https://mightyguides.com/citrix-7-experts-on-transforming-the-employee-experience/

1. Sponsored by
Experts on
Transforming
Employee Experience
Expert Advice on How to Initiate and Roll Out a
People-Centric Solution

2. 2
INTRODUCTION
Today’s work environments are technology driven. Technology is the focal point for users doing work
and businesses trying to create optimum work experiences for their employees.
Business leaders want to attract and retain top talent and facilitate collaborative workflows, so the
technology they deploy increasingly facilitates work anytime, anywhere in personalized virtual work
spaces. IT leaders are tasked with creating an adaptive infrastructure that serves both business and
employee needs while being secure and manageable. But, how do companies create the employee
experiences that best serve their business objectives?
With the generous support of Citrix, we asked seven IT and human resources (HR) experts the
following question:
How do you create an employee experience that enables business adaptability while attracting and
retaining top talent?
We purposely chose both IT and HR experts to get a range of viewpoints on a question that ultimately
touches everyone in the business.
Several key concepts came out of our discussions, including the importance of input from all levels
of the organization and—most especially—the employees themselves. The responses also revealed
that creating an employee experience is a continuous effort because technology, expectations, and
business needs evolve.
This topic is critical at a time when there is great demand for talent and people are changing the way
they work. I’m sure that whether you’re in executive management, HR, or IT you’ll find valuable insights
in these essays.
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Editor

3. 3
In recent months, organizations, leaders and employees around the world have been faced with
the immense challenge of maintaining business continuity in the face of the global COVID-19
pandemic.
During that time, one thing has become clear: never has the ability to deliver an engaging digital
workspace been more important; particularly as it is also a central component to providing a
positive Employee Experience.
We at Citrix have created Citrix Workspace specifically to serve this need for flexible and consistent
workspace performance. Industry research shows that those who have enhanced flexibility in
how, when, and where they work are 60 to 80 percent more productive than those who lack that
flexibility. By enabling workers to access all their data and applications from anywhere on any
device, many organizations have found that Citrix Workspace is their key to greater employee
engagement, satisfaction, and retention.
I hope you enjoy this eBook,
Sara Nelson
Director, Human Resources, EMEA
Citrix
Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) is
committed to helping the world’s
businesses use workspace
technology to unlock human
potential and create a better
employee experience. Our platform
brings apps, data, devices, even
clouds into a secure, personalized
user experience, where people can
work with passion and purpose. It
helps IT secure ecosystems and
reliably deliver any app on any
device, network, or hybrid, multi-
cloud environment. With annual
revenue of $2.82 billion, more than
400,000 organizations use Citrix
solutions worldwide.
FOREWORD

4. MEET OUR EXPERTS
BRIAN SOLIS
Global Innovation Evangelist,
Salesforce pg. 6
ROSS YOUNG
Director, Information Security
(Divisional CISO),
Capital One, pg. 18
DAVE MILLNER
Author, Futurist, and
Consulting Partner,
HR Curator, pg. 9
ERIC STIELER
VP/Account Executive,
General Electric, pg. 15
BRIAN GRUTTADAURIA
VP, Cloud Business Group,
Oracle, pg.12
PROF. SALLY EAVES
Emergent Technology CTO,
Forbes Tech and
Aspirational Futures, pg. 21
JEANNE MEISTER
Managing Partner,
Future Workplace LLC, pg. 24

6. 6
“You have to consider how people work so that
it’s in direct alignment with how people think
and their aspirations.”
Corporate Culture Can Be a Catalyst for Transforming
Employee Experience
When transforming employee experience, everyone involved must share a common
vision of what the employee experience needs to become. That’s easy to say, but
it’s not so easy to accomplish because you’re now talking about a future motivating
state. You’re defining and articulating what that employee experience is going
to be and how it’s going to come to life through technology. You’re talking about
it in terms of everyday processes—the way people work, the way they measure
performance, and ultimately how all that aligns with business goals. Brian Solis,
author, analyst, and digital anthropologist, sums up the challenge this way: “You’re
talking about the future of work, but it’s the future of work now.”
Where many companies miss the mark is taking the next step after they
conceptually define what it is. Then, it’s about designing the experience,
executing it through technology, and supporting it operationally. Many companies
take a more tactical approach that focuses on a narrow problem without fully
accounting for human nature. “You have to consider how people work so that
it’s in direct alignment with how people think and their aspirations,” Solis says.
“There’s a technological component, but it’s just a subset of the future of work.
Business goals have to align with employee aspirations, so there’s also an
emotional connection.”
Brian Solis is global innovation evangelist
at Salesforce. He is also a world-
renowned digital anthropologist, 8x best-
selling author and keynote speaker. Brian
studies Digital Darwinism, how disruption
impacts markets and how businesses
and ecosystems evolve. His latest books
include, Lifescale: How to Live a More
Creative, Productive, and Happy Life; X:
The Experience When Business Meets
Design, and WFT? What’s the Future of
Business.
Brian Solis,
Global Innovation Evangelist, 8x Best-
Selling Author, Keynote Speaker,
Salesforce
b

7. 7
Asking those deeper questions about
the relationship among human nature,
people’s aspirations, and the technology
they use to do their work leads to
conversations about corporate culture.
Ultimately, corporate culture is at the heart of employee experience transformation. Solis maintains that culture is either the number
one catalyst or the number one inhibitor of employee experience. “If leadership articulates that employees should be more empowered
and that they should be agile,” Solis explains, “then those goals should also be aligned with not only business outcomes but technology
enablers, employee growth, incentivization, human resources management, infrastructure processes, and policies.” Everybody in the
organization needs to move in the new direction. Companies are successful when everybody is in unison, working toward this greater
outcome where tools are used to facilitate the transformation at scale.
To have employee experience as an outcome of a desired state, transformation has to be managed toward that desired state. That
requires a willingness to look honestly at what’s not working. It requires cultural leadership within the organization. “The C suite has to
be involved in at least communicating why this is so important,” says Solis. “The C level needs to articulate what that work environment
should be, and then allow all the other stakeholders to enliven that vision through their work and their investments.”
In many companies, transforming the employee experience happens in parallel with other digital transformation initiatives. It requires
organizing a cross-functional group that’s supported with executive sponsorship to work toward a common set of outcomes. It needs
alignment with the corporate culture that will support this initiative. That’s the ideal, but as Solis notes, it often doesn’t work that way.
“It’s often not a culturally aligned imperative because culture itself is not an organizational imperative.”
“The C level needs to articulate what that work environment
should be, and then allow all the other stakeholders to
enliven that vision through their work and their investments.”

8. 1 2
KEY POINTS
8
Transformation requires organizing a cross-functional
group that’s supported with executive sponsorship to work
toward a common set of outcomes. It needs alignment with
the corporate culture that will support this initiative.
Companies are successful when everybody is in unison,
working toward this greater outcome where tools are used
to facilitate the transformation at scale.
This disconnect can affect how technology is implemented and used. For example, if employees live a mobile lifestyle and actively
use apps like Twitter, Instagram, Uber, DoorDash, Postmates, and Facebook Messenger, these technologies become a baseline for
their experience. Technology deployed as part of an employee experience initiative may be used in one way that makes sense to those
users because of their baseline experience, but it may not create the desired user experience outcomes. When culture becomes part
of the employee experience calculation, the outcomes may be entirely different. Solis says, “This is why leadership is as important to
employee experience transformation as the technology itself.”

9. 9
“An employee experience initiative must be
underpinned by business priorities.”
Creating an Employee Experience to Solve a Business
Problem
Dave Millner, founder and consulting partner at HR Curator Ltd, recognizes that
when it comes to employee experience, it’s all about the job. So, when you think
about creating an employee experience, you need to consider the structure and
processes of the role in which the employee is working. You must look at the
practices and methods used to get people into those roles, whether it’s recruitment,
training, development, or other factors.
Creating an optimum employee experience requires looking at these factors in
the context of what the business wants to accomplish. “An employee experience
initiative must be underpinned by business priorities,” Millner says. “Businesses
want better employee experiences to help improve the way the organization is
operating. That can include having better productivity, reducing turnover, better
employee engagement, better customer experience, better profitability, and other
factors that employee experience influence.”
Dave Millner has 30 years of
consulting experience, working with
global organizations to offer a range
of development-based solutions
underpinned by people analytics. He is
frequently referenced as one of the most
influential human resources practitioners
to follow on Twitter (@HRCurator) and
has written a new book titled Introduction
to People Analytics.
Dave Millner,
Author, Futurist, and Consulting
Partner EBSCO,
HR Curator

10. 10
When business objectives are clearly
understood, the actual employee
experience you create must be possible
and acceptable within the corporate
culture. Millner says, “When you’re looking
to change the practices that create this employee experience, you must ask what the culture of the organization is, how that culture
operates, and whether the changes you want to make reflect that culture.” For example, if you’re creating a new employee experience in
a tight, command-and-control organization, one that’s anchored in process and method, you’ll likely meet resistance if the experience
you’re designing is all about employee empowerment.
With business objectives and company culture in mind, it’s necessary to evaluate all the employee touch points that influence employee
experience. This check extends from the reasons people will be attracted to the job to how they perform the business processes that
constitute their role. Millner notes that there are many reasons why employees are interested in a job. “It’s not always about the pay,”
he says. “It’s about great learning opportunities or working for a specialist manager who can improve their technical capability. It could
be that they want an opportunity to work on a cross-functional project. Then, there are different cadres of people with different levels of
expectation. They all want a job that’s interesting and fulfilling.”
Millner believes that one area in which human resources (HR) needs to take a more active role is in organizational and job design.
Traditionally, HR focuses on plugging people into roles. HR needs to think more about the business problem employee experience is
trying to solve, however. “HR is in an ideal position to do this,” Millner says. “But HR must have a commercial business mindset that
addresses the people issues. That doesn’t mean that HR shouldn’t care about the people, but just talking about people and talent isn’t
good enough anymore. HR has to turn that conversation into something that business leaders understand.”
“[An employee experience initiative] is a
transformation program. Therefore, it must have a
dedicated team of stakeholders and specialists.”

11. 1 2
KEY POINTS
11
The keys to creating a successful employee experience are
using technology, thinking differently, involving employees,
getting them to tell HR what they really want rather than
what the company thinks they want, and providing degrees
of personalization.
Traditionally, HR has focused on plugging people into roles.
But HR needs to think more about the business problem the
employee experience is trying to address.
The keys to creating a successful employee experience are using technology, thinking differently, involving employees, encouraging
workers to tell HR what they really want rather than what HR thinks they want, and providing some personalization that enables them
to say, “This is why I want to stay.” Getting that done requires a team. “It’s a transformation program,” Millner says. “Therefore, it must
have a dedicated team of stakeholders and specialists.” Millner believes in taking an agile, incremental design approach that involves
test and pilot phases to verify that it’s working, even as the team keeps an eye on the longer-term strategy. He says, “The key with these
teams made up of line managers, senior managers, and specialists is that it enables you not just to look at what’s working well now but
also look to the future.”

12. 12
Democratization of Data Is Employee Empowerment
Improving the employee experience depends on many factors. Sometimes,
however, those factors aren’t what you expect.
For instance, one internet-based company with consistently high employee
ratings works hard to improve its employee experience. In a survey designed
to identify key factors that could improve the work environment, this company
found that it wasn’t the systems or the work schedules or other factors it
expected. Instead, the key to employee satisfaction was being able to bring
their dogs to work.
This change may have been the result of one survey at one point in time, but
Brian Gruttadauria, vice president and chief technology officer of the Cloud
Business Group at Oracle, notes that technology has long been a key driver for
improving employee experience and personalization. “If you look at the history
of how technology has evolved in the workplace, companies used to give you
the tools you needed for your job, like laptops and phones,” he explains. If you
wanted to use your own phone for business, you would install a virtual private
network and security controls on your device. When the iPhone and iPad
came along, things began to change in a big way.
As vice president of Oracle’s Cloud
Business group, Brian Gruttadauria
develops and evangelizes Oracle’s
cloud infrastructure strategy around
the globe. He effectively engages
C-level customers, partners, and sales
teams, using thought leadership to
drive business. Brian is also an active
member of the startup community,
where he advises companies on both
the technical and business value of
using Oracle’s cloud infrastructure,
machine learning, blockchain, and
autonomous database.
Brian Gruttadauria,
VP, Cloud Business Group,
Oracle
“This is about democratization of data. The whole
goal is to empower people at different levels of
the organization to look at the data from their
own perspective.”

13. 13
“Bring your own device came along,
and tools began to make that easier,”
Gruttadauria says. “People began using
these devices for both personal and
business tasks. The way people work
today blurs the line. You’re always working. When I’m on vacation, I’m working—answering email, checking things. It’s difficult to keep
that separation.” Moving services into the cloud makes it even easier for employees to work more flexibly. This personalization of the
technology has placed greater demands on security, however, which has evolved from early models that put security on the device to
single sign-on mechanisms, where employees use their device to connect, get a code back, type it in, and gain a secure connection to
a service. Gruttadauria points out that security is evolving to be closer to the data. “New models include a personal security passport,
where everybody has his or her own security token. That gives you access not just to the perimeter but to the actual source of the data,
such as a database.”
Another area of personalization is how users view data. At one level, you want to have a standard viewpoint, but you also want to give
users flexibility to be creative. “This is about democratization of data,” says Gruttadauria. “The whole goal is to empower people at
different levels of the organization to look at the data from their own perspective. If you enable people in the organization to access
data in ways that make the data more meaningful to them, if you enable them to manipulate the data from their perspective, they’ll
gain insights that make them more efficient and effective. This is employee empowerment.” Personalized dashboards and the ability to
create a personal look and feel are important parts of the democratization of data.
“You definitely want to start with an employee
survey to know where the pain points are. Without
that, it’s taking a shot in the dark.”

14. 1 2
KEY POINTS
14
IT and business leaders often focus on ease of use rather than
how all their systems work together. Ease of use is important,
but when it comes to improving employee experience, you need
to understand true employee pain points.
New technology advances, such as AI and ML, are enabling new
levels of personalization.
New technology advances, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), are enabling new levels of personalization.
“Employees use many applications today that have ML under the covers. They may not even be aware of it,” says Gruttadauria.
“These intelligent applications provide guidance to help employees accelerate their decision making to the next step. Machine
Learning intelligent applications can curate streams of enterprise resource planning data to assist an employee on a specific
screen, and give them the best possible information needed to make a decision.”
These are all powerful tools for creating a better employee experience, but IT and business leaders often focus on ease of use
rather than how all those systems work together. Ease of use is important, but when it comes to using technology to improve
employee experience, Gruttadauria recommends beginning with the employees. “You definitely want to start with an employee
survey to identify employee pain points and what would make people more efficient in their job. Without that, it’s taking a shot
in the dark,” he says. You assess your current systems to determine which changes will give you the greatest return on your
investment. Then, you present your plan to the chief information officer.

15. 15
“For us to make this shift, we had to adopt the
language of a customer service culture.”
For a Better Employee Experience, Adopt a Customer
Service Mentality
As a leader in Digital Operations at General Electric (GE), Eric Stieler has been
involved in transforming the way GE delivers IT services across the entire
company—a transformation that has changed employee experiences in many
ways. Some changes are more visible than others, but the overall result is a
more satisfying IT experience for employees and streamlining of some key IT
functions, such as employee onboarding.
With nearly 300,000 people located around the world working in many industry
segments, each with unique IT demands, GE was challenged to find the
most cost-effective way of delivering the IT services employees needed. The
company’s size gave it economies of scale, but that did not address individual
employee needs. “The best way to capture economies of scale is by doing one
thing really well across 300,000 people,” Stieler explains. “But that strips away
users’ ability to make their own decisions about what they want to do.”
Eric Stieler is a software engineer who has
worked in consulting for Automatic Data
Processing, General Motors, and General
Electric (GE). He recently branched out to
support infrastructure work, including onsite
operations and user populations for GE in
Asia. Eric’s focus on customer outcomes
led to his current position as the account
executive for IT Services at GE Healthcare.
Outside work, he enjoys traveling and
constant learning.
Eric Stieler,
VP/Account Executive
General Electric

16. 16
GE decided to change IT from a services
delivery model to a product delivery
model. It decided that a product model
made more sense because GE was
offering its IT services to different
companies within the larger GE organization. “We wanted to make sure they could see our offerings, and then compare them to the
market, commercial providers or other big outsourcing firms,” Stieler says. “That way, they could make cost comparisons and feel
good about the money they were spending on our products.”
GE’s transformation consisted of a three-step process:
1. Develop detailed personas for the user population. This step involved defining specific personas, such as people who worked
in a factory; people who worked in an office environment; power users; road warriors; and the VIP persona—senior executives.
Stieler says, “We modeled the IT needs of each persona. For instance, the road warrior needs virtual private network connectivity,
but the standard office worker doesn’t. An engineer power user needs different equipment than the person entering receipts or
trading e-mail.”
2. Survey users for feedback. Stieler describes GE’s process: “We use a detailed net promoter score (NPS)–based survey that asks
about sentiment—for example, ‘How do you feel about the services you’re getting?’ We ask users to score items on a standard
NPS 10-point scale. We give them a list of the services and solutions to score.” Comment boxes provide more detailed input,
and users can aggregate comments. Stieler’s team can analyze the surveys by geography, by business unit, and by negative
or positive opinions. “We survey one-sixth of the employees every month,” Stieler says. “That way, we get a cross-section of the
employees every month. All employees get a survey twice a year, so they don’t suffer from survey fatigue.”
3. Change mindsets so that the IT team becomes a customer service team rather than a service delivery team. Stieler explains:
“As IT professionals, we focus on things like incidents, problems, changes, configuration management databases, forward
schedule of change—all the ITIL principles. For us to make the shift to customer service, however, we had to adopt the language
of a customer service culture.” The team had to adopt customer service practices and tie performance rewards to improvements
in survey results. The IT group developed tools that helped them manage a personal relationship between users and their
equipment. They worked with business units to show them how to police their own employees.
“When employees join the company, they have their
computer waiting for them with instructions on what they
need to do to be productive on day one.”

17. 1 2
KEY POINTS
17
Adopt customer service practices, tie performance rewards to
improvements in survey results, and then develop tools that
help the IT team manage relationships between users and their
equipment.
Define specific personas for each kind of worker in the organiza-
tion, and then model the IT needs for each person.
The result is an IT organization that offers personal service and provides flexibility and options for employees. In this way, employees
can make choices and build their own kind of technology environment based on offerings the IT team or business unit management
provides.
The change has also streamlined employee onboarding. “We’ve completely overhauled our new-hire orientation and computer day-one
strategy,” Stieler says. “Now, when employees join the company, they have their computer waiting for them with instructions on what
they need to do to be productive on day one.

18. 18
“Your security organization has to
audit, maintain, and monitor all those
environments, which is really tough.”
Adapt to Employee Needs in Ways That Meet
Business Needs
For some companies, creating an employee experience that serves the
business well is a challenge because having a good employee experience
is key to employee retention. At the same time, if you have poor employee
retention, it’s difficult to build a consistent positive employee experience.
When employees leave, knowledge leaves with them.
To keep employees happy and satisfied, there must be an employee growth
plan in which they learn a project in their first year, are performing well on the
project by the second year, and are training the next batch of people to take
the project over in the third year. Ross Young, director of Information Security
and divisional chief information security officer for Capital One, says, “It’s a
well-understood timeline. It takes people who are happy, who love their job,
and who are willing to stay for three years and train new people.”
Ross Young is director of information
security at Capital One, a lecturer
at Johns Hopkins University, and a
SANS instructor. His expertise ranges
from attacking financial services for
the federal government to defending
organizations by automating defenses
in DevSecOps pipelines. Ross holds
master and bachelor degrees from
Johns Hopkins University, Idaho State
University, and Utah State University.
Ross Young,
Director, Information Security
(Divisional CISO),
Capital One

19. 19
Young sees three factors as critical
to retaining employees and creating a
sustainable employee experience:
• Flexibility in employee location.
Traditionally, people have worked on location, but competition for talent and availability of skills are changing the way some
businesses approach this. “There’s a lot of competition for talent, especially in fields like data science and cybersecurity,” Young
explains. “It’s difficult to find these people, but if you’re flexible and can adapt, you can take people from anywhere in the country.
Now, you can find niches of talent and salaries that match what you need but would be difficult to attract in a large city.”
• Training. In the past, employee training has been expensive. It may involve specialized internal training and sending employees
to pricey seminars at a conference. “That’s an expensive journey, and it’s limited by what your internal training organization can
provide,” says Young. “It’s not adaptable to what individual employees need. Maybe the employee needs personal leadership
coaching or something else your company doesn’t offer.” Young believes that more training will take place online. It’s more cost-
effective to pay the low cost of an online course and testing, and then give the employee time to complete the course on his or
her own. Then, when that employee goes to conferences, he or she can become a speaker at the conference rather than just
attending. The value of online training is significant. “I think we’re going to see a transformation, with more learning taking place
online,” Young says.
• Standard tech environments that can be personalized. This element involves the centralization of services for commonly
performed work functions. One example is a developer desktop experience. A large company could have 10,000 developers,
each one working in a unique developer environment. Young describes the challenge of supporting these developers: “Now your
security organization has to audit, maintain, and monitor all those environments, which is tough.” An alternative approach is to
have one cloud-based developer desktop that’s fully equipped with all the tools and libraries developers need. Young explains
the advantages of this approach. “One is that developers no longer have to set up their environments and connect to the tools
they need. It’s all there for them. They just choose what they need. That transforms how developers work.” Another advantage is
security. In the past, remediation teams had to remediate 10,000 unique developer environments. “Now it’s a single environment
that everybody uses,” says Young. “It’s even difficult to steal data, because the data isn’t on their local device.”
“Now it’s a single environment that everybody uses.
It’s even difficult to steal data, because the data
isn’t on their local device.”

20. 1 2
KEY POINTS
20
The keys to successful transformation of employee experience
include documenting all your processes and getting employee
input on things they need and things that aren’t working.
Competition for talent and skills makes good people hard to find.
Being flexible about where they work makes it possible for busi-
nesses to find the right talent at the right prices.
The keys to successful transformation of employee experience include documenting all your processes and getting employee input on things
they need and things that aren’t working. In addition, Young recommends an agile approach to transformation that uses tools for agile project
management. The process should include people from across the organization. “This is where you need that diversity of thought and ideas,” he
says.

21. 21
“That unified picture is critical. Making it easy
to access information and applications helps
businesses get the best out of the people doing the
work.”
Successful Transformation Requires IT-Business
Alignment
A well-designed employee experience benefits everyone, from employees
and the IT teams that support them to business stakeholders and even
customers. Everything works better.
“Technology should be complementary to what we do,” says Sally Eaves,
Emergent Technology chief technology officer and global strategy advisor
for organizations like Forbes Tech, GBA UK, Effect.AI, and CitiesABC.
“When we get it right, employees feel that it’s giving them time to do the
things they need to do, which then enables them to do more meaningful
work. It benefits technology teams with fewer support calls and higher
satisfaction. There’s more natural engagement between teams, and you
start to see more organic relationship building across the organization.”
Prof. Sally Eaves is a highly experienced Chief
Technology Officer, Professor in Advanced
Technologies and Global Strategic Advisor
on Digital Transformation. She specializes
in the application of emergent technologies,
notably AI, Blockchain, Cloud, IoT & 5G for
both business and societal benefit at scale.
An international keynote speaker and author,
Sally was an inaugural recipient of the
Frontier Technology and Social Impact award,
presented at the United Nations and has been
described as the ‘torchbearer for ethical tech’
- founding Aspirational Futures to enhance
inclusion and diversity in the technology
space and beyond.
Prof. Sally Eaves
Emergent Technology CTO,
Forbes Tech and Aspirational Futures

22. 22
This approach is important at a time
when business workflows depend on
a rising tide of information. Successful
businesses must manage ever larger
volumes of data moving in real time. They
must determine which data are important to key business decisions. That means that employees must be able to filter out the noise
and get to the essential insights that make a difference. Eaves emphasizes, “That unified picture is critical. Making it easy to access
information and applications helps businesses get the best out of the people doing the work.”
Transforming employee experience in a way that achieves these goals requires a deep look at what the employee experience actually
is. Eaves points out that companies spend a lot of time talking about transforming customer experience, but they often spend much
less time personalizing, innovating and optimizing the employee experience along it. To do this, you need to listen at all levels within the
organization. She says, “In the same way we spend time listening to a customer stakeholder point of view, we have to focus on what the
internal drivers are and how to prioritize the needs of employees.”
It also requires identifying people who can play a key role in the transformation. “You want to find the disruptors in your organization,”
says Eaves. “Who are the people trying to make a difference, and how can you support those people? Not everybody wants to have that
role, but we need to do that kind of scoping. We need to identify what drives people as individuals.”
It all begins with benchmarking and surveys to discover where friction exists in the organization and what employees want. Specialized
tools can do this quickly and regularly, but it also helps to have one-on-one discussions with people. Eaves advises, “You need to
demonstrate to employees the benefits of taking an active part in this process. We find that if you bring diversity of perspectives
together, you get better outcomes.” Both IT and human resources (HR), which traditionally defer to business management when it
comes to transforming employee experience, have critical roles to play. The IT organization will be a major beneficiary of a better
employee technology experience. It will also be in a position to provide insights into tools and techniques associated with artificial
intelligence and machine learning for more effective use of data that contributes to a satisfying employee experience. In addition, HR
sees employee onboarding as an essential process that forms the foundation of employee satisfaction and retention. “For me, this
transformation is all about shared value,” Eaves says.
“You need to demonstrate to employees the benefits of
taking an active part in this process. We find that if you
bring diversity of perspectives together, you get better
outcomes.”

23. 1 2
KEY POINTS
23
A good employee experience benefits technology teams with
fewer support calls and higher satisfaction. It creates more
natural engagement between teams and more organic relation-
ship building across the organization.
Transforming employee experience requires a deep look into
what the employee experience actually is. Companies spend a
lot of time talking about transforming customer experience. They
need to spend time personalizing the employee experience, too.
This diversity of inputs is critical to the success of a transformation initiative. Eaves says, “The biggest barrier to innovation in
organizations is lack of IT-business alignment.” You need to make sure that everybody’s voice is heard at that table, in solution design,
development, and application. If that doesn’t happen, the solution will not satisfy, and people will circumvent the system. You prevent
that circumvention by developing the right thing in the first place. “It has to start at that design and development phase,” Eaves
maintains. “It’s about having the right people in that conversation to agree with on the purpose behind what you’re building and getting
that right. Everything else flows on from there.”

24. 24
Jeanne Meister is Managing Partner,
of Future Workplace LLC, an HR
advisory and membership firm that
manages Future Workplace Network,
a consortium of 40 senior HR, talent,
and learning professionals who meet
virtually and at times in person to
discuss best practices in preparing for
the future workforce and workplace.
Future Workplace Network member
organizations access online courses
to re-skill HR on Future Workplace
Academy. Jeanne was also named one
of Top 100 HR Tech Influencers for
2019.
“You empower people by asking them what’s
important to them—regularly and frequently.
Then, you make changes in the employee
experience so that they know that you’re
listening to them.”
Employee Experience Is a Cross-Functional Project
When it comes to transforming the employee experience, it’s important to
define what you mean by employee experience. Jeanne Meister, managing
partner of Future Workplace, a firm that provides human resources (HR)
consultation and research, distinguishes between employee engagement and
employee experience. She explains it this way: “Employee engagement is a
C-suite view, a top-down perspective, often HR driven, that focuses on how
engaged employees were over the past, say, 12 months. Employee experience
is bottom up. It uses pulse surveys to look at current and important attributes
of experience such as culture, physical workspace and digital tools. Rather
than just being HR driven, employee experience is a team sport.”
Creating employee experience requires personalizing experiences so that
you provide what different employee segments want. For most people, job
satisfaction isn’t just about money: It’s about growth opportunity and career
path. For an employee experience to be positive, it must relate to what
matters in employees’ lives. Creating such an experience requires input from
employees and others in the organization that touches on the key elements
of employee experience—HR, technology, and the physical space in which
people work.
Jeanne Meister,
Managing Partner,
Future Workplace LLC
b

25. 25
“The process should include
representatives from different segments
of employees as well as representatives
from HR, IT, finance, and real estate,”
Meister says. “Those key functions must
have a shared vision of how to execute employee experience so that it creates a more compelling experience for the individual but also
drives business in terms of improved productivity, retention, and customer satisfaction.”
So, where do you begin? Meister believes that you start with a business problem. If you don’t, the employee experience concept
becomes too abstract and broad. “Organizations don’t always get requests for a better experience,” she says. “You have to look at the
data from various segments of employees regarding productivity, engagement, and retention. That tells a fuller story.”
When you have defined the problem, the next step is to listen to what employees say. Meister says, “You empower people by asking
them what’s important to them—regularly and frequently. Then, you make changes in the employee experience so that they know that
you’re listening to them. For that, you need pulse surveys and employee journey mapping.” Listening is key. You need to understand
the moments that matter most to different employee segments. You can group segments by age, demographics, or life events. They
become the personas that are important in your organization.
Armed with this data, you must then look at how to create a seamless and personalized employee experience happening in the flow of
work. That may mean giving employees mobile access to tools they need to answer some of their frequently asked questions and deliver
a consistent, reliable experience to employees. “That’s where IT, real estate, finance and HR must come together,” Meister says.
“The process should include representatives from different
segments of employees as well as representatives from
HR, IT, Finance and Real Estate.”

26. KEY POINTS
26
1 2 Work to make it easy for employees to have a seamless and personalized
employee experience in their workflow. This may mean re-evaluating their
digital and physical workspace ensuring mobile access to work tools,
ensuring if they are remote workers they have the technology tools and
training to answer frequently asked questions so you can deliver a
consistent, reliable experience to employees.
Transforming employee experience begins with a busi-
ness problem. If you don’t start with a business problem,
the concept of employee experience becomes too ab-
stract and broad.
To accomplish this transformation, it is critical to form a cross-functional team that brings together key stakeholders from IT, HR,
finance, and real estate. Meister advises creating a role such as Head of Employee Experience. That person would manage the cross-
functional team to create a shared vision for employee experience, identify the work streams needed to fulfill this vision, and provide
on-going project management. Also by creating a new position to focus on Employee Experience means that you recognize that
transforming employee experience isn’t something an HR, IT or Real Estate initiative, rather it is a business objective needed to solve
for key workforce issues such as enhancing employee productivity or increasing employee satisfaction. Meister goes on to stress,
“Once this cross functional team is in place and you can nominate a leader to manage it, so you can drive a shared vision for employee
experience and build a governing advisory council to monitor business results on an ongoing basis.”
To effectively address a business problem through employee experience, Meister says, “You have to look at the employee segment’s
impact on the company’s bottom line, and then address the problem through a segment-by-segment point of view. It’s really all about
being clear about your employee value proposition, and taking into account career growth opportunities within the organization.”