Session Information:

The Dividends of Empathy & Value of Change Management Towards the Future of Work

• How can Change Management influence your strategic results and employee engagement?
• How to lead change during times of ambiguity to a future state
• Working Personas and Empathy create dividends 
• The Voice of the Employee as a solution
• How does all of this shape The Future of Work at your company?

Session Transcript:

I'm very excited about our next guest in our next talk. We're Gonna Have Douglas Flori Global Practice Lead in the Change Management Office for Login Me. And Hello there. Douglas talk to us about the dividends of empathy and value of change management towards the future of work. We're really looking forward to your presentation.

Good luck Thank you so much and it's a privilege to be here with you today.

I appreciate the opportunity to meet with all of you.

I've been looking at some of your profiles on LinkedIn just to be here with you today. I'm very honored and very humbled to have this opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Douglas Story has, I was introduced little bit a quick highlight and bio about who I am, and what I do. I am very involved in change management, which is the managing and supporting the people side of changes. And in that role, or in that discipline by rho, is number one, I worked for a company called LogMeIn. We offer remote products and services such as GoToMeeting or GoToWebinar and many others that will empower us to work in a remote and digital environment, like we all find ourselves in today. In addition, I'm also highly involved in the Association of Change Management Professionals. I've been doing that for some time.

But I'm fortunate enough to just recently been elected to the board of directors, So at the end of the presentation today, I'll share my contact information. If you have any follow up questions or anything you'd like to learn more about, love connecting with you, and learning from your experiences, and seeing what I can do to help you as we go forward.

So for today, we're gonna learn about the dividends of empathy, and the value of change in management, towards the future of work, to do so.

So what does that mean? So, what I want to do is highlight a couple of things that we're going to be talking about today. You can see here on the screen, we've got five key things that we're going to walk through, that will address our topic today. First, is we're all going through a lot of ambiguity, so how can we lead during those times of N periods?

How can that change? Management influenced your strategic results? And employee engagement? I think you'll find changed. I'm sorry to interrupt, but yours like, has not changed. I'm not sure if you change your life. If you did, we cannot see that we're still on the first slide.

Oh, it was sorry. There we go. Yeah. We should be able to see it now.

Yeah. Thank you for, for the remainder, so we can be talking about change management as well. The third thing I want to introduce is working personas. I think it's a great opportunity for any of us to be able to leverage working personas and help build empathy and see real dividends. And I'm going to share some examples of what that looks like, and what we've been able to do at LogMeIn with our employee base. And then the voice of the employee as a solution, and how powerful that can be helping you shape the future of your work.

And then, putting all this together. What does this mean for the future of our work, which is the one million dollar question that we all wanna understand and learn. So let's do the talking points and the considerations for today. But before we get started, what I've built into the presentation today is an opportunity for us to have reflective thinking.

I hope that along the way, you will see some points that helped you to think, aha or some key points that you want to jot down.

Throughout the course of the different sessions that we discussed today, you're going to see a screen that will look similar to this, and what is going to do is provide you a grid, and I would encourage you to get some paper or pencil or maybe if you're on A, on a digital aspect, and that's your preference. You can go digital as well, and create this this quadrant box, and you're gonna see a series of questions across the top question. one will typically be dynamic. Maybe, what is your story, or question to, how does your story relate to? Someone in Question three will be pretty static. It's going to be constant throughout. It's going to be something to the effect of, what are you going to go and do?

What I've done is created these rows across here for Strategy execution on the people side of what you're thinking about, what you're learning about. And hopefully, this will help you as you go back to work on Monday and share this with your peers, and on and apply these concepts to your project at your company.

So, that's what you can expect today, I'm gonna give you a minute to get your paper and your pencil ready to create your grid.

And we're going to go ahead and jump in.

All right, So, first, I want to share my story about LogMeIn, and it's not to promote LogMeIn or anything of that nature. Because I believe storytelling is a great connector. Right now, we're in a virtual setting, and I wish I was there with you in person, I really do.

But, unfortunately, we can't do that. So, storytelling to me is a great way to help you connect with what I'm about, to teach, and for you, to connect the dots, and apply it to what you're experiencing and going through in your role with your company, and what is your story? So, here in our book, you can see on the left-hand side, what I've created is a little bit of an overview of coming into 2020, 2020 came along, just like all of us. And we came back from the holidays and we're ready to go with the new year and our new strategy and the new financial calendar.

But then, for us, we had privately private equity transition, we were in the midst of going through a transition from public to private, so that was very unique for us as well.

Then Covert 19 came in and I think we all know the ramifications and implications there. But certainly it was like wait, what says Coburn 19 thing and we were trying to learn and understand a little bit more about it has to be grasping for knowledge at this new concept that was taking over as an as a company. We have 4000 employees and 20 global offices. So at that point, we had to pivot and transition all 4000. Approximately 90% of our employee base to a remote setting.

We had to transition 20 offices globally, to be able to work from home or work from anywhere, is what we like to call it within our company.

Then, we had to be able to support our employees after that transition. And simultaneously, because we offer these types of products and services, customer, customer demand was going increasingly high, and we had all employees onboard to help support and answer, from our care center.

So, as you look forward, and we're, as we're going through this together, we've been able to navigate this ambiguity.

And, what does that look like as we look ahead and where we are today? So, we're still go on to the private equity transition to a from a public, to a private company.

We've experienced all kinds of social and cultural events that we'll talk about today, as well that have impacted our employees. And it's really been visible, what this means to them, and how it's influencing their work.

We've been able to socially connect with our with various frontline responders and different charities and organizations. So ER WK is an emergency remote work, get where we're able to provide digital resources. For the first time, we were able to bundle them, an offer these, to these charities, is fable one sees these people out on the frontline government institutions who are trying to deal with all of the events at their local in their local region and setting and trying to communicate with each other. We were able to help them, so that was very powerful for us. We then developed working personas.

We then started building on this voice of the employee concept and on our future of the work, and by doing all this, from a change management perspective, it's really helped us to get forward through the ambiguity and help build a roadmap and a strategy as we look forward.

So that's my story, and that's our story at LogMeIn, has the, what we're about to discuss today, with change management and empathy, the dividends of empathy.

I want you to think about what your story is. one day, I'd love to hear, I'd love to share it, have you share that with me?

But I want you to think about what your story is, as we go through these next slides, and apply these to your situation.

I love this slide, because it talks, I think it highlights what we are all kind of feeling at one point, once coded 19, and all of these different events started happening.

We kinda felt like we were in a fog, we hadn't, we knew we had to go forward, but we had all these questions and feelings and emotions and reactions to what was happening because we couldn't see anything.

We didn't know, is the path forward stable? Should I go forward?

And I wish I had directions and milepost to know along the way or a compass along the way to help me know that, what I'm seeing and what I'm doing and feeling.

It's the right is the right path and the right step for us.

So I wanted to ask you, what was the right steps for you to think about that?

As we're going through this, this is what's often referred to as like, a change curve, but I want to apply it in a little bit of a different lens. So starting down here at the bottom, you can see it's about Historical ways of working a transition period, and the Future of Work.

So this historical ways of working will be pre coven 19. So like 19, 9, 20, 19, excuse me. And the future of work will be somewhere down the road, still to be determined.

For you, That could be, you could be at a different point in this transition period, as compared to some of your, your peer companies or other institutions and organizations. But, what we all experience was kinda the same, because this provides a sense of direction, a sense of hope, as you look walk, taking that first step into that cloud of ambiguity. And you're trying to figure out how to get to the other side, because all of your employees are asking you, What does the future look like?

And, right now, there's not a lot of answers, but here, this provides a sense of hope.

Because what it does, is it says, We are on this side. We're about to go through this journey in transition period.

So, we can get to the other side.

Just knowing that there is no another site, knowing and remembering that sometimes provides us with a baseline level set and reminder that we know we will get through this.

We're just in a transition period.

As we go through this transition period, we were all hustling. we were working hard or adrenaline was pumping as we had to transition to a remote work setting from our office into our homes or into our slots or whatever your situation may be. Because of all of that, our adrenaline was pumping and we were coming down the hill and gravity was working very hard. And we were accelerating very quickly as we moved into this transition period, because we got, towards the bottom. We started looking around this, kind of, where I would suggest, at least for us, for LogMeIn, and this is where we are today.

And here toward the bottom and kind of working our way back up, you start to feel like, OK, this remote work thing is kind of normal for me now, getting in my groove. I'm starting to feel like this is comfortable with this, I can be productive. It's, it's OK, right? But as you get down here, you catch your breath from the adrenaline and the gravity, you look up to the other side that you want to get to and you realize, wait. This is going to require some work. That's going to require some effort. I need to catch my breath to get up to where we need to go.

So, that's the question I want to ask you today.

For your company.

You get back to where you were. You have three options. Let's look at what those options are and how we applied them a change. Log Log, Man. You are here. We've all seen this on the maps. Regardless of where you're going, maybe it's at the mall, maybe it's on your smart phone, or device, and you see way where you are, but you want to know where you're going. This is very helpful in helping navigate the ambiguity and lead your team and your your people through this.

As you go back, I mentioned there's three options you can return.

You can renew or you could redesign.

Now, these are the three options that we felt like were most appropriate for us, but I think they're also universal enough to help you as well.

So, real return, What does that mean? I wish things would go back to the way they were, I just can't wait to return to the office.

That's what it's going to sound or feel like, when you think about that, or you ask yourself that question, you'll want to come back to things as they were.

They renew.

Maybe let's just paint the house, will put a new coat of paint on it, and it will fill fresh.

It will give us a new view, sense of hope, undoing how we're going to be doing things, or you could redesign, which means, basically step forward into the ambiguity, take a step, and learn more as you evolve and create a future way of growth and advancement.

So, I think that's really important question for you to ask yourself as you think about leading through this ambiguity, but also about the future of your work.

At LogMeIn, we had had this conversation, and we felt like is return an option.

We didn't feel like it wasn't option because we've learned so much. We've progressed the, the acceleration of technology and working remotely has just accelerated years and years and years. All condensed set of, of course, of weeks, maybe a month at the most. But all of that that was supposed to be in the future, is now here, so we did not feel return, was an option for us. We could have renewed. We could have just refresh some things, but because of all the aspects that I shared with you about our story, we felt like redesign was more appropriate.

We wanted to take advantage of this unique period in history of where we are as a company, and we wanted to take that, just sketch and shake it up.

Start with a clean slate, let's say, let's redesign. Let's, let's be Frank, what we're doing, what's our future strategy?

How can we take all of these different elements about our story, package it towards the future.

So that's what we chose to do for LogMeIn.

So I want you to stop and reflect and learn, I mentioned this at the start. This time to get out your paper or your digital note taking device, and I want to ask you these questions and these are more reflective questions and exercise for you to think about, about what you've learned from this first part of the conversation.

The first thing I want you to do is reflect on your company's current position. What are the ambiguities needs and options that your company and your employees have?

And you can take some time and write these down into the columns and the boxes.

Second question I want to ask you, are you which one are you planning to do?

If you haven't had time to think about this yet, well here's some options for you to consider: Do you want to return, do you want to renew? Do you want to redesign?

But more importantly, why do you want to choose that?

The third question, this is going to be the static question through all of the stop, reflect, and learn, is, what can you take back with you to your colleagues and your company on Monday after you've shared what you've learned as a team?

So take a minute and capture your thoughts.

Capture any things that have caught your attention, and What would help you with your organization as well.

OK, I'm going to continue to go for it, But if you want to continue to capture your thoughts, because you're in a stream, flow, keep going up, but you can catch up with us here shortly. Next, let's talk about what change management can do to help you during this time, Just for tactics that can really influence your strategic results and employee engagement, and this is the readiness, communications, training, and sustainment. I'm not gonna go through the context of each one of those bullets, but these are the four.

Workflows are different areas of change management. We want to create readiness. By helping our people understand, are we ready to make this transition. Whether it's policy, process, working from home, navigating how to change our policies, or implement a work from home policy, something to that effect. How do we communicate about it? So we create awareness, some understanding about why we've made these decisions, help them prepare for the implications of what this means, and ultimately, to adopt how to do these and understand our vision.

We have to give them the skills. That's what the training aspect comes in. So hoping to build them with a growth mindset so that we understand that there are options that there are scenarios, and not have a fixed mindset about how things are going to be.

We want to encourage that growth, opportunity to see what may be possible and equip them to lead and navigate this change journey that we're all going through today, Then ultimately, sustain whatever it is you choose for your organization. You want to be able to continue it going forward. Otherwise people are just going to return to their old habits, their old ways of doing things, the old systems, what have you. And we want to correct that. So that's where sustainment comes into play. In helping you with your change management, so you truly get that embedded into your normal, daily routines.

So change management incorporates three different specialities.

What does it mean if you're new to this, or, if you're thinking and wondering, this is what we're neuroscience, culture, and engagement can be a part of your solution, neuroscience really helps us to understand some of the cognitive aspects of Why am I behaving this way?

Or This is, I don't understand why I'm resisting this? What's so hard about this for you?

What is this I've experienced in the past helps you manage by hand, to the solution.

So it gives you some really good foundation as to help navigate and anticipate what your employees might be dealing or going through When they initially feel this pain, or paint the impacts of what they're going to say, culture, it's very important to understand your culture. The culture here at LogMeIn is going to be different or unique as compared to yours. So, again, you need to apply this to your lens and your story, to understand how things will get done.

You're focused on empowering your employees, engagement.

We're going to talk about voice of the employee, and how to incorporate them along the way.

So, again, with regards to change management, I want to ask you these questions. Are these skills and competencies currently in your toolkit?

If they're not, why not?

If they are, how are you using them?

Second question, what can you do to engage your employees, understand their needs, and hear their voice?

Number three, the static question is, what can you take back to your team in your office on Monday to talk about how change management can influence, excuse me, your results?

I'll give you a minute to capture your thoughts. We're going to continue forward.
we're going to talk about the realities of working for Somers.

So, before I dive into what a working persona is, this is some of the context of what we were feeling at LogMeIn just, you know, at the organizational level. But even down to the individual level. We're all feeling these impacts just different ways.

We were trying to figure out what, you know, so much is going on. And you can see by the different icons on the screen, some of the things that maybe you felt as well.

We're trying to figure out ways to help our employees through all this, because we knew that this was a pivotal moment in time, historical, even. Helping us lead through this is gonna be something our employees will remember. The other thing we wanted to say was, How are you? And we truly wanted to ask that question and, not just a salutation like we do here in the United States. But let's stop and see how they respond. Let's talk about that. Let's make sure that we understand them. So you can see this quote at the bottom. As we started to introduce working personas and this concept of building empathy, it really gave us a moment to say that now is the time. This is why we have established this new set of resources called working personas to our employees.

That launched us into what you're about to see as a solutions. So what is a working persona?

It's thinking about your employees at your company. And the roles, the different aspects of what they do, and trying to get them a grouping, if you will, to understand what they're going through.

Who are your worksheet personas? Again, it's gonna vary based upon your company, the nature of your business and what you're focused on, but you need to ask yourself, what are the commonalities? What are the differences of our people, and what is it that's missing?

Why do you want to do personas?

Because it's gonna enable you to connect with others, are all working now in a digital environment And we can't just see each other across the table so we can anticipate how people at what people are going to. We can better connect and empathize with them. Lots of different reasons here you can see on the screen.

This is what we came up with at LogMeIn, and we're very proud of this, because we said, what are working personas? that took some time and a collective effort from our team, from a team of many people to come to this consensus? So we came up with working as a new hire. We had 215 new hires during the first half of the year, so what does that experience like for them?

Working individually, that could be as an example. Maybe you live in a flat or an apartment, and you don't have a roommate, or something to that effect working with other adults. Maybe you do have a roommate.

two of the most important and most impacted areas that I personally have felt, but I've seen others go through, is working well at home. Well, we have young children, or we have school age children, So we certainly wanted to make sure that was included in our working groups on us. But then, lastly, working while caring for adults working. While caring for adults could look like maybe you're taking care of your elderly parents, because maybe the nature of their age or their health. Or maybe your university student just came home because the university has closed down.

So, this is what we've incorporated employed. And what it's enabled us to do is to build greater empathy to connect with others, and to understand what they're going through as we engage with them in a conversation, in a remote setting. We've also been able to leverage these icons. And these images statuses in our, in our internal messaging system, we will put that as our as our working persona.

So that when I reach out to talk with you, I cannot Excuse me. I can automatically anticipate exactly what you're going through and get a sense of that, where we put them in our e-mails, so other people could connect as well.

Very powerful, because it really helped us to understand and lunge forward into our voice to the employee survey results, which I'm going to share with you here shortly.

But again, I want to stop to reflect, And I want to learn, and I want you to think about these questions. Reflect on your company's roles, titles, and demographics.

What is it that they're currently experiencing feeling or going through?

There's so much going on right now. What? But what is it that they are feeling? Because chances are, if they're feeling it may be as well, what keeps them up at night? What's what is it that worries them and worries you?

And again, what can you take back to your company?

So I'm going to proceed forward. In the interest of time. We then took these working personas and we said, what is the voice of the employee? We want to help shape the future. We want to understand what they're going through during this current environment. We also want to know what we can do to help them through this transition that I showed you on the earlier slide.

By doing so, it gave us so many wonderful insights, things that we would have never known, like, hey, 8% of our staff is feeling less than OK mentally, emotionally. What can we do to address that?

So, that's a very powerful thing, 8% may sound low, but that's an important aspect to that person, and to all of us, we realized that 90% of our managers are feeling supported and communicating well.

We then came to a realization that, as we look toward the future of work, 95% of our employees want some kind of aspect of working remotely in the air in their future.

With LogMeIn, many, many, many other metrics that you can see some here on the screen, and we've continued to iterate on, but the area that we felt and saw, probably the most impact was the ones where they were children at home.

Because all of a sudden, parents are now parents. They're workers. And oh, by the way, you're also a teacher or principal.

All of these things, and you're trying to remember fifth grade algebra and nobody remembers how to do that. But yet you're expected to help your children with their homework on doing these things. So we tried to figure out how we could help these different personas. And by surveying and getting their voice, and understanding what they were going through, inequality to and quantitative way, we were able to get actual data driven approach. So you can see here some of our personas. We asked them a question and some of the results, so you can see the blue as great as an example, and orange is good, and so on down the scale here at the bottom, we're also to gather the employee sentiment and a summary and visual to see, what is it that stands out, what is this focus?

So we promised them along the way, as we introduced this, that we would share these results with them. We wanted them to know, we're trying to do something to make things better, and we know that you are most important resource.

So rather than just sending an e-mail or sending a PowerPoint or something to that effect, we decided to go with those options, but we directed them to a common sight in our internal workings.

And we created these videos that became very powerful. Because here's an example of a colleague that I worked with and that I had a chance to have a conversation with, just like using the technology that we're using today. We were able to have a conversation and connect with each other, even though we're miles and miles apart, even in other countries. And it helped not only us to have that conversation to help their employees to say there's somebody else out there just like me going through the same thing. Or if, they just appreciate the ability to have that social interaction, see their colleagues and employees as a reminder that we are still human.

There's, as we've been able to progress through this. There's been additional outcomes that we've experienced, huge increase via empathy.

Couple of things here on this, on the slides, you can see we've increased our self-awareness and our emotional intelligence. That's been very powerful to help us get through this process.

We've been able to start conversations on mental health. What was once taboo, is now like, how are you? Let's understand what we can do. How do our benefit packages help us? What can those vendors do to support us supporting our employees through that? There's so much going on with racial injustices. Some of the events that we're all experiencing across the globe with protest, June was pride month, so on and so on with different things.

We had. we actually had, as an example, at LogMeIn, with all the, as a reflection of the experience, we had a forum for all of the employees at our company who are african american or black, we allowed them to speak and feel it.

They're experiences like, so we can actively listen and learn from that as well.

It's very, very powerful, very important event for us. We had other things like the ability to contribute to those first responders, schools, government, we were able to help the University, so we're able to give back to our community. And that was, helped us to commit to those kinds of things. And tech compaq's, so that we feel like diversity and inclusion as a key part of all of this.

But the last thing it really helped us to do is understand self bias, whether it's intended run or not, it exists. And so, we want to understand this, And we're beginning that journey today with an understanding our own biases as well.

So I'm going to stop, reflect, and learn. What does your company and your culture say to your employees about hearing? And acknowledging their voice. How will you know what your employees need, or what they're feeling or thinking?

And what can you take back to your company on Monday as well?

Last bits I want to share with you is the future of work.

For us, this is kind of, I like these pictures because it's a kind of a summary of what the options are, right?

You could be going back to a commute. You could go back to the office, but is the office going to be the same as what you experienced in the past?

Or do you just want to stay at home and work from home?

So we provided these five options across the top: No remote, remote allowed, some kind of hybrid combination, a remote bias, or 100% all rima.

We've leaned for LogMeIn in our culture and our needs based upon our story.

We're going with the remote bias dependent, and what that means is the ability to transition from the Office based culture to a more talent based approach.

You can see all the different comparisons, as you look at these two columns, as to what that means and what that looks like. A remote bias means, instead of being based on a certain headquarters and coming into the office every day. Let's give flexibility in scheduling. Let's find the talent where they are. Let's get the best of what we can do.

You may see on the screen here our EFS where it says Koester rafts or savings of reps that's real estate and facilities so consider these aspects as you're thinking about your story gored culture as you go back to your office.

So what is the future of the office?

I think that's the question we all want to understand and hopefully why we're here today.

I don't think that there's a universal formula or a blanket statement we can all make.

But these are some of the things that we predict based upon what we're going through.

What we're seeing from some of our are colleagues in different industries, what we're hearing from our customers, from goto Meeting, and GoToWebinar and what we're learning from market research as well. Offices will still exist, and there'll be brick and mortar. But it's going to look a lot different in terms of the capacity and how we use them. So maybe, as we transition to remote working, maybe these offices become a hub.

Maybe they become a place for us to socially interact for special key events or trainings or projects or social gatherings. So we still have that ability to have our social fabric.

That's important to our company on our employees, OK, if we don't have real estate and facilities, does that mean that we can apply those funding in that budget towards something else? To help our employees while they work from anywhere, maybe a stipend for equipment to set up their office? Or maybe just to send them thank you notes, and chuck and swag and gifts and things like that.

The other key question I want to encourage you to think about is, what is legal? What is practical, and what is sustainable?

I think that's the key framework that we're using, LogMeIn, to help us determine the future of the office and the future of work with our employees. It all be. It would be great if we could all go work in Hawaii.

Is that practical? Is it sustainable? Is it realistic?

How do we navigate the office in Cove? In 19 situations?

If we return back into work that way, then the ability to work remotely requires a lot of trust. So we have to empower our employees to do their job and let them know that they can do it.

So I'm going to stop here on this last stop, reflect, and learn, and I want you to ask yourself again about your story.

What are you looking forward to about going back to the office, or working remotely or in a hybrid mode?

What have you learned during this recent event? Because it's not all been negative. There's been some positive things if you stop, and you look for What have you learned, and what can you re-evaluate going forward to to apply to the future of your work?

Then, of course, what can you take back on Monday?

I'm going to pause here for Q&A.

Jose, if you would like to join us to ask those questions or Brian, now's a great time.

I look forward to it.

Good to go, Douglas, so I'm going to ask you to stop sharing your presentation so that the audience can see us on their screen and that and I'm looking at, you know any questions that are coming on here and I want to I want to ask you.

Let me, let me pop up the, the question panel here, and the.

Tell me a little bit about the, the follow up that you did at, at the company as you as, as you roll out.

Initiative, if you will, if you want to call it, that, or something else. But also the you mentioned the videos that you had and, uh, and I'm curious how you can gage the impact of doing something like that with the, with the professionals in their organization.

Yeah, that's a great question and so, I'll give you some examples of real dividends and the impact that has made.

Um, we have received a flood of e-mails from our employees.

And to me, when you get these kinds of e-mails, where the employee just chooses to send you an e-mail that says, thank you so much, we're doing this.

It really helped me to connect with others who helped me to get through this time, and just the fact that we're doing these things shows that we care about them, that is powerful, right there in itself. So, we've been able to get multiple e-mails from our employees, and that way, number one, Number two, we've seen our productivity or engagement, our performance and our productivity. Just go through the roof. And, we feel like that's because, the employees feel like, we know that we're focused on them, we value their voice in the process, and, we can easily come out and say, Hey, this is the future of work, and this is what we're going to do.

And, what we did, we dictate.

But, we want to incorporate them in the process. And they're responding heads over tails over over overwhelmingly in favor of this. And of course, we hear, you know, people share with us through various conversations here and their water cooler talk and things like that, about what it means to them. And so, those are different pulses that we can take from our employees to understand the impact that is truly truly making.

Very good. At Douglas wherein, the organization does the, the assessment, the planning, and then the follow up. Execution takes place for our group of people are getting involved in doing that type of assessment.

Great question. For us.

So it was a team, to determine the future of work, and this transition to from the office, to working from home or from anywhere.

It's not any one person. We had to have facilities involved. We had to HR involved legal. And both, we had to have our global site leaders to be able to advocate and communicate locally to check back with this on a two-way dialog on what they're seeing and feeling from their employees. Our leadership team, obviously, was a key part of that as well. But our change management team was a key part of it, to help us understand how, to navigate this, how to get the employee sentiment, and build that empathy as, we're all going through this to empathize and really connect with them on this little. So I would encourage you to look at your teams and based upon what your story and your organization holds, who are those key players And stakeholders that can help you to make those decisions, and build your strategic approach.

Very good.

one of the comments that we had, and that, And I'm looking at the question panel here, And, also related to the, so, the context is this sum. Is this an activity that is, would you categorize it as an employee engagement type of activity? As, you know, a lot of active organizations have very somewhat traditional and structure employee engagement surveys, and follow up is this part of that is just a different category altogether. How would you contextualize an empathy program like that?

Yeah.
This was, uh, ad hoc. I totally understand what you mean by that because historically, we had, we typically had your checkpoints, like, you know, mid year, end of the year, like employee scores and engagements, all these different things that most companies do. What's your, what's our NPS and are all those things for employee satisfaction.

So, this was completely ad hoc, because those sir, typical, and traditional surveys are aimed at different aspects. This was really getting at the empathy and understanding what we're going through, a real scenario.

So, we look at, it has a unique opportunity to shape and mold the future of this, and we've been able to incorporate new products that can allow us to get real feedback. Just simply, maybe you visit a web page, and you said something like, Hey, click here, and tell us about your experience. We've been able to use that kind of artificial intelligence to say, Hey, employee, how are you feeling today? How are things going? We've been able to track and monitor that Rather than just constantly sending another? survey? And another survey notice of it, that's allowed us with an iterative approach to continue to monitor this and share those results At the different, global sites and focused on where we need to go.

Tell us a little bit more about how this emerged. Log me in Half, Rebecca was this? Was this more recent as a result of? What's happening with covert and everything else, or is this something that I started no earlier than that and and? How did that come about?

It came about.

So, I think it was, if I remember the exact day that we started sharing about covert our office or headquarters based in Boston, We have a lot of different connections there in that area.

And I read this article, and I was like, Hey, guys.

Isn't this right down the road? Because I don't work in Boston. I work in the Rocky Mountains here in the US, and I said, Hey, guys, isn't this right down the road from your head from headquarters?

And there was a big moment in Boston where a hotel convention at a huge spread of covert 19.

And that's where we started really scratching our heads, and I think that was, like, October of last year, Are like, what does, what does this do we really need to be paying attention. So obviously, we did, we didn't need to pay attention. And so that's really where it originated, And then we started brainstorming what what is this gonna look like? And we realize the true impact that this was having as we look globally and our employees there were experiencing this. Then we can see that it was proliferating across the globe. So we realized we need some kind of strategy and our approach to be able to address that. And so, using some experiences from change management, we were able to build these worksheets personas, and then, hey, let's understand that sentiment and incorporate surveys.

And by putting it into a platform on our intranet internally, that's been able to give them a resource where they can go to get resources, information, to help themselves, to help their teammates out there, individual contributors on their team, as managers, and have a one stop location for all of this to make that experience even better.

So it's it's been kind of a balding and iterative process as we learn more.

And tell us more about the body of knowledge that this is based on, and then really within the organization who was the person who identified this as an opportunity? Was that you, or is it someone else the organization who saw that as an opportunity? And then once that was realized, how did you approach it? I mean, how, how did you think about addressing the, with this approach?

Millimeter mm, so, It was Art, it was the team that I work on change operations within LogMeIn. We started becoming the driver of this idea. We were all kind of looking around at each other as we were having these daily huddles about, you know, curve in 19, here's the update, here's the situation and Guatemala, here's the situation in Budapest. Here's the situation in Los Angeles wherever we were located, and we're all grappling for answers like many of us are today.

We just started putting our collective ideas and thoughts and experiences together. And from our change management team, we were able to share.

We've done this similar before. We could use working personas, which would really connect with the people, and would help build that empathy. And then we started building that platform, and we got such favorable response to that. That it allowed us to take the next step, and the next step, and the next step, because we figured out what we needed to do and make that look like.

And so that's where the voice of the employee came in, and then responding to that voice of the employee, to do things, and share those results with them, so that they knew we were taking their voice series and it just kind of proliferate proliferate it from there.

one last question here with the time that we have a lot of, and that is on. I want, I wonder if, as you do this internally, and you have success, and in you, and you'll learn even more about this, the benefits of this approach. I wonder if you, in the organization, have considered If this would make sense on the, on the customer experience journey, or perhaps, you know, deploying this at the customer level to have a higher level of empathy for, for the customers in times like this. Is that something that has been talked about? Is that something that you think may be a natural progression?

Yeah, yeah. It's lead us to that, actually. And that's a love that you brought it up. So thank you.

Once we saw the results and experience of this, we stopped, and we thought, wait a minute, this could apply in different ways. Right? And so we certainly wanted to understand what our customers were going through as well. So we started leveraging different approaches of a similar approach.

An effort to achieve the same thing and empathize with what they're going through. Because obviously, the customers are going through a lot of this as well. They have to make business decisions on top of that. They're looking to us for support and guidance with products and services. So how do our salespeople, how to our care center people, when they get these kinds of questions and the challenges that they're facing, how do they connect with them, how do they help them, how do they support them through all of this. So, empathy came in there, and then we were able to understand, you know, what, what are some of the small business SNB area is going through. What are some of the enterprise areas experiencing? And taking that data, and our, and our voice of the customer program, and building this altogether, and putting a package together through our marketing efforts to suggest different resources and materials to support them along the way.

Now, fascinating journey. I can't wait to see, you know, how things progressed in the months and years ahead on as you go down this path. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your experience with us and the insights. We really appreciate that.

Well, thank you so much for the opportunity to be here, and it's a privilege, and thank you for the opportunity to meet all of you and look forward to learning more. It's been a great experience.

Thank You Douglas.

Thank you. Goodbye.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, this concludes, they chew of digital transformation workplace live. Let's take a peek at what's happening tomorrow, shall we? Tomorrow, we start the day with how to drive true digital transformation. With a unique methodology that generates results, and we're going to have Sarah ... who leads global digital operations for Honeywell discussing that with us. It's gonna be a fascinating the reveal of how Honeywell is approaching their digital transformation journeys. So you do not want to miss that. After that, we're going to have intelligent automation and share services from future pipe industries, and the ..., Ramaswamy, he's gonna describe. He's a senior general manager and head of share services for the organization.

He's going to talk about how they have been automating share services at scale. So, using RPA, artificial intelligence, and take into account the impact of the pandemic and the impacts on their operations, that will be followed up by. Camera, Shahan, Shahi, and camera is going to lay out the foundation of advancing analytics in Finance. Camera is the former vice president of Global Finance, Strategy and transformation for a Walgreens, and he's gonna come at this with a lot of great experience, and in the fight on, on the use of advanced analytics, specifically in the context of finance.

And we're gonna wrap up the day tomorrow with a session on digital transformation opportunities, in production use cases, in the, our aerospace industry, from no less than high call weitz, who is going to be talking to us from Europe directly. And he is a leader for these, are transformation and rolls, Royce. So, we're gonna have a great organization and a great experience leader. He has spent 2 or 3 decades office leadership journey on a rolls royce. And he's gonna share that to us on how an experience leader is transforming our business digitally and our organization of a scale and the impact like Rolls Royce. So thank you so much for being with us here today to connect with us on LinkedIn. There's a conversation, Multiple conversations going on, LinkedIn, If you have comments about the sessions, we have, if you have questions, connect with others, Go to LinkedIn. Look under my name is Joseph Ferris on LinkedIn, and you're gonna find multiple conversations going on there. And engage with us. We'll be answering questions and commentary.

Throughout the day.

Also, as you close this last session today, you always have an opportunity to provide feedback right within the goto Webinar interface and let us know what's working well, what's not working so well, what we can do differently for you. But, for now, thank you so much for joining us from all these different places around the globe. I hope to see you back here in the in the morning, San Antonio, Texas time, whatever time it is for you in other parts of the world. So, thank you. Have a great rest of your day.