How businesses perform has always depended on how well their employees perform. Yet never before has the relationship between how well employees work and the digital technology that they use been so complex.
At the same time, companies
are grappling with the transition to increasingly data-driven and automated
processes. What’s more, the top skills at all levels are increasingly harder to
find -- and hold onto -- for supporting strategic business agility.
As a result, business leaders
must enhance and optimize today’s employee experience so that they in turn can
optimize the customer experience and -- by extension – better support the
success of the overall business.
Stay with us as BriefingsDirect explores
how those writing the next chapters of human resources (HR) and
information technology (IT) interactions are finding common ground to
significantly improve the modern employee experience.
We're now joined by
two leaders in this area who will share their thoughts on how intelligent
workspace solutions are transforming work -- and heightening worker
satisfaction. Please welcome Art Mazor, Principal and Global
Human Resources Transformation Practice Leader at Deloitte, and Tim
Minahan, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer
at Citrix. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Art, is
there more of a direct connection now between employee experience and overall
business success?
Mazor: There
has been a longstanding sense on the part of leaders intuitively that there
must be a link. For a long time people have said, “Happy employees equal happy
customers.” It’s been understood.
 |
| Mazor |
But now, what’s really
powerful is we have true evidence that demonstrates the linkage. For example,
in our Deloitte
Global Human Capital Trends Report 2019, in its ninth year running, we noticed
a very important finding in this regard: Purpose-focused companies outperformed
their S&P 500 peers by a factor of 8. And, when you think about, “Well, how
do you get to purpose for people working in an organization?” It’s about
creating that strong experience.
What’s more, I was really
intrigued when MIT recently published a
study that demonstrated the direct linkage between positive employee
experience and business performance. They showed that those with really strong
employee experiences have twice the innovation, double the satisfaction of
customers, and 25 percent greater profitability.
So those kinds of statistics tell
me pretty clearly that it matters -- and it’s driving business results.
Gardner: It’s seemingly
commonsense and an inevitable outcome when employees and their positive experiences
impact the business. But reflecting on my own experiences, some companies will nonetheless
talk the talk, but not always walk the walk on building better employee
experiences, unless they are forced to.
Do you sense, Art, that there
are some pressures on companies now that hadn’t been there before?
Purposeful employees produce profits
Mazor: Yes, I think there are. Some of those pressures, appropriately, are coming from the market. Customers have a very high bar with which they measure their experience with an organization. We know that if the employee or workforce experience is not up to par, the customers feel it.
That demand, that pressure, is
coming from customers who have louder voices now than ever before. They have the
power of social media,
the ability to make their voices known, and their perspectives heard.
There is also a tremendous
amount of competition among a variety of customers. As a result, leaders recognize
that they have to get this right. They have to get their workers in a place
where those workers feel they can be highly productive and in the service of
customer outcomes.
Minahan: Yes, I
totally agree with Art. In addition, there is an added pressure going on in the
market today and that is the fact that there is a huge talent
crunch. Globally McKinsey
estimates there is a shortage of 95 million medium- to high-skilled workers.
 |
| Minahan |
We are beginning to see even
forward-thinking digital companies like Amazon saying, “Hey, look,
we can’t go out and hire everyone we need; certainly not in one location.” So that’s
why you have the HQ2 competition,
and the like.
Just in July, Amazon
committed to investing more than $700 million to retrain a third of their
workforce with the skills that they need to continue to advance. This is part
of that pressure companies are feeling:
“Hey, we need to drive growth.
We need to digitize our businesses. We need to provide a greater customer
experience. But we need these new skills to do it, and there just is not enough
talent in the market.”
So companies are rethinking that
whole employee engagement model to advance.
Gardner: Tim, the
concept of employee experience was largely in the domain of people like Art and
those that he supports in the marketplace -- the human resources and human capital
management (HCM) people.
How does IT now have more of a
role? Why do IT and HR leaders need to be more attached at the hip?
Minahan: Much
of what chief
human resources officers (CHROs) and chief people officers (CPOs) have done
to advance the culture and physical environment with which to attract and
retain the right talent has gone extremely far. That includes improving
benefits, ensuring there is a purpose, and ensuring that the work environment
is very pleasurable.
However, we just conducted a study together with The Economist, a global
study into employee experience and how companies are prioritizing it. And one
of things that we found is organizations have neglected to take a look at the
tools and the access to information that they give their employees to get their
jobs done. And that seems to be a big gap.
This gap was reaffirmed by a
recent global Gallup study
where right behind the manager, the number one indicator of employee engagement
was if they feel they have the right access to the information and tools they
need to do their best job.
So technology -- the digital
workspace, if you will -- plays an increasingly important role, particularly in
how we work today. We don’t always work at a desk or in a physical environment.
In fact, most of us work in multiple locations throughout the day. And so our digital
workspace needs to travel with us, and it needs to simplify our day -- not make
it more complex.
Gardner: Art,
as part of The Economist study that Tim cited, “ease of access to
information required to get work done” was one of the top things those surveyed
identified as being part of a world-class employee experience.
That doesn’t surprise me because
we are asking people to be more data-driven. But to do so we have to give them that
data in a way they can use it.
Are you seeing people thinking
more about the technology and the experience of using and accessing technology
when it comes to HR challenges and improvement?
HR plus IT gets the job done
Mazor: Yes,
for sure. And in the HR function, technology has been front and center for many
years. In fact, HR executives, their teams, and the workers they serve have
been at an advantage in that technology investments have been quite rich. The HR
space was one of the first
to move to the cloud. That’s created lots of opportunities beyond those
that may have been available even just a few short years ago.
To your point, though, and building
on Tim’s comments, [employee experience requirements] go well beyond the
traditional HR technologies. They are focused around areas like collaboration,
knowledge sharing, interaction, and go into the toolsets that foster those
kinds of necessities. They are at the heart of being able to drive work in the
way that work needs to get done today.
The
days of traditional hierarchies -- where your manager tells you what to
do and you do it -- are quickly dwindling. We are moving to a world
where teams are forming in a more agile way, demanding new toolsets.
The days of traditional hierarchies -- where your manager tells you what to do and you go do it -- are quickly dwindling. Now, we still have leaders and they tell us to do things and that’s important; I don’t mean to take away from that. Yet, we are moving to a world where, in order to act with speed, teams are forming in a more agile way. Networked groups are operating together cross-functionally and across businesses, and geographies -- and it’s all demanding, to your point, new toolsets.
Fortunately, there are a lot
of tools that are out there for that. Like with any new area of innovation, though,
it can be overwhelming because there are just so many technologies coming into
the marketplace to take advantage of.
The trick we are finding is
for organizations to be able to separate the noise from the impactful technologies
and create a suite of tools that are easy to navigate and remove that kind of
friction from the workplace.
Gardner: Tim, a
fire hose of technology is certainly not the way to go. From The Economist
survey we heard that making applications simple – with a consumer-like user
experience -- and with the ability to work from anywhere are all important. How
do you get the right balance between the use of technology, but in a simplified
and increasingly automated way?
A workspace to unify work
Minahan: Art
hit the exact right word. All this choice and access to technology that we use
to get our jobs done has actually created a lot more complexity. The
typical employee now uses a dozen
or more apps throughout the day, and oftentimes needs to navigate four more
applications just to get a single task or a bit of information that they are
looking for. As a result, they need to navigate a whole bunch of different
environments, remember a whole bunch of different usernames and passwords, and
it’s creating a lot of noise in their day.
To Art’s point, there is an emergence
of a new category of technology, a
digital workspace that unifies everything for an employee, gives them
single sign-on access to everything they need to be productive, and one unified
experience, so they don’t need to have as much noise in their day.
Certainly, it also provides an
added layer of security around things. And then the third component that gets
very, very exciting is that forward-thinking companies are beginning to infuse
things like machine
learning (ML) and simplified workflows or micro apps that connect some of
these technologies together so that the employee can be guided through their
day -- very much like they are in their personal lives, where Facebook might guide you and curate your
day for the news and social interactions you want.
Netflix, for example, will make up the
recommendations based on your historical behaviors and preferences. And that’s beginning
to work its way into the workplace. So the study we just did with The
Economist clearly points to bringing that consumer-like experience into the
workplace as a priority among IT and HR leaders.
Gardner: Art,
you have said that a positive employee experience requires removing friction
from work. What do you mean by friction and is that related to this
technology issue, or is it something even bigger?
Remove friction, maximize productivity
Mazor: I
love that you are asking that, Dana. I think it is something bigger than
technology -- yet technology plays a massively important role.
When we think about friction, and
what I love about that word in this context, is it’s a plain English word. We know
that friction means. It’s what causes something to slow down.
And so it’s bigger than just
technology in the sense that to create that positive worker experience we need
to think about a broader construct, which is the human experience overall. And
elevating that human experience is about, first and foremost, recognizing that
everyone wakes up every morning as a human. We might play the role of a worker,
we might play the role of customer, or some other role. But in our day-to-day
life, anything that slows us down from being as productive as possible is, in
my view, the element that is this friction.
So that could be process-oriented,
it could be policy and bureaucracy that gets in the way. It could be managers
who may be struggling with empowerment of their teams. It might even be
technology, to your point, that causes it to be more difficult to, as Tim was
rightly saying, navigate through to all the different apps or tools.
And so this idea of friction and
removing it is really about enabling that workforce to be focused myopically on
delivering results for customers, the business, and the other workers in the
enterprise. Whatever it may be, anything that stands in the way should be
evaluated as a potential cause of friction.
Sometimes that friction is
good in the sense of slowing things down for purposes like compliance or risk
management. In other cases, it’s bad friction that just gets in the way of good
results.
Minahan: I
love what Art’s talking about. That is the next wave we will see in technology.
When we talk about these digital workspaces -- moving from traditional
enterprise applications – built around giving functions and modern
collaborations tools, they are focused on team-based collaboration. Still, individuals
need to navigate all of these environments -- and oftentimes work in different
ways.
And so this idea of people-centric
computing, in which you put the person at the center, makes it easy for
them to interact with all of these different channels and remove some of the
noise from their day. They can do much more meaningful work -- or in some cases,
as one person put it to me, “Get the job done that I was hired to do.” I really
believe this is where we are now going.
And you have seen it in
consumer technologies. The web came about to organize the world’s information,
and apps came about to organize the web. Now you have this idea of the
workspace coming about to organize all of those apps so that we can finally
get all
the utility that had been promised.
Gardner: If we
return to our North Star concept, the guiding principle, that this is all about
the customer
experience, how do we make a connection between solidifying that employee experience
as Tim just described but to the benefit of the customer experience?
Art, who in the organization
needs to make sure that there isn’t a disconnect or dissonance between that
guiding principle of the customer experience and buttressing it through the
employee experience?
Leaders emphasize end-customer experience
Mazor: We
are finding this is one of the biggest challenges, because there isn’t a
clear-cut owner for the workforce experience. That’s probably a good thing in
the long run, because there are way too many individual groups, teams, and
leaders who must be involved to have only one accountable leader.
That said, we are finding a
number of organizations achieving great success by at least appointing either
an existing function – and in many cases we are finding that happens to be HR –
or in some organizations finding a different way of having accountability for
orchestrating the experience. The best meaning is around bringing together a variety
of groups -- those could be HR, IT, real estate, marketing, finance, and the business
leaders for sure to all play their roles inside of that experience.
Delivering on that end-customer
experience as the brass ring, or the North Star to mix metaphors, becomes a way
of thinking. It requires a different mindset that enterprises are shaping for
themselves -- and their leaders can model that behavior.
Delivering
on that end-customer experience as the brass ring becomes a way of
thinking. It requires a different mindset that enterprises are shaping
for themselves -- and their leaders can model that behavior.
I will share with you one great example of this. In the typical world of an airline, you would expect that flight attendants are there -- as you hear on the announcements -- for your safety first, and then to provide services. But one particular major airline recognized that those flight attendants are also the ones who can create the greatest stickiness to customer relationships because they see their top customers in flight, where it matters the most.
And they have equipped that
group of flight attendants with data in the form of a mobile device app that
they use to see who is on board and where they sit in the importance of being customers
in terms of revenue and other important factors. That provides triggers to
those flight attendants, and others on the flight staff, to help recognize
those customers and to ensure that they are having a great experience. And when
things don’t go as well as possible, perhaps due to Mother Nature, those flight
attendants are there to keep watch over their most important customers.
That’s a very new kind of construct in a world where the typical job was not focused on customers. Now, in an unwitting way, those flight attendants are playing a critical role in fostering and advancing those relationships with key customers.
There are many, many examples
like that that are the outcome of leaders across functions coming together to
orchestrate an experience that ultimately is centered around creating a rich
customer experience where it matters the most.
Minahan: Two
points. One, what Art said is absolutely consistent with the findings of the study
we conducted jointly with The Economist. There is no clear-cut leader on
employee experience today. In fact, both CHROs and CIOs equally indicated that they
were on-point as the lead for driving that experience.
We are beginning to see the
emergence of a digital
employee experience officer that’s emerging at some organizations to help
drive the coordination that Art is talking about.
But the second point to your
question, Dana, around how do we keep employees focused on the customer
experience, it goes back to your opening question around purpose. Increasingly,
as Art indicated, there is clear demonstration of companies that have clear
purpose and are performing better -- and that’s because that purpose tends to
be on some business outcome. It drives some greater experience or innovation or
business outcome for their customers.
If we can ensure that
employees have the right tools, information, skills, and training to deliver
that customer experience, then they are clearly aligned. I think it all ties
very well together.
Gardner: Tim,
when I heard Art talking about the flight attendants, it occurred to me that there
is a whole class of such employees that are in that direct-interaction-with-the-customer
role. It could be retail, the person on the floor of a clothing seller; or it could
be a help desk operator. These are the power users that need to get more data, help,
and inference knowledge delivered to them. They might be the perfect early types
of users that you provide a digital workspace to.
Let’s focus on that workspace.
What sort of qualities does that workspace need to have? Why are we in a better
position, when it comes to automation and intelligence, than ever before to
empower those employees, the ones on the front lines interacting with the
customers?
Effective digital workspace requirements
Minahan: Excellent
question. There are three, and an emerging fourth, capabilities required for an
effective
digital workspace. The first is it needs to be unified. We talked about all
of the complexity and noise that bogs down an employee’s day, and all of the
applications they need to navigate. Well, the digital workspace must unify that
by giving a single-sign-on experience into the workspace to access all the apps
and content that an employee needs to be productive and to do engaging work,
whether they are at the office, on the corporate network, or on their tablet at
home, or on their smartphone on a train or a plane.
The second part is obviously --
in this day and age, considering especially those front-line employees that are
touching customer information -- it all needs
to be secure. The apps and content need to be more secure within the
workspace than when accessed natively. That means dynamically applying security
policies and perhaps asking for a second layer of authentication, based on that
employee’s behavior.
The third part is around
intelligence. Bringing things like machine learning and simplified workflows
into the workspace to create a consumer-like experience, where the employee is
presented with the right information and the right task within the workspace so
that they can quickly access those -- rather than needing to log-in to multiple
applications and go four layers deep.
The fourth capability that’s emerging,
and that we hear a lot about, is the assurance that those applications, -- especially
for front-line employees who are engaged with customers -- are performing
at their very best within the workspace. [Such high-level performance needs
to be delivered] whether that employee is at a corporate office or more likely
at a remote retail branch.
Bringing some of the
historical infrastructure like networking
technology to bear in order to ensure those applications are always on and
reliable is the fourth pillar of what’s making new digital workspace strategies
emerge in the enterprise.
Gardner: Art,
for folks like Tim and me, we live in this IT world and we sometimes get lost
in the weeds and start talking in acronyms and techy-talk. At Deloitte, you are
widely regarded as the world’s
number-one HR transformation consultancy.
First, tell us about the HR
consultancy practice at Deloitte. And then, is explaining what technology
does and is capable of a big part of what you do? Are you trying to explain the
tech to the HR people, and then perhaps HR to the tech people?
Transforming HR with technology
Mazor: First,
thanks for the recognition. We are truly humbled and yet proud to be the
world’s leading HR transformation firm. By having the opportunity as we do to
partner with the world’s leading enterprises to shape and influence the future
of HR, it gives us a really interesting window into exactly what you are
describing.
At a lot of the organizations
we work with, the HR leaders and their teams are increasingly well-versed in
the various technologies out there. The biggest challenge we find is being able
to harness the value of those technologies, to find the ones that are going to
produce impact at a pace and at a cost and return that really is valued by the
enterprise overall.
For sure, the technology
elements are critical enablers. We recently published a
piece on the future of HR-as-a-function that’s based on a combination of
our research and field experience. What we identified is that the future of HR
requires a shift in four big areas:
- The mindset, meaning the culture and the behaviors of the HR function.
- The focus, meaning focusing in on the customers themselves.
- The lens through which the HR function operates, meaning the operating model and the shift toward a more agile-network kind of enterprise HR function.
- The enablers, meaning the wide array of technologies from core HR platform technologies to collaboration tools to automation, ML, artificial intelligence (AI), and so on.
The combination of these four
areas enables HR-as-a-function to shift into what we’re referring to as a world
that is exponential. I will give you one quick example though where all this
comes together.
There is a solution set that
we are finding is incredibly powerful inside of driving employee experiences
that we refer to as creating a unified engagement platform, meaning the blend
of all these technologies in a simple-to-navigate experience that empowers the
workers across an enterprise.
We, Deloitte, have actually
created one of those platforms in the market that leads the space, called ConnectMe,
and there are certainly others. And in that, what we are essentially finding is
that HR leaders are looking for that simple-to-navigate, frictionless kind of
environment where people can get their jobs done and enjoy doing them at the
same time using technology to empower them.
HR
leaders are navigating this complex set of technologies out there that
are terrific because they're providing advantages for the business
functions. A lot of technology firms are investing heavily in
worker-facing technologies.
The premise that you described is spot-on. HR leaders are navigating this complex set of technologies out there that are terrific because they’re providing advantages for the business functions. A lot of the technology firms are investing heavily in worker-facing technology platforms, for exactly the reason we have been chatting about here.
Gardner: Tim,
when it comes to the skills gap, it is an employee’s market. Unemployment rates
are very low, and the types of skills in demand are hard to find. And so the
satisfaction of that top-tier worker is essential.
It seems to me that the better
tools you can give them, the more they want to work. If I were a top-skilled
employee, I would want to go with the place that has the best information that empowers
me in the best way and brings contextual information with security to my
fingertips.
But that’s really difficult to
do. How do businesses then best enhance and entice employees by giving them the
best intelligence tools?
Intelligent tools support smart workers
Minahan: If you
think about your top-performing employees, they want to do their most
meaningful work and to perform at their best. As a result, they want to
eliminate a lot of the noise from their day, and, as Art mentioned before, that
friction.
And that friction is not
solely technological, it’s often manifested through technology due to certain
tasks or requirements that we need to do that may not pertain to our core jobs.
So, last time I checked, I
don’t think either Art or myself were hired to review and approve expense
reports or to spend a good chunk of our time approving vacations or doing full-scale
performance reviews. Yet those types of applications that may not be pertinent
to our jobs or processes, tend to take up a good part of our time.
What digital workspaces or digital
work platforms do in the first phase is remove that noise from your day so that
your best-performing employees can do their best work. The second phase uses
those same platforms to help employees do better work through making sure that
information is pushed to them as they need it.
That’s information that is pertinent
to their jobs. In a salesperson’s environment that might be a change in
pipeline status, or a change in a prospect or customer activity. Not only do
they get information at their fingertips, they can take action.
And what gets very exciting
about that is you have the opportunity now to elevate the skills of every
employee. We talk about the skills gap, but this is but one way to go re-train
everybody.
Another way is to make sure
that you’re giving them an unfair advantage within the work platforms you are
using to guide them through the right process. So a great example is sales force
productivity. A typical company takes 9-12 months to get a salesperson up
to full productivity. Average tenure of a salesperson is somewhere around 36
months. So a company is getting a year-and-a-half of productivity out of a
salesperson.
What if by eliminating all
that noise, and by using this digital work platform to help push the right
information, tasks, right actions, and the right customer sales pitches to them
at the right time, you can cut that time to full productivity in half?
Think about the real business
value that comes from using technology to actually elevate the skill set of the
entire workforce, rather than bog it down.
Gardner: Tim, do
you have any examples that illustrate what you just described? Any named or use
case types of examples that show how what you’re doing at Citrix has been a big
contributor?
Minahan: One example
that’s top-of-mind not only helps improve employee experiences to elevate the
experience for customers, but also allows companies to rethink work models in
ways they probably haven’t since the days of Henry Ford. And the example
that comes to mind is eBay.
We are all familiar with eBay,
one of the world’s largest online digital marketplaces. Like many other
companies, they have a large customer call center where buyers and sellers ask
questions. These call center employees have to have the right information at
their fingertips to get things done.
Well, the challenge they faced
was with the talent gap and labor shortage. Traditionally they would build a
big call center, hire a bunch of employees, and train them at the call center.
But now, it’s harder to do that; they are competing with the likes of Amazon, Google and others who are all trying to do
the same thing.
And so they used technology to
break the traditional mold and to create a new work model. Now they go to where
the talent is, such as the stay-at-home parent in Montana and the retiree in
Florida, or the gig worker in Boston or New York. They can now arm them with a digital
workspace and push the right information and toolsets to them. By doing so you ensure
they get the job done even though if you or I call in we don’t know that they
are not sitting in a centralized call center.
This is just one example as we
begin to harness and unify this technology of how we can change work models. We
can create not just the better employee experience, but entirely new ways to
work.
Gardner: Art,
it’s been historically difficult to measure productivity, and especially to
find out what contributes to that productivity. The same unfortunately is the
case with technology. It’s very difficult to measure quantitatively and
qualitatively what technology directly does for both employee productivity and
overall organizational productivity.
Are there ways for us to try
to measure how new workspaces and good HR contribute to good employee
satisfaction -- and ultimately customer satisfaction? How do we know when we
are doing this all right?
Success, measured
Mazor: This
is the holy grail in many ways, right? You get what you measure, and this whole
space of workforce experience in many ways is a newer discipline. Customer
experience has been around for a while and gained great traction and
measurement. We can measure customer feedback. We can measure net promoter
scores, and a variety of other indicators, not the least of which may be
revenue, for example, or even profitability relative to customer base. We
equally are now starting to see the
emergence of measurements in the workforce experience arena.
And at the top-line we can see
measurements like measuring workforce engagement. As that rises, likely there
is a connection to positive worker experience. We can measure productivity. We
can even measure the growth of capabilities within the workforce that are being
gained as a result of -- as we like to say -- learning in the flow of work, to
develop their capabilities.
That path is really important
to chart out because it has similarities to those tools, methods, and
approaches used inside the customer space. We think about it in very simple
terms, we need to first look, listen, and understand to sense what’s happening
with the workforce.
We need to generate and
prioritize different ideas of ways in which the experience for the workforce
can be moved. Then we need to iterate, test, refine, and plan the kinds of
changes you might prototype that provides you that foundation to measure. And
in the workforce experience space, it’s a variety of measures that we are
starting to see to get down into the granular levels below those top-line
measures that I mentioned.
What comes to mind for me are
things like measuring the user experience for all of the workers. How effective
is the product or service that they are being asked to use? How quickly can
they deliver their work? What feedback do we get from workers? So kind of a
worker feedback category.
We
need to generate and prioritize different ideas of ways in which the
experience for the workforce can be moved. We need to iterate, test,
refine, and plan the types of changes you might prototype that provide a
foundation to measure.
And then there are a set of operational measures that can track inputs and outputs from various processes and various portions of the experience. There is that kind of categorization “in those three buckets” that really seems to be working well for many of our clients to measure that notion of workforce experience to your point, of, “Did we get it right?”
But in the end, as I shared at
the beginning, I think it’s really critical that organizations measure that
workforce experience through the ultimate lens, which is, “How are we dealing
with our customers?” When that’s performing well, chances are pretty good,
based on the research that we have seen, that the connection is there to the
employee or workforce experience.
Minahan: When
we are talking about the employee experience, we should be careful -- it’s not
synonymous with just productivity. It’s a balance of productivity and employee
engagement that together ultimately drives greater business results, customer experience,
satisfaction, and improved profitability. Employee experience has been
synonymous with productivity, it’s certainly a key integer into it, but it’s
not the only one.
Gardner: Tim, how
should IT people be thinking differently when it comes to how they view their
own success? It was not that long ago where simply the performance of the
systems -- when all the green lights were on and the networks were not down -- was
the gauge of success. Should IT be elevating how it perceives itself and
therefore how it should rate itself when it’s successful within these larger
digital transformation endeavors?
Information, technology, and better business
Minahan: Yes,
absolutely. I think this could be the revitalization of IT as it moves beyond
the items that you mentioned: keeping the networks up, keeping the applications
performing well. IT can now drive better business outcomes and results.
Those forward-thinking
companies looking to digitize their business realize that it’s very hard to ask
an employee base to drive a greater digital customer experience without arming
them with the right tools, information, and experience in their own right in
order to get that done. IT plays a very major role here, locking arms in unison
with the CHRO, to move the needle and turn employee experience into a
competitive edge -- not just for attracting and retaining talent, but
ultimately for driving better business results.
Gardner: I
hope, if anything, this conversation prompts more opportunity for the human
resources leadership and the IT leadership to spend time together and
brainstorm and find commonality.
Before we sign off, just a
quick look to the future. Art, for you, what might be changing soon that will
help remove even more friction for employees? What is it that’s down the pike
over the next three to five years -- technologies, processes, market forces – that
might be an accelerant to removing friction? Are there bright spots in your
thinking about the future?
Bright symphony ahead
Mazor: I
think the future is really bright. We are optimistic by nature, and we see
enterprises making terrific, bold moves to embrace their future as challenging
as the future is.
One of the biggest
opportunities is the recognition of the imperative for executives and their
teams to operate
in a more symphonic way. And when I say that I mean to work together
to achieve a common set of results, moving away from the historical silos that
were emerging from a zeal for efficiency and that led to organizations having
these various departments, and then the departments working within themselves
and finding it a struggle to create integration.
We are seeing a huge unlocking
of that, in the spirit of creating more cross-functional teams and more agile
ways of working -- truly operating in the digital age. As we talked about in
one of our recent
capital trends reports, the idea of driving this is a more symphonic
C-Suite, which then has a cascading effect for teams across the board inside of
enterprises all to be working better together.
And then, secondly, there is a
big recognition by enterprises now around the imperative to create meaning in
the work that workers are doing. Increasingly, we are seeing this as a demand.
This is not a single-generational demand. It’s not that the younger generation
needs meaning or anything like that, that fits into stereotypes.
Rather, it’s a recognition
that when we create purpose and meaning for the workers in an enterprise, they
are more committed. They are more focused on outcomes, as opposed to activities.
They begin to recognize the outcomes’ linkage to their own personal purpose, meaning
for the enterprise, and for the work itself.
And so, I think those two
things will continue to emerge on a fairly rapid basis, to be able to embrace
that need for symphonic operations and symphonic collaboration, as well as the
imperative to create meaning and purpose for the workers of an enterprise. This
will all unlock and unleash those capabilities focused on the customer through
creating terrific employee or workforce experiences.
Gardner: Tim,
last word to you. How do you foresee over the next several years technology
evolving to support and engender the symphonic culture that Art just described?
Minahan: We
have gotten to the point where employees are asking for a simplification of
their environment, a unified access to everything, and to remove noise from
their days so they can do that meaningful, purposeful work.
But what’s exciting is that same platform can be enabled to elevate the skill sets of all employees, giving them the right information, and the right task at the right time so they can perform at their very best.
But what gets me very excited
about the future is the technology and a lot of the new thinking that’s going
on. In the next few years, we’re going to see work models similar to the
example I shared about eBay. We will see change in ways we work that we haven’t
see in the past 100 years, where the lines between different functions and
different organizations begin to evaporate.
What
gets me excited about the future is the technology and a lot of new
thinking that's going on. In the next few years, we're going to see new
work models. We will see change in the ways we work that we haven't seen
in the past 100 years.
Instead we will have work models where companies are beginning to organize around pools of talent, where they know who has the right skills and the right knowledge, regardless if they are full-time employees or a contractor. Technology will pull them together into workgroups no matter where they are in the world, to solve the given problem or produce a given outcome, and then dissolve them very quickly again. So I am very excited about what we are going to see in just the next five years ahead.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Citrix.
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