent deployment. FlexSpace for Apple can also modernize an identity infrastructure, build self-service choice portals, and provide end-to-end lifecycle management at a per-user/per-month consumption model. Users can take advantage of seamless support backed by AppleCare® for Enterprise where available through the FlexSpace solution.

Regardless of an enterprise’s experience with Apple devices, from just exploring the ideas to intermediate or advanced users, the FlexSpace for Apple solution provides companies with help along every stage of their Apple journey.

Benefits for enterprises also span their landscape:

CEOs will see digital transformation and business agility goals met.      CFOs can reduce their IT costs through zero-touch deployment.      CISOs will gain data encryption, malicious attack prevention, and backup and recovery benefits.Chief Human Resource Officers add an extra tool to their talent retention toolbox through offering device choice and support.Employees remain actively engaged and increase their productivity.

For more information on FlexSpace for Apple offering, click here. HCL is running a limited time free Mac assessment offer for customers.

Fine print

© 2022 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, AppleCare ,Mac,  MacBook Air, and Touch ID are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries and regions.

Digital Transformation

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Employee experience has become a key factor in defining your company’s overall success. Positive or negative, employee experience can significantly impact your company’s productivity, efficiency, and its ability to recruit and retain talent. It can even impact your brand’s reputation long after an employee has exited the company.

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the future of work by normalizing remote work, placing a new emphasis on workplace flexibility, and introducing hybrid workforce environments. It has also seen drastic changes around employee expectations and engagement, and significant challenges to long-held workplace assumptions. Because of this, business leaders are making employee experience a top priority like never before.

In the past, employee experience was built around location, typically an office building, which served as a central point for all employees. Research firm Gartner argues that today a good employee experience is all about human-centered design, which “prioritizes the human as the core pillar of work design over location, requiring a new set of principles, norms, and thinking.” Without a human-centric approach, which includes integrating flexibility, intentionality, and empathy into work policies and practices, organizations will struggle to attract and retain talent in today’s talent marketplace, Gartner contends.

Employee experience definition

Employee experience encompasses everything your employees experience, from the moment they are recruited to their journeys onward as alumni of the company. While the steps and facets of the employee life cycle vary by company and industry, there are common milestones that define the employee experience across the board. These milestones include the recruitment process, onboarding, training, development, evaluation and promotion, exiting, and the alumni experience.

Why is employee experience important?

Employee experience has a significant influence on business success, especially around turnover and productivity. According to Gartner, when employees report a positive employee experience, they are 60% more likely to stay with the company, 69% more likely to be high performers, and 52% more likely to report “high discretionary effort,” which is work they do above and beyond their daily responsibilities. Embracing a human-centric approach to employee experience can also reduce work fatigue by 44%, increase “intent to stay” by 45%, and improve performance by 28%, according to Gartner.

Remote work has become more normalized since the COVID-19 pandemic, challenging long-held assumptions about when and where work is performed. Organizations can no longer rely on a top-down office culture alone to shape the employee experience. Instead, they must design workflows and business processes around human physical, cognitive, and emotional needs.

Employee experience strategy

A human-centric approach to the employee experience addresses the growing expectations of employees to have flexibility and empathy at work. That means acknowledging demands for hybrid work, accepting that the future of work has fundamentally changed, and embracing autonomy, visibility, and inclusion in the workplace.

While 14% of employees prefer to work from a corporate office exclusively, and 10% prefer to be fully remote, 76% want some type of flexibility between the two, according to Gartner data. Employees are also shown to be more productive when given the opportunity for flexibility and are more likely than their on-site peers to go above and beyond their job description, according to the research firm.

In addition to flexibility, employees want systems, tools, and software that make their jobs easier, without causing delays or impinging on productivity. It’s important to have a streamlined effort around technology in the company, ensuring everyone has access to the data or systems they need. All systems, networks, software, and hardware should also be as efficient as possible. Everyone needs to have the appropriate tools to effectively do their jobs, without running into headaches when using them.

But the most important facets of developing an employee experience strategy are ensuring that you know what employees want, have the means to measure challenges and progress, and put your employees at the center of every step of their employment journey.

Employee experience best practices

Organizations with “vision maturity,” the highest level of employee experience, according to Gartner, typically exhibit the following characteristics:

They take a holistic view of employees, seeing them as a “whole person,” including their personal and social experiences inside and outside of work.
They realize the overall contribution of employees outside of their job descriptions and time with the company.
They identify “moments that matter” in the employee experience and build objectives and goals that support all types of employees and personalities in the organization.
They have “clear cross-functional ownership and goal alignment” of the employee experience outside of just the HR department that’s aligned with the overall organizational goals and culture.
They implement an employee experience strategy that supports two-way communication and expectations with employees, allowing them to share their opinions and ideas openly.
They develop an architecture that enables IT, HR, and other leaders to plan and organize initiatives relevant to specific business roles, tasks, and other objectives.

Common employee experience mistakes

On the opposite end, organizations that rank on the lowest levels of employee experience have a limited focus, typically implementing one-off initiatives or relying too much on employee experience tools. According to Gartner, companies that have a lower-ranked employee experience typically struggle with:

A lack of understanding of the impact of employee experience and of the building blocks that go into employee experience
Having restrictive views on the overall employee journey, focusing only on “major career moments” rather than the more granular day-to-day responsibilities and work of employees
Being too depending on technology to improve the employee experience, and often having unrealistic expectations from the tools and software implemented
Fragmented and overlapping systems and processes, which introduce friction that impact employee satisfaction and productivity

Measuring employee experience

Employee experience platforms and tools help companies manage the employee experience while also getting feedback on what they’re doing right and what needs to change. These tools can also help enable employees to have a voice in the organization, giving them a platform to express how they feel about various initiatives or business processes.

You don’t want your employee experience data to be hidden away in a “black box,” says Tori Paulman, a senior director analyst at Gartner. It’s important that the information is accessible to all stakeholders and that it helps piece together a clear picture of what the employee experience is like within the organization.

Another way to measure the employee experience is through employee resource groups (ERGs). When it comes to ensuring technical resources are providing a positive experience, Paulman suggests that CIOs leverage ERGs to get broad feedback on “how the applications are being perceived and how effective they are for various groupings of employees that you might have in the workplace.”

Ultimately you need the tools that will supply the data to help identify all the pain points in the organization, initiatives that are working positively, and areas for improvement. There’s no one-size-fits-all to the employee experience, so it’s important to identify various departmental or even employee-specific needs within the organization. Employee experience platforms can help capture these.

IT’s role in the employee experience

Employee experience has historically fallen on the desks of HR staff, but as it grows increasingly digital, the CIO and IT department now have a bigger role than ever in the process, according Paulman.

Gartner states that by 2025, more than 50% of IT organizations will prioritize and measure the success of digital initiatives based off the digital employee experience — a significant jump from just 5% of companies who said the same in 2021. Similarly, by 2024, 60% of large global organizations will deploy no less than five human capital management and digital workplace technologies to address employee experience needs.

“The CIO and the leaders that report to them have to lean in and take ownership over employee experience. We see an imperative for the CIO to step into the circle and say, ‘I’m going to own the day-to-day employee experience and I’m going to support HR leaders and facilities leaders,’ because a huge part of [employee experience] is the connections and the collaboration of humans and the place in which it’s done. And it’s my position that the CIO has the greatest impact on that on a day-to-day basis,” says Paulman.

Technology is fundamental to the employee experience and it includes everything from what recruiting software you use, to the daily collaboration tools, to the software used to offboard employees can impact the digital employee experience. It’s even important to consider an employee’s lifelong experience with technology.

Paulman gives the example of an architect who started their career with pencils and paper and now works with fully digital programs and tools. Some employees may have a learning curve with technology used in the organization or may have used entirely different tools at their last company. It’s important to ensure that all considerations around technology are considered and made a central part of employee experience initiatives.

Aligning digital efforts so that they can support the overall employee experience strategy within the organization will allow digital leaders to effectively prioritize projects and resources. Whereas not aligning those efforts will only result in “siloed applications and unhappy employees,” according to Gartner. 

For more on what CIOs can do, see “How IT can improve the employee experience.”

Careers, IT Leadership, Staff Management