Session Information:

XLA 2.0 – The Secret to Great Employee Experience in 2022

The pandemic has focused our attention on the experience of our employees as they work remotely or in a hybrid office. Companies are scrambling to understand and improve employee experience in order to attract and retain talent.

Business leaders are also seeing a strong connection between a great employee experience and a great customer experience. Weston will share his insights as to how CIOs are measuring and improving the experience of their digital workers through the use of eXperience Level Agreements (XLAs). In this session, Weston promises to answer these questions:

•   What is an XLA?
•  What will XLA 2.0 look like?
•   What is required to see an ROI on XLAs?
•   What are 3 insights that a great employee experience program can provide business leaders?
•  What are the 4 things I need to do when starting my employee experience program?

Session Transcript:

More is Global Strategy Digital Workplace Services Leader at Unisys Corporation, less than is the Global Director for Digital Workplace Strategy at Unisys. He was named one of the top 25 thought leaders in end user experience by HDI for 2022. He is the creator of the Digital Workplace Deep Dive podcast, and a guest host on x.l.a.

TV, less than what an honor and privilege to have you with us, sharing your wisdom and expertise about digital transformation, and employee experience with our, with our global audience today.

Well, she'll say, I tell you, I really appreciate the invitation, and look forward to meeting your audience and sharing some of our experience with experience, experience management.

As you mentioned, I am the creator of the Visual Workplace Deep Dive Podcast, guest host on Exploit TV.

And what that means is, I get to, know, interview really, the smartest folks that are out there, the people that are really driving experienced management, that are looking at, you know, how to advance the digital workplace.

And and with x.l.a.

is how to measure it and actually do something proactively to improve experience.

So, in today's session here, here's what I plan to cover. We'll talk a little bit about the challenges of the hybrid Office. We're all moving back to the hybrid office. Many of you are already there.

We're seeing, with some of the data that we collect, over eight million virtual calls that we track last year. So, I'll be sharing some of the data we've gotten from that, and what are some of the trends. We'll talk about what does an X.l.a. X.l.a.

one, and looking beyond to X.l.a. two, and how to actually get real value from from using SLAs and actually going even further, connecting it all the way from not just employee experience.

But looking at your customer experience and how these two are intimately related.

And I'll be sharing some recommendations with some of the things that the lessons learned, that been collecting a part of our client base as part of the podcast, and an x.l.a. TV. So, let's, let's start off with a little quiz here. I want to, I'm going to show you a picture.

I don't wanna ask you, what is wrong with this hybrid office.

So you're seeing there, you're looking OK, It looks like they're their hybrid. That's awesome there. Some people are in the office, some people are remote. They've got the technology.

They've got some sort of communication and collaboration technology. They must have microphone speakers. Video. There might even be a smart whiteboard in the room.

But they're not affective, right? What's happened here? It's the behavior.

They've switched from being digital to analog.

For whatever reason they are hovering around this piece of paper, This document this blueprint. The people in the room are collaborating.

But it's like collaborating from 20 18. Remember when we had had remote meetings? Everyone in the room was, was there, and we sometimes forget to connect the people remotely. Oh yeah, it's very N O. Tony, you're, you're connected, you have anything to add?

You're definitely a second class citizen.

This experience parody didn't exist.

And there's this danger of returning to that, that behavior, even though you have the technology when you come back into this hybrid office. So, that's something that we need to figure out. How do we address? How do we address?

Not just the technology, but they hate the behavior side of things.

Something else I'd like to mention too.

We monitor the UC experience, the unified Communication, and Collaboration Experience for over 150 companies worldwide.

We've got a platform power suite that lets us really figure out what's going on with the quality of the calls and the video.

And what's really happening and one of the things that we saw is from the beginning of the pandemic: Well into it, we saw an average of 400% increase and video calls.

And that's, I guess, you'd say, that's to be expected.

Everyone is, you know, not connected remotely, but now, we've started to see that level off.

And we're actually seeing, with some of our more, I'll say, advanced customers.

Up to a 20% drop, in the video conversations. Now, you might say, Well, what's happening in there? Are we are, we just forgetting how to use that.

Know, what's happening here is, they're improving the experience.

You've probably heard the expression XOOM bloom, or the suffering with too many teams meetings back to, back to back calls and meetings.

That, that has been a very frustrating and discouraging part of this whole, you know, move towards hybrid and virtual, is the fact that, you know, we're spending far too much time in these meetings.

What we're finding is, as people are figuring out, What is the right way to have a meeting. Should I have it have this many, Should I allow, like, a 5, 10 minute break at the end of a call?

Just like we're having here, you've got a 15 minute break in between to actually do something, or to react to your notes, to capture experiences, to do a little, you know, bio break or something like that.

So that's actually, we're seeing happening here.

This is a tapering off of the number of calls as people figure out, how to, you know, have a better experience and do things better.

So that really leads up to a second challenge that we're seeing, and that is, I was thinking that when people went to a hybrid office, the people in the office would have the better experience. The people remotely would have the worst experience and that can happen. We see that in this picture.

But the reverse is also true.

What happened when we all went home?

If we think about the Zoom calls and Teams calls prior to the pandemic we didn't have our cameras on so much when we got when we were all remote. We realized, Man, we need this personal connection. Hey, the cameras are helping with that. We got used to having our cameras on.

So, what happens now?

You have buildings shut down for two years, people coming back into the office, and what are they doing with their resume and their teams calls, They're turning on their camera, and the experience isn't good.

Why?

Because, well, the building wasn't set up with the Internet capability to have everybody in the building trying to pump video out that same building, maybe inside the building. The internet is good enough, but once you get out, it's just not. They didn't have that pipe setup for it. Or, or the quality of the cameras and good or the top of the microphone isn't as good as what you had at home.

Or you're in a big, you know, kind of a bullpen and with glass walls and high ceilings and the noise is just terrible, you can't even communicate because of all the noise of the other people. So, we're actually seeing two reasons why experience in the Hybrid Office can be negative.

So that's why it's so important.

I think that kinda sets the stage for us to talk about measuring experience. And so we're gonna answer the question, I mean, what is an x.l.a.?

I mean, that is a, a way an experience level agreement of actually, you know, even contractually measuring the experience that IT is providing to your end users.

So I think many people are familiar with what I would call ... one. That's kinda what we see here.

They've deployed a digital experience management tool like ..., Taki on, or maybe next thing or something like that.

And it's got a dashboard and it's showing you the experience of the PC, PC happiness I call app.

And that's a very important part of my experience. As a user, if my laptop's having a bad day, I'm probably having a bad day. So it's good to measure that, proactively.

But in addition to that, people are rolling in some sort of people happiness, periodic survey, very much focused on IT, and what's your experience there. And those are very important components, but I will say, let's look ahead to x.l.a.

two, which includes much, much more. It's much richer. I mean, where do we spend most of our time?

We're certainly using a device, but it could be a laptop, a smartphone, or tablet.

But it's the technology, it's this unified communication and collaboration platform. We're in WebEx right now. You might be in teams and an hour. He might be zoom later on in the day.

This is where we're spending much of our day.

We need to measure, you see, happiness.

What is going on with the quality of my calls? What is going on with the reliability?

And, then behind the scenes, know, the CIO and the CISO Wants to know, Is it secure? Are we compliant?

So, these things really need to be measured and there's been a challenge with doing that out of the box and we're suggesting you need to have a platform in place that lets you measure your UC experience. And another thing to consider is not just measuring, you know, experience for everybody the same way. I mean, that's how you start off with actually one.

But, we're recommending to think about personas.

Think about specific roles in your organization who might need a different experience.

Then someone else, think about your people in the field, your sales organization. Think about someone on a manufacturing floor who doesn't have a PC. They're using a shared kiosk.

Think about, maybe if you're in development of research and development team, research scientists, they need specialized equipment and special care.

Once you establish your base x.l.a., thinking about it by persona is a really, really important part of the story here. And the other thing to consider, at the very bottom, you'll notice this digital adoption. What do I mean by that?

You need to track, as you're rolling out your digital transformations, that's what this whole conference is all about, looking at different digital transformations. As you're rolling them out, Like, say, moving from you know, voice to chat on your service desk. Or rolling out a cloud based HR tool, like Workday or something like that.

As you're doing these digital transformations.

How well is it being adopted, tracking that by different users, different regions, and seeing what's going on with that adoption, and then reacting to it?

That's another important part of your experience.

Now, all of this is a waste of time, a complete waste of time, if you don't do something with the experience data.

And that's why this is where things fail So often is not having this experience management organization.

It's a group of people that are looking at this data and asking, what is it telling me?

And just being curious slicing and dicing it, Hey, I wonder what's going on in Europe? I wonder what's going on with my sales team. I wonder what's going on with HR?

And then, digging into each of these measures.

The PC happiness, the UC happiness, the survey data, and discovering what might be going wrong, but you're not hearing solely from the service desk.

You know, you find people that are suffering in silence and then do something with that data.

Figure out OK, they've got a problem.

What's going wrong with that and how can I resolve that?

So, that's, that's the first thing that we can do with this. This XML can start resolving problems that people have with, you know, their bad experience and better yet doing it proactively.

You know, don't wait for them to call and say, I'm suffering.

You identify it with this data.

But even more than that, the XML can actually see things that need to be changed with how you're delivering your services.

Or maybe a new service is needed.

Such as, you know, maybe the process for onboarding is painful, or maybe how you procure a new laptop get a replacement device is painful?

Maybe that whole new service needs to be re work this IT service.

But even better than that, once this X demos in place, once you've got x.l.a.'s in place, especially if you're monitoring by persona, you now have the ability to actually provide feedback to the business.

So the business is rolling out initiatives, right?

There may be something that at your company, a merger and acquisition, HR may have some sort of onboarding program where they're trying to attract talent.

There may be a technology rollout that's going across the whole company.

Any of these digital transformations, very likely, if you've got this experienced management organization in place, they've got some insights as to what's actually going on. Is it successful? Is it failing? Who's suffering? Who is who's adopting it? Who's not?

And this information is super valuable, as an insight, back to the business leaders.

And I think this is, when I had, I had this aha moment: that this is where we really want to go.

I mean, now, I'm connecting all the way to our customers, because the business initiatives are all about revenue, and growth, and customers, and we're seeing a connection, a very strong connection between poor customer experience, being tracked back to poor employee experience.

If I, as an employee, don't have the tools, and the processes and services I need to do my job, it makes it hard for me to give our customers a great experience.

So let's talk a bit more about this XML. Why it's needed.

We'll talk about some of the lessons learned that we're seeing as we work with organizations. I'm introducing this idea of guardrails, versus speed limits.

And I can't claim authorship for this. This is something that smart people in our organization have shared with me, and I really like the idea. So what's the difference between a guardrail and a speed limit?

When you think about a Guardrail is something that IT we do this really well, in IT, we can lock stuff down, Right?

We can, we can put in rules in place that you can't do this, and you can't do that, and we say it's for security and for compliance, And, and it usually is.

But these are the types of things that, for example, we've, let's talk about Teams.

Who can create a Team Workspace? What are some rules on sharing documents?

For example, you know your finance organization, You may want to put in a rule that prevents them from creating a team or joining a team that has any outside.

No guests, because you don't want your finance team to accidentally share something that, you know, doesn't, doesn't belong on the front page of the newspaper. You know, or are there some sort of regulation preventing it?

You could influence. You could have naming conventions. That make it very clear that this team allows guests, this team does not allow guests and who has access to those.

You could be looking at your call quality and in determining that most of your poor quality calls might be coming from your remote users in South Africa.

And then, one of the things we're able to do is to look at, you know, through crowdsourcing, which ISP has the best service in that region.

And then saying, that's that's a requirement you must. If you're gonna work from home, you must be using this ISP if you're going to have a, you know, conduct effective business.

So those are, those are examples of some guardrails, things that that I think as a IT. We do pretty well. But what about speed limits? I don't mean, I don't mean to speed on the right, pull you over and give you a ticket.

I'm talking about, like this, perhaps you've been driving through a neighborhood, and you saw the sign like this, where it's saying, hey, it's below 25 and it starts flashing you're going forwarding.

There's kind of some peer pressure that, Hey, you're not being a good citizen here. Maybe you should slow down. There's kids here or something like that.

You're being influenced to change your behavior.

I didn't force you to do it, but I'm encouraging you through some sort of IT to make that happen. So what are some examples? Perhaps I could get a notification that says, Hey, in our department, we've got 200 Microsoft Teams.

They have only one administrator.

And the recommendation is to have multiple administrators, because what happens if that perfect person's away, or they leave the company, and now you can't make any changes to that team, you know, so that's the best practice that we can inform you about.

or something else.

Like, did you know that maybe 40% of your employees are using non certified Teams devices?

You know, maybe they're using air pods, that they think are great, but everyone else on the call goes, Man, I can't wait for that person to get a real, you know, headset. that gives me get some good quality, because I just can never understand them.

Giving you information about that is an example of this, The speed limit, or maybe even further, all the way to wellness, like, we could begin to detect.

That.

Gives you a report that says, you know, Most of your people are in seven plus hours of, of teams or Zoom meetings a day.

Here's some suggestions about how to reduce your meetings or to be more effective in your meetings. So the reality is, you need both, you need both the guardrails.

You need the speed limits.

And, and you can do this more effectively when you have this XML in place looking at both the PC happiness and the UC happiness.

Now, it's, It's clear that IT is really good at deploying new technology.

What we're not so good at is educating people that it's coming. You know, that this is the new technology here. We kind of surprise people.

Now, I know if you're in IT and you're listening or way, I've taken exception to that. We send out a lot of e-mails, you know, about a new technology that's coming.

We posted it on the company, you know, internal homepage that's been there for a month.

Why are people surprised?

That is part of communicating the change that's coming.

But it's, it's only the beginning.

You think about it, what else do you need to share?

There's really four questions that we recommend that you cover.

If you're going to build some new technology, provide new technology, and expect people to come and participate willingly, You first need to explain what the change is.

OK, and you say you probably have done that, but you need explain why this changes coming. And there may be too wise. There may be a why that's benefiting the business. It might be about cost, right?

We're doing a cost reduction, and this is a new technology that lets us do that, but are there benefits to me as a user?

Well, we'll explain that.

That's going to make me want to participate in it, show me what's changing.

And then, if I have to do something for this to be successful, explain that to me, what is changing for me, and how do I participate in this?

And then, the last question, You need to make me comfortable that when this change takes place, and something goes wrong, you're going to help me. You've got my back.

So show me, you know, how, you've got me covered.

Where can I get help, you know, if I'm confused or still unclear about how to use this Or if I have a problem with it.

That's really what the industry calls, organizational change management.

It's, it is almost like guerrilla marketing to educate and train people and give them the desire to participate in this new digital transformation super important and so often missing in most digital transformations.

And I just did a podcast recently with some folks that are really good at this. Gillian Oakes mentioned some of the things that she is doing and her and her, some of her ...

activities that I would call, you know, kind of like bleeding edge marketing techniques used inside of the company. So it's going beyond signage.

She's done something where they've had a videos of leaders in the organization saying here's what's changing.

Here's why it's changing and maybe doing a different video for different regions or different parts of the business, speaking specifically to their people.

You know that kind of a heart to heart interview as to what's changing and why Gamification is being used.

For example, one customers moving from a phone based support to chat, and so they implemented gamification where like every 50th person to use the new technology. You know, gets a surprise, a coffee cup with a company logo or something like that, You know, just innovative things that go beyond just sending out an e-mail or posting it on the company portal.

And we're seeing some real results from this one customer that moved from you know voice the chapter up to like 99% usage of chapped, one of our clients.

I mentioned how video calls went up like 400% on the average during the pandemic.

And now now we're seeing like an 18% drop in video usage due to people being educated about what makes an effective meeting.

How to be effective in your meetings, have fewer meetings, only invite the people that are really needed and, and really be effective.

So, this only happens when you have true organizational change management and you get feedback about how successful this is from your XM.

Oh, your experience management organization, they're seeing the data, the real data, about whether people are participating in the end, using the new technology, and how effective it is.

So, one more thing I'd like to talk about is, as we and IT are collecting this experience data, we are able to have a new conversation with a different part of the company than we've had before.

What am I talking about?

I'm talking about the ability for the CIO and the ...

to start to have a conversation and to talk about things that are new and completely different. Let me just give you a quick example here.

As part of all of this experience, the data that we're collecting, the CIO through the Experienced Management Organization, is now seen what is happening with changes in experience almost on a real-time basis.

You know, a lot of times, HR does an annual survey.

They might do it more frequently, maybe quarterly or something like that. Just imagine if your company did a survey at the end of 2018, 20 19. I mean.

And then 4 or 5 months later, you wanted to know what's the experience of your employees as they're starting the pandemic and everybody working from home Is that survey data of any value that you did it, you know, six months earlier, probably not.

It gets, it's out of date because a major change has taken place.

But if you have an experienced management organization in place, and they're collecting PC happiness, collecting you, see happiness slicing and dicing that by personas.

And having specific measures in place, they would very much be able to see what is going on almost real time with your, with your employees, as they're experiencing this big change. Same thing, as they come back into the office.

Experienced management organization is able to see what's really going on, and to report these changes.

Now, the CIO is normally looking at experience management to figure out how to improve, you know, the part that they control, the digital workplace experience, the IT, the technology.

They're not thinking about, you know, true HR things, like health benefits, or pay, or things like that.

However, but this is an opportunity now for HR and the CIO, the CHR on the CIO, to get together and have a conversation. And it should be a bi directional flow of information.

So, what do I mean by that was an example here.

The the X M O couldn't be detecting that this new rollout of Teams, or whatever the changes that's taking place in the company, it's going really well.

Most people are accepting it, or for whatever reason, all the engineers in the Milan office are unhappy with, specifically around this team's rollout, that that's where it's being detected.

Now, there may be more under the surface, then it's, you know, maybe it isn't just teams, Maybe it's how the management is imposing the usage of teams or the fact they feel that they're in meetings non-stop. You know, it's more of a behavioral thing, not the technology, but who sees it first.

The CIO saw that, through the X, M O, through SLAs.

Now, what should he or she do with that information?

Would be great to go over to the ...

and share that with him or her, and say, Here's an experience.

Here's some very important experience or information I'd like to share with you. We're able to deal with part of it, but there may be more going on here.

And you may have a job retain retaining problem with, with our engineers, specifically in Milan, and if we lose those engineers, our ability to produce the next product is just going to disappear.

So we see that's an important flow of information that the SLAs and the XML can almost be an early indicator that something's going on with your employees that you need to share with the EHR.

Now, what about the opposite flow of information: What can the ...

share with the CIO that would impact the impact, the digital workplace experience?

Well, the ...

has access to exit interviews. Why are people leaving the company?

They also have access to information about attracting talent.

When people, when they make a job offer, and the person declines, and they say why they, they don't accept that job, the HR department is getting some insights.

Some of them may be benefits. Some of them may be, you know, pay things like that, where they can work.

But, there's other requirements that are now coming over to the CIO.

Hey, we can't bring people on board because we're not allowing remote work.

Hey, we can't bring people on board because we don't have a great way of having people collaborate and communicate with good technology.

Or, when they come into the office, they've seen what the office is like, and it's just, thus, they will, they need smart meeting rooms.

They need the ability to come in and collaborate and work with people remotely where everybody has experienced parody.

HR can't fix that, but HR is detecting it and HR can share that and should share that as requirements, what the digital workplace needs to be, what the experience needs to be with the CIO.

So, hopefully, that's clear.

This bidirectional flow of information is, it is, is a new one that's possible, primarily because CIOs now, paying attention, two employee experience, and that you really can make a difference when you have that, that broad communication between the CIO and the CHR.

I'd like to, now just take a quick step back, look back, this is something in the news that I referred to in a conference I did a year ago and I thought, you know, is there a lesson learned here?

As we know, two years later we're coming out of the pandemic Hybrid Office. What can we learn from this? What can we learn from an eight year old school girl?

Perhaps you remember this in the news that Sophia was her name. She was interviewed on the news.

It she discovered, when she was forced to, as all kids where many kids were to do homeschooling and do it by, by XOOM, that she entered her password in wrong, twice in a row, Zoom would be locked out for the whole day.

There was nothing he could do to bring her back into school. Once you've figured this out, she was doing it for like a couple of weeks. She log in, but reboot, mom schools broken. And then, mom had to spend time with IT, trying to figure out how to get her connected.

The IT person was trying to do it remotely. They didn't have the technology to figure out what was going on.

It wasn't until, her hand was in the same room, kind of looking over her shoulder, seeing her type in the password twice. So if you had turns around his mom, schools.

Oh hi, and realized, that was the cause of the problem. It was bad behavior.

On the part of Sofia that was making this happen and as a result, you may saw this if you had to write this little thank you for apology note or school for wasting so much time you know, and and giving such a hard time.

You know, kind of a cute little story, but what does this tell us? What does this teach us?

I mean it shows us that work has changed. Keeping people productive in a remote model, in a hybrid model, in a flexible model is challenging. You can't just rely on your old methods of supporting people and figuring out what's going wrong. You definitely need to have something new, and that's what leads to, my, my recommendations, my four recommendations that I would just like to share with you here.

The first recommendation is, clearly, no technology is needed, You heard in the previous session.

Eric talks about the importance of automation.

I'm talking to you here about the importance of being able to monitor what's going on with PC happiness and UC happiness and those sorts of things.

And there's a people component, no matter what you do, You have to take into account people and behavior, and and you're dependent upon them, using this technology, in many cases, for you to be successful.

The second recommendation is, if you're not measuring experience, now, really, my recommendation is to start looking at it.

SLAs is an industry term for a way of doing this. And that's something that there's a lot of thought going on as to how you can do that. And I'll share some links that will help you further in that endeavor.

But even if you do that, even if you're measuring experience, it is a waste of time.

If all you do is have a dashboard that says, Taobao, your experience for employees is 6.8 and it was 6.4 or last week.

I mean, who cares? What difference does that make?

Unless you actually do something with it.

So you have to have In our case, this experience management organization is what we recommend to really be looking at that experience data, and to do something with it, to ask these questions, So what?

What's this telling me?

And once I realized that this is important, what now?

And if you don't get to that, what now, This is all a waste of time. You know, you're just costing money and you're not solving anything. when you get to that. What now, that's when you're making recommendations for change.

Either your proactively, no fixing the, the call quality problem for all your people in Texas.

Or you are going further, And you're saying, Hey, we need a whole new service here to automate how we onboard people.

You know, how do I get an order, a new piece of software, or a PC.

Those sorts of things are the types of changes that can come out of the XML.

And then lastly, as I alluded to, now that the CIO is measuring experience, there is a real opportunity to have this conversation between the CIO and the CHR bidirectional sharing information about experience requirements, about what the digital workplace should be coming from the ...

to IT.

And then all of this real-time experience data.

Sharing those insights with HR and beyond, with the business, so that you can make a connection.

Not just, you know, fixing employee experience, but going all the way to your customer experience as well.

Where can you get more information?

I'm on LinkedIn, so I'll provide my LinkedIn address here.

Love to hear from you, Love to hear your stories as to, you know, what's going on in your world.

The Digital Workplace Depo podcast.

We've got close to 40 episodes there now where I've interviewed both the people that are providing the technology, are providing the service, the leaders in this space. Tips on, you know, how to implement an x.l.a., what are some things to that to avoid?

If you're implementing x.l.a., if you know that people are doing wrong, Looking at it from a security perspective, looking at it from an HR perspective.

As well as the individuals who are, you know, different customers who are implementing this in the real world.

Similarly, very specifically, around x.l.a.. So, the Workplace Deep Dive covers all aspects of the digital workplace, not just experience.

But the ... TV is very much focused on experience. So, here, we have different channels.

There's a channel the climb, where we're versus the the new alchemists, where we're looking at.

The technology providers that are implementing SLAs, providing the technology to make it happen, versus the industries that are actually implementing SLAs and what is their experience? What are the lessons learned there?

There is a session on a channel on X.l.a.

Plus, where we look at how x.l.a.

is plus other initiatives, like, you know, digital experience, or ..., those sorts of sorts of initiatives or HR initiatives, how they are better together. There's a channel there on aha moments where people are sharing, Ah, this was the key thing that really made the difference for me as I was working with ..., So, I'd love to hear from you, perhaps.

Maybe you even like to be a guest and sharing your story on on either of these channels as well, But with that, I'd like to allow some time for questions, and we'd love to hear what you think about what you've heard here today.

Fantastic question. So, for, for our audience, want to remind you, I put the link also on the chat, we have on the posts for the conference, on there, my name, on LinkedIn. You can connect with every one of our speakers, because they are listed there. You can, you just need to click on their names, and you can send them a connection request, and that's under my name on LinkedIn, on their digital workplace transformation life. So great presentation, Western on a topic. As I look at the feedback in the comments. That. And questions that came up during your presentation is that? I think this is a topic that's new for a lot of our participants, and they're like, what is an x.l.a.? and and How? How do I use it enough course? You have you have gone through that?

App I think it would be helpful for them. if you could give a bit more of a of a specific? Example, I blow by blow on what is what what an experienced level agreement or x.l.a. looks Like? How do you set it up? You know, how, how do you decide what the x.l.a. will be? And so if you, if you can guide us for that, I think that could be with an example, I think that could be helpful.

Yeah, I just sat in on a workshop where the slaves were being developed for a particular customer, and so it starts with what can I measure?

And on the other side is, why am I doing this? You know, what? what's the point of measuring this? I would say that's really important to have in mind. Why am I doing this? What's the outcome? What is the experience that I'm expecting to get?

And then, looking back at what are all the different measures that I have?

So, if you clearly need to have a digital experience management tool in place that's collecting like PC happiness, we recommend you have a tool in place that's measuring the quality and experience of your UC experience, as well.

two different tools, collecting data in real time, and seeing trends, as well as some sort of survey. A lightweight survey that you do throughout the year. You don't do it once a year, cannot do it once a year. You know, a select population maybe once a month, about the IT experience.

And with those three things together, you can now begin to have an X Y. So what might be an example Annex? Like you might have an x.l.a. about what is the reliability of my digital workplace? You know what's the uptime? You're scared, and they are looking back at more detail, things. Like, how many crashes are there? Blue, screens of death?

You know, those sorts of things. How reliable is it? You may be looking at the performance of it, you know, how many of my machines out there are maxing out CPU, or have, you know, almost all their disk being consumed? And, and what can I do about that? You may be, look, having x.l.a. that's focused on, on the, the reliability or the, the experience of the site, like, the performance.

From a, from an experience point of view, we we can implement little micro transactions where we're seeing, you know, Is it responsive?

When I click on a web page or click on a button, does it feel responses? So, it may be that My CPU is 100%, and that's OK.

If it's Responsive. You know, if I have a three second delay, when I click on something on a break, is it something wrong? That's when you start to question the technology. So, measuring those sorts of things.

It is an example of an x.l.a., one moving texts. Like, to point out, you might be looking at, Well, what do I do as a business?

Know my an airline. Am I a fast food company? Am I a retail and consumer packaged goods? I'm a government agency.

And, what are my clients? What customers who are my customers and what are we delivering?

And start to put together an x.l.a. for that.

So, for example, if I'm a pharma, you might have an x-ray specifically for your research scientists, because they're key to you being able to develop the next drug.

You don't have them, they quit, they leave, or they're not productive.

You're going to be slow to market, and your competitor is going to beat you, and your customers then suffer as well.

So, putting together an experience that's tailored by persona, or perhaps a more general persona might be, Well, I want to measure my onboarding experience. What is, what is it like for a new employee, a new hire, as they, as they join the company, so that it's that they, you know, don't stumble and fall and they're quickly productive. So, those are some examples.

These are great examples, and that, that, that helps quite a bit on the understanding. And So is how do you evaluate this .... What is the, you know, do you end up with some sort of dashboard? You end up with a dashboard and survey results And some, how much of its, you know automated kind of information that's coming in and you're looking at? What does that look like? How do you, what does this site, typical cycle for evaluating this SLAs?

Yeah, what we're finding is because So, this is so new that it's probably challenging unless you build a custom, to have a single dashboard that pulls all of this together.

I mean, that's where things are going, but you may have multiple dashboards At this point in time. You may have your survey data, You may have one about the PC Experience, you may have another one about your UC experience.

And so that's one of the reasons why you need the ..., is so that they can look across these different dashboards, and then they need to start, no, no, just being curious and saying, OK, this is the score overall for my entire population.

I wonder what's happening with our folks, you know, with what's going on with the Ukraine right now. You think about Eastern Europe or my folks being affected there, what's going on in Hungary as an example? And, just look at that group of people, And you need to do that. You know, periodically well, constantly to see how things are changing. You're looking for trends. There's something going down.

And once you see that, then, you can ask the question, OK, here's the high level score that says it's going down.

But what's below that: Is it a technology thing? Is it a network thing? Is it, you know, purely a subjective thing. I just, you know, I'm anxious. I'm worried about work, or I'm worried about what's happening next.

That actually can come out, you know, through the survey data, which is something typically we only would have seen from an HR survey in the past.

Farewell. So we're looking to enhance the employee experience here with the systems that they use and their ability to perform their their their tasks and their jobs.

How, how do you engage those employees on building this x.l.a.? So what is a typical process that you follow for that?

So there's two types of engagement: There'll be the engagement with the organization too, as you say, build the SLAs to define what they are.

And that's going to be more with the leaders, You know, the folks that are in charge of it, even involves the business unit leaders. It could even involve HR. Ideally, we're not seeing much of that yet. It's, like, they don't turn us think IT gets it, or knows anything about it, and maybe we were struggling still. But we're moving in that direction. Right?

Those would be the key stakeholders to define what is it we need to measure.

Because remember, I said the very first thing is you look at two things. What can I measure, and then why am I doing this, and what are the outcomes? So those outcomes no, we're not going to invent that. That's business related.

So, so that, that process is how we start.

We look at what we can measure and then start know it really going through, almost like a checklist. We can measure hundreds of things, you know, like CPU and boot time and things like that, of crashes.

Does it matter?

We can measure it. Should we measure it?

And if we do measure it, where on the needle is pain, right? And that is something we'll set once for across the organization for X one and X Y two point, or you start to look at by persona. Maybe the pain is different.

Are different parts of the organization different for a contractor versus someone HR or someone in sales? Engagement.

When he first said engagement, I was thinking about once it's in place And you're rolling out new digital transformation that's kind of alludes to the organizational change management.

The section that I talked about once you're rolling something out.

You almost need this guerrilla marketing organization.

You really do need some of the understands O C M to work with you and to help you're your audience, the end users, just to see why this technology is in place, how they should use it, and what their role is, in making it successful.

That, that's very, very interesting, and that, when you, when you start building our SLAs, when you start executing on this ..., How do you assess value creation from this type of activity? I mean, what kind of things that you do to, to understand that there, there is a positive impact as a result of doing this exercise? Yeah, that that, if we don't get to that, you know, the CFO says, well, I spent a bunch of money on this, and what did I get out of it, right? Or the CEO, ultimately is going to ask that question, too.

So that is a very important component of this. Josey.

one of the, as I said, there's three insights that the XML can get.

There's some that are, let's fix a problem proactively for people, There is, what are some changes I can make to my overall service, and then there's the insights. Over time, those don't happen instantly over time, that I can give to the business.

That's the real gold, when I can see those, The, say, if, for example, if I'm a retail, and I'm, I've got an initiative to improve my, my sales counter activities, and I can tie that back to the end users, that support the retail people, You know, the employees in IT that are supporting it. Do they have the technology they need? Does that person person at the counter have the ability to answer questions that a person a shopper might have, or to on the fly make a decision to help that person, to improve their experience. That's when we connect CX all the way back to E X. That's the gold. Now, you don't get that out of the gate.

Start with the easiest, easiest would be simply improving productivity, reducing, know the pain that people have in doing their job.

Secondly isn't in the neck, the in-between is looking at how do I change some of the processes that don't exist today. Like, say, for example, how hard is it for me to swap out, you know, a mobile device or a laptop. Does that take weeks?

How long before I made whole, again, if I lose it, you know, in a taxi, or the Uber.

If I can reduce that down to zero, or, you know, just hours, instead of days, that greatly improves productivity. So, you know, you say, I just want to make my employees happy now. You're trying to improve productivity, there's, there's value there, and then ultimately, I'm trying to make sure that my customers actually experienced that as well.

What are fascinating and reveal off of SLAs? This experience agreements and the employee experience agreements, and, in a time where I think that there is a demand from customers for a great experience. I think employees, and employee experience, we're, we understand very well, is, is a great proxy for that customer experience, and I think you are getting on some leading indicators there. I had you know, ahead of time, and to Help employees provided the best possible service to our customers. So, thank you for addressing this important, and really not very much talked about aspect of digital transformations. We are thankful for you to share your expertise and wisdom with our global audience today.

Josey, I was a real pleasure and thank you for your insightful questions.

Thank you very much ...

Gaucho, Ladies and gentlemen, that well, that that's uh great, interesting presentation from Western Morrice, he's coming today. by the way, I should have mentioned from Michigan.

I am broadcasting from San Antonio and our global audience of more than 15 hundred registered participants are all over the world consuming this content live and On Demand, and I should have mentioned this, all of our sessions as a registered participants. All of our sessions are recorded and will be made available to you via a secure link and password, in the next couple of weeks. Once we are completed with the our three day event we're going to be taking a break now and at the top of the hour I'm going to we're going to continue the discussion on Digital Transformation with Deidre Pak nam who is the CEO and co-founder of Work Board. She's going to talk about zero waste, strategy, execution.

Optimizing for the scarcity of everything. And so we're gonna look at performance indicators. We're gonna look at digital transformation that creates real value and how some of the best organizations in the world are doing that today. So, I'll take a break now, See you back with ..., at the top of the hour.