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For companies looking for an edge in the tight talent market, a solid DEI strategy and employee engagement often go hand in hand, creating a balance that fosters an inclusive work environment. When employees feel they can bring their authentic selves to work, it can result in higher levels of employee productivity and satisfaction, improved retention rates, and more effective recruiting efforts.

Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina (BCBSNC) is one organization reaping the benefits of a robust DEI strategy, which the company began overhauling in 2020, starting with the establishment of an official diversity council. The idea was sparked by CEO Tunde Sotunde, MD, MBA, FAAP, to establish a “strategy, measurable goals, and a roadmap” around DEI, says Pam Diggs, MPH, director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at BCBSNC.

And those efforts have paid off, with BCBSNC coming in at No. 1 on Computerworld’s 2023 Best Places to Work in IT list for large companies. BCBSNC also ranked No. 1 for diversity and No. 2 for employee engagement.

As part of its DEI strategy, BCBSNC focused on three areas — people and culture, healthcare equity, and strategic partnerships for economic mobility and community. Establishing this as the “Northstar” has helped realize DEI efforts throughout the organization, getting everyone on the same page and working toward shared goals, says Diggs.  

“We deepened our commitment to ‘better health care for all.’ It is embedded in our purpose. When we say ‘for all,’ we are looking at the way we treat our employees internally as well, making sure that all our employees feel like this is an inclusive space to work in and to grow in. That way, they’re able to show up in an inclusive way for our customers and our communities,” she says.

Providing a ladder to the top

As part of its DEI efforts, BCBSNC runs an IT Leadership and Diversity Development Experience Rotation program, called Ladder, that connects BIPOC IT leaders with BIPOC IT professionals early in their careers. These relationships help entry-level and early-career professionals to develop their careers and navigate the workplace.

Representation is crucial, especially for improving diversity up the ranks. “You can’t be what you can’t see,” Diggs says, adding that BIPOC and women IT workers often don’t see themselves in leadership positions, simply because of the lack of representation further up the ladder toward the executive level.

BCBSNC’s Ladder program addresses this issue by fostering leadership relationships for BIPOC IT workers. By connecting seasoned IT pros who understand the nuances of being underrepresented in the industry, early-career IT workers gain access to a wealth of knowledge, mentorship, and a roadmap toward leadership. Participants also have access to tailored training opportunities, as well as opportunities for sponsorship, which can be vital for progressing your career.

“To have a mentor is so important. We see in our data that the participants in our mentorship programs have higher retention rates and higher internal mobility rates, but then the sponsorship takes it a step further.” Diggs says. “We’re encouraging our mentors to think about ways that they can be sponsors. Taking a step further to advocate for individuals when they’re not in the room.”

Rotational program as onramp to IT

The rotational component of Ladder recruits companywide through posted opportunities and direct outreach to employees who qualify. Employees who qualify include anyone in a “pre-professional role” who has an interest in learning what it takes to be an IT professional.

Hiring internally gives the added benefit of bringing on workers familiar with other sides of the business. That knowledge can serve IT well, as they’ll bring outside perspectives from other departments to their roles. For example, someone who has worked in customer service may have a unique take on process improvements, roadblocks, and technology that can help improve the experience for employees and customers alike.

The rotational program takes place over two years, with participants cycling through three rotations to get a feel for various opportunities in IT. Participants are also given the chance to connect with leaders in various areas of the company. Once they’ve completed the program and identify where they want to go next, participants are typically matched with a career at Blue Cross.

Tynia Burrows found out about the Rotational Development Program (RDP) through an internal posting. Prior to joining the program, Burrows worked as a lead project coordinator specialist in Portfolio Management and was “always curious about other opportunities I could take at Blue Cross NC,” she says. Her first rotation was with File Transfer Services, and she’s currently in her second rotation with Enterprise Security.

Tynia Burrows, Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina

BCBSNC

The program has completely changed Burrows’ perception of IT, noting that RDP “brings new perspectives and personalities together,” giving everyone a “different outlook when solving programs or improving processes,” she says.

“The structure and support I’ve received through the Rotational Development Program is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my career. This program is a great stepping stone, especially for those who have the drive, but are unsure how to seek out opportunities on their own. I’m thankful Blue Cross NC has this program available to employees — it’s allowed me to explore new opportunities, build connections throughout the company, and has helped me understand my value and strengths,” says Burrows.

Opening talent pipelines through internships

BCBSNC IT also works closely with the talent acquisition team and employee networks to recruit at women-focused IT conferences and events. The department has also reshaped its talent pipeline to support diversity through recruitment and internship programs centered around HBCUs.

This year, BCBSNC partnered with the North Carolina’s Governor’s HBCU internship program and recently restructured requirements for the company’s rotational program to give interns the opportunity to apply for RDP after their internship ends. BCBSNC also collaborates with local colleges, such as Durham Tech, to recruit diverse tech talent for apprenticeships and internships.

Ultimately, BCBSNC’s commitment to DEI has helped diversify the workforce, while bolstering employee engagement and retention. Diversity is more than a benchmark for BCBSNC; it’s a vital part of the overall business strategy that helps to drive growth and innovation, as well as employee and customer satisfaction.

“That’s what diversity is all about — it helps companies, teams, and programs be more innovative, more creative, and more productive because we’re bringing in [fresh] perspectives,” says Diggs.

And those perspectives help position BCBSNC to better impact the constituencies it serves, Diggs says, adding that BCBSNC has bolstered its focus not only on equity in the workplace but on healthcare equality as well, given that several “social drivers of health, [including] transportation, affordable housing, food security, and social isolation” can impact up to 80% of a person’s overall health and wellbeing.

The organization now has an entire team dedicated to identifying ways they can change and restructure benefits for members to improve their experience, with a focus on DEI. This group also works to find opportunities for the organization to invest in local communities, with a priority on addressing issues surround systemic bias in the healthcare industry. 

“It can be anything from making sure that we’re addressing systemic bias, that we are connecting equity to the way that we do business, or the way that our providers interact with our patients,” says Diggs, adding that if employees are engaged and satisfied at work, they will be better equipped to help customers and patients navigating the healthcare system.

Diversity and Inclusion

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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 , , , , , , , ,

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

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As IT leader of self-regulatory body Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO), Doria Manico-Daka continues to build on her 16 years in tech, the last five of which has seen her heavily involved in leading digital transformation and modernization. Throughout her career, industries and company sizes have varied, but there’s been one constant: environments have largely been male dominated. And as a Black woman, she’s had some unique experiences as a double minority. Against the odds, however, she’s excelled not only for herself but toward collective efforts to elevate the conversation of diversity, opportunity, and sourcing talent in, and for, the workplace.

“One needs to be resilient and determined to pursue the passion and paths they’ve chosen,” she says. “There’s very little precedent or example to rely on, and it can be both challenging and rewarding at the same time. Challenging in the sense that it can be lonely sometimes. It can feel like an uphill battle when you’re in the minority, and especially if you have conscious and unconscious bias fighting against you. But at the same time, it can be rewarding just knowing you helped change the status quo, and change minds and environments for people to consider it’s normal to have women at all levels of the tech space. Early in my career, I had a role that included helping clients over the phone. I’d take calls and after introducing myself, the person on the other end would think it was a mistake and ask to be transferred to the technical team. But I was the technical team, so I’m glad that we’re past that in 2023 for the most part.”  

It can be difficult for women to have a sense of belonging facing these challenges. Speaking of the senior tech leader at the leadership table, there’s underrepresentation of women and even more underrepresentation of Black women. So resilience, fuelled by self reliance and confidence, helps to navigate a career path.

“Being in a minority can bring self-doubt, especially if you’re in an environment that isn’t supportive or causes doubts,” she says. “So know the value you bring to the table and the difference you’re making. Some environments are going to appreciate this more than others, but it’s important you don’t let others minimize your contributions. For example, if you work hard and lead your team to launch a tech solution that positively impacts the organization’s bottom line, that is value you can quantify. Having said that, we still have a ways to go about women in tech still being overlooked and passed over for promotions. The numbers are getting better, but we’re still there.”

CIO Leadership Live’s Rennick recently spoke with Manico-Daka about elevating standards of diversity to help achieve organizational goals and win the search for talent. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On Black women in tech: Breaking the glass ceiling for women in minority groups is still a business goal every organization should strive to achieve. And for Black women, the ceiling is made of concrete, so the organizations that are going to break through are the ones with talent at all levels. We’ve seen great improvements in lowers ranks in terms of inclusiveness, but the senior leadership roles in the boardroom still have a ways to go. I think soon it’ll no longer be acceptable to have non-diverse leadership teams. And we’re already seeing mandates on this, especially from forward thinking organizations that are intentional about diversity, equity and inclusion at all levels, not just the lower ranks. This is inclusive leadership that taps into a wider pool of talent, especially as we see the shortage of talent in tech. So organizations that lead with purpose, intention and empathy, and reflect the communities they serve, are the ones that are going to retain top talent, especially regarding women. One step organizations can take to raise equity is to be aware of unconscious bias and manage it through education or training. Just acknowledging we all have it and sometimes it gets in the way of making decisions in how we treat other people is progress. And again, that purposeful, intentional, empathetic leader is the one who is going to win in this case. Another is you need to create targets for equity and ensure those targets are measured and communicating progress of those targets. We know that only what’s measured can be improved.

On a clear approach to talent: For me, clarity of vision, purpose and meaningful work is a bare minimum in today’s world of talent. Any organizational leader who wants to attract talent today must have that focus on the greater good and the difference they’re going to make. What the COVID years have shown is that people are now starting to want to find meaning; they want to rediscover themselves and ask what really matters. So it’s important that what matters in business gets tied to a mission, vision and value system, and gets clearly communicated to the entire organization. And if you do that, you’ll have a chance of winning the talent pool.

On teamwork: Throughout my career, what I’ve found is a positive environment inspires creativity, motivation and delivery. So I always try to create that same thing for my team. We’re an environment that fosters positive work where achievements are rewarded and respect is given. And if somebody drops the ball, you pick it up and score. There’s no room for blame. That’s an environment that has inspired me to be very creative and innovative. So I figure if I create the same for my team, I’ll see results. And with our rapidly changing tech landscape, you also need to promote continuous learning and upskilling. Today, the shelf life of tech skills is about three years and it keeps shrinking. So as leaders, you need to ensure your team is in continuous learning mode. One thing I’ve done for my team is to create a space where they can use new technologies to implement ideas without affecting the digital services we offer. And that’s really helped us improve the tech skills, close the gaps, and foster that sense of innovation and knowing that it’s a safe space where they can try out their ideas.

On strategic leadership: The strategy in all aspects of the organization is key. So for me, what first comes into play is you need to care and act like an owner. Business owners look at the long-term success of the whole business. So in my experience, it’s important that a clear vision, mission, and goals are articulated at every level throughout the organization. When everyone understands and owns that, and begins to act like an owner of the business, then you have a recipe for success. Second, you need to play using the whole team by encouraging women to get in the tech sector and stay in tech, but also by encouraging diversity in general. By now, everyone knows it’s been proven that diversity of thought is good for business. When you have a diverse team, you simply have more ideas to work with and a greater talent pool to tap into. And that makes for very superior business solutions. So I would encourage any leader or any organization to focus on diversity at every level. And with this war on talent, this is the recipe that’s going to make you win.

Diversity and Inclusion, IT Leadership, Women in IT

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The all-encompassing digital workplace platform 

Work as we know it has changed in the past few years coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Communications and collaboration technology were critical to that shift. As a result, we have witnessed the evolution of communications and collaboration suites to UCaaS platforms that are now evolving into fuller all-encompassing digital workplace platforms with deeper integration with CCaaS and strategic lines of business applications. As a result, the lines are blurring, and the days of silo applications that do one thing, like conferencing, are giving way to fuller platforms aimed at being more strategic solutions for helping companies run their entire business.  

We see from one end of the market (mainly small and midsize businesses) that providers like Zoho fully position their platform as the operating system for business. In their favor, they have the platform and myriad applications to make a strong claim. Collaboration and office productivity providers, such as Microsoft and Google, have evolved into digital workplace platform providers with the core applications companies need to run their businesses. Recently, as part of its fuller Zoom One platform strategy, Zoom announced the addition of email and calendar along with its expanded team chat functionality to rival Microsoft and Google. And that goes along with its complete contact center offering. With its acquisition of Slack, Salesforce has made it the collaborative hub of the platform that powers critical customer workflows in sales and marketing use cases, amongst others.  

This chat-enabled collaboration hub feature is becoming a common key identifier in these new-era digital workplace platforms. Take RingCentral, for example; they have a unified UCaaS and CCaaS offering with an in-context collaboration feature set that spans voice, video, and integrated team chat as the connecting hub. Similarly, Cisco Webex boasts UCaaS and CCaaS with a chat-enabled collaboration hub and an expansive portfolio of workplace devices. 

Technology vendors are always looking at adjacencies but what is happening now is the strong undercurrent of providing fuller platforms that support cross-business functions. Vendors have long realized they need to be the glue that connects rather than individual product providers. While this makes me reminisce back to the messaging middleware days, this is where we are now with digital workplace technology platforms.  

Low-code/no-code offerings are also emerging as critical features of digital workplace solutions to enable organizations to build applications to support essential business processes and workflows flexibly.   

Workplace transformation requires solutions-focused tech platforms 

In response to the ongoing digital transformation and disruption every business is going through, these platforms have to provide relevant business solutions that specifically support lines of business domains. Each solution set must, at its core, offer satisfactory experiences to both internal employees and external customers and partners. Business processes and workflows incorporate a continuum of conversational experiences between people, apps, and data in multidirectional iterations. 

The effect is a collaborative ecosystem and community of constituents that require seamless connectivity. Therefore, organizations must focus on the collaboration and community aspect of business processes and workflows. Every business process involves a series of collaborative events between various internal and external actors. 

They may include physical meetings, conference calls, videoconferences, and chat and email interactions. These are the points at which people come together to create, inform, negotiate, or persuade each other in ways that advance the process. Other nodes in the process include work done independently by each actor, such as planning, analysis, document creation, etc. 

The output of these intervening sessions is generally input to the next step, and part of the integration process is to make this data and content available to the right actors at the right time. This step involves shared middleware services such as access control and authentication, scheduling, and content management. Enterprise planners and decision-makers must evaluate digital workplace platforms and solutions by how they can support collaborative business workflows. The flexibility of the platform is critical. 

Final thoughts 

While new all-encompassing digital workplace platform offerings are emerging, each provider’s partner and developer ecosystem will be critical. Therefore, it must be an evaluation criterion in decision-making. First, evaluate providers’ offerings on the ability to integrate into existing infrastructure to minimize friction. Ensuring people are at the center of this, clearly define the goals and objectives of the workplace, and identify the specific needs and requirements of the organization. This step will help ensure that the chosen platform can support the desired workflows and collaboration processes and comes down into the flow of how people work in the organization. 

Collaboration Software, Remote Work

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Most everyone agrees: Before the pandemic, creating a company culture and encouraging people’s connection with their colleagues was simpler – many SMBs had a shared office where employees could gather, work, and collaborate. Today, things are dramatically different – and HR and IT leaders must shift their strategies in kind.

In this 4th episode of our 5-episode podcast, Essential Connections: The Business Owner’s Guide to Growth During Economic Uncertainty, we explore the way employee engagement has changed, and how business and tech leaders can nurture a healthy and productive workforce in new times with a focus on strong connections.

“It’s been kind of a crazy three years. I feel like we keep using the word unprecedented … there’s so much going on. We shifted a lot for our people. And we had to do it very quickly, in response to the pandemic,” says Jo Deal, Chief Human Resources Officer at Go To. “But I think what people want from work and from … what they want from each other, that cultural kind of human connection piece, has not changed.”

“Connections is what is important to people,” she continues. “We value working with other people and connecting with our colleagues and with our customers.” As a result, SMB tech and business leaders must consider what technology and tools can do to make those connections possible.

“You don’t have any raw materials, you don’t have a production, you just have people,” she notes. “That’s key. If your people are engaged at work with their work and connected to the culture of the company and to each other, if they know what’s going on, they know what the company’s mission is, and they know how they connect with it, then I really believe amazing things can happen.”

Listen in to learn all the details, including actionable insights on how to establish and maintain connections, even when the definition of work has changed, and how to create an equal experience for everybody, no matter where they are.

Be sure to listen to other episodes in our series, Essential Connections: The Business Owner’s Guide to Growth During Economic Uncertainty, and learn how you can future-proof your business with agile IT leadership.

IT Leadership, Small and Medium Business