The next BriefingsDirect workplace productivity discussion explores how businesses are using the latest digital technologies to re-imagine the employee experience -- and to transform their operations and results.
Employee experience isn't just
a buzz term. Research
shows that engaged employees are happier, more productive, and deliver a
superior customer experience, all of which translates into bottom line results.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
To learn how, our panel will now explore how IT helps deliver a compelling experience that enables employees to work
when, where, and how they want -- and to perform at their best. Joining us are Adam Jones, Chief Revenue
Officer, who
oversees IT for the Miami Marlins
Major League Baseball team and organization, and Tim
Minahan, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer
at Citrix. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Tim, when
it comes to employee experience, Citrix has been at the forefront of the
conversation and of the technology shaping it. In fact, I remember covering one
of the first press conferences that Citrix had, and this is going back about 30
years, and the solutions were there for people to work remotely. It seemed crazy
at the time, delivering apps over the wire, over the Internet.
But you are still innovating.
You’re at it again. About a year ago, you laid
out an aggressive plan to help companies power their way to even better ways
to work. So, it begs the question: Tim, what's wrong with the way people are working
today and the way that employees are experiencing work today?
From daily grind to digital growth
Minahan: That topic
is top of mind both for C-level
and board members around the globe. We are entering an era of a new talent
crisis. What's driving it is, number one, there are just too few workers. Demographically
McKinsey estimates
that in the next few years we will be short by 95 million medium- to high-skilled
workers around the globe.
 |
| Minahan |
And that’s being frustrated by
our traditional work models, which tend to organize around physical hubs. I
build an office building, call center, or manufacturing facility and I do my
best to hire the best talent around that hub. But the talent isn’t always
located there.
The second thing is, as more
companies become
digital businesses -- trying to develop new digital business lines, engage
customers through new digital business channels, develop new digital business
revenue streams -- oftentimes they lack the right skills. They lack skills to
help drive to this next level of transformation. If companies are fortunate
enough to identify employees with those skills, there is a huge likelihood that
they will be disengaged at work.
In fact, the latest Gallup
study finds that globally 85 percent of workers are disengaged at work. A
key component of that frustration has to do with their work environment.
We spend a lot of time talking
about vision alignment and career development -- and all of that is important.
But a key gap that many companies are overlooking is that they have a frustrating
work environment. They are not giving their employees the tools or
resources they need to do their jobs effectively.
In fact, all the choice we
have around our applications and our devices has actually begun to create noise
that distracts us from doing our core jobs in the best way possible.
Gardner: Is this
a case of people being distracted by the interfaces? Is there too much
information and overload? Are we not adding enough intelligence to provide a contextual
approach? All of the above?
Minahan: It is
certainly “all of the above,” Dana. First off, there are just too many
applications. The typical enterprise IT manager is responsible for more than 500
applications. At the individual employee level, a typical worker uses more than
a dozen applications through the course of their day, and oftentimes needs to
traverse four or five different applications just to do a single business process.
That could be something as simple as finding the change in a deal status, or
even executing one particular transaction.
To your point around
disruption and context switching, today -- because we have all of these
different channels, and not just e-mail, but Slack
and Microsoft
Teams and all of these applications – just finding information consumes a
large part of our day. We can't remember where we stored something, or we can’t
remember the change in that deal status. So we have to spend about 20 percent
of our day switching between all of these different contexts, just to get the
information or insight we need to do our jobs.
Gardner: Clearly
too much of a good thing. And to a large degree, IT has brought about that good
thing. Has IT created this problem?
Minahan: In
part. But I think employees share a bit of responsibility themselves. As an employee,
I know I’m always pushing IT by saying, “Hey, absolutely, this is the one tool
we need to do a more effective job at marketing, strategy, or what-have-you.”
We keep adding to the top of
what we already have. And IT is in a tough position of either saying, “No,” or
finding a way to layer on more and more choices. And that has the unintended
side effect of what we have just mentioned -- which is the complexity that frustrates
today's employee experience.
Workspace unity and security
Gardner: Now,
the IT people have faced complexity issues before, and many times they have
come up with solutions to mitigate the complexity. But we also have to remember
that you can't just give employees absolute freedom. There have to be
guardrails, and rules, compliance, and regulatory issues must be addressed.
So, security and digital
freedom need to be in balance. How do we get to the point, Tim, where we can
create that balance, and give freedom -- but not so much that they are at risk?
Minahan: You’re
absolutely right. At Citrix, we firmly believe this problem needs to be solved.
We are making the investments, working with our customers and our partners, to go
out and solve it. We believe the right way to solve it is through a digital workspace
that unifies everything your employees need to be productive in one, unified
experience that wrappers those applications and content, and makes them available
across any device or platform, no matter where you are.
A
workspace that's just unified but not secure doesn't fully address the
needs of the enterprise. We believe the workspace should wrapper in a
layer of contextual security policies that know who you are.
If you are in the office, on the corporate network using your laptop, perfect. You also need to have access to the same content and applications to do your job on the train ride home, on your smartphone, and maybe while visiting a friend. You need to be able to log on through a web interface. You want your work to travel with you, so you can work anytime, anywhere.
But such a workspace that’s just
unified -- but not secure -- doesn't fully address the needs of the enterprise.
The second attribute of what's required for a true digital workspace is that it
needs to be secure. When you have those applications and content within the
workspace, we believe the workspace should wrapper that in a layer of
contextual security policies that know who you are, what you typically have
access to, and how you typically access it. The security must know if you do your
work through one device or another, and then apply the right policies when
there are anomalies outside of that realm.
For example, maybe you are
logging in from a different place. If so, we are going to turn off certain
capabilities within your applications, such as the capability to download, print,
or screen-capture. Maybe we need to require a second layer of authentication,
if you are logging on from a new device.
And so, this approach brings
together the idea of employee experience and balances it with the security that
the enterprise needs.
Gardner: We are
also seeing more intelligence brought into this process. We are seeing more
integration end-to-end, and we are anticipating the best worker experience. But
companies, of course, are looking for productivity improvements to help their
bottom line and their top line.
An Intelligent Workspace
Minahan: Dana,
you hit the nail on the head. I mentioned there are three attributes required
for an effective digital workspace. We talked about the first two, unifying
everything an employee needs to be productive with one unified experience, and
secondly securing that to ensure that applications’ content is more secure in
the workspace than when native. So that organizes your workday, and that’s a
phenomenal head start.
Work smart, with intelligence
But, to
your point, we can do better by building on that foundation and injecting
intelligence into the workspace. You can then begin to help employees work
better. You can help employees remove that noise from their day by using things
such as machine
learning (ML), artificial
intelligence (AI), simplified workflows, and what we call micro apps to
guide an employee through their workdays. The workspace is not just someplace
they go to launch an application, but it is someplace they go to get work done.
We have begun providing
capabilities that literally reach into your enterprise applications and extract
out the key insights and tasks that are personal to each employee. So when you log
into the workspace, Dana, it would say, “Hey, Dana, it’s time for you to
approve that expense report.”
You don't need to log-in to
the app again. You just quickly open a review. If you want, you can click “approve”
and move on, saving yourself minutes. And you multiply that throughout the
course of the day. We estimate you can give an employee back 10 to 20 percent of
their workweek. So, an added day each week of improved productivity.
But it’s not just about streamlined tasks. It’s also about improved insights, of making sure that you understand the information you need. Maybe it’s that change in a deal status and presenting that up to you so you don’t need to log-in to Salesforce and check on that dashboard. It’s presented to you because the workspace knows it’s of interest to you.
To your point, this could
dramatically improve the overall productivity for an employee, improve their
overall experience at work, and by extension allow them to serve their
customers in a much better way. They have the resources, tools, and the
information at their fingertips to deliver a superior customer experience.
The
Miami Marlins have a very sophisticated approach to user experience.
They look at heir employees and their fan base across multiple ways of
making the experience exceptional.
Gardner: We are entering an age, Tim, where we let the machines do what they do best and know the difference, so that then allows people to do what they can do best, creatively, and most productively. It's an exciting time.
Let's look at a compelling use
case. The Miami Marlins have a very
sophisticated approach to user
experience. And they are not just looking at their employees, they are
looking at the end-users -- their
fan base across multiple different ways of entertainment and for intercepting
the baseball experience.
Baseball, in a sense, was hibernating
over the winter, and now the new season has played out well in 2019. And your
fans in Miami are getting treated to a world-class experience.
Tell me, Adam, what went on behind-the-scenes
that allows you in IT to make this happen? What is the secret sauce for providing
such great experiences?
Marlins’ Major League IT advantage
Jones: The Marlins is a 25-year-old franchise. We
find ourselves in build mode coming into the mid-2019 season, following a
change in ownership and leadership. We have elevated the standards and vision
for the organization.
 |
| Jones |
We are becoming a world-class sports
and entertainment enterprise, and so are building
a next-generation IT infrastructure to enable the 300-plus employees who
operate across our lines of business and the various assets of the organization.
We are very pleased to have our longtime partner, Citrix, deploy their digital
workspace solutions to enable our employees to deliver against the higher standards
that we have set.
Gardner: Is it
difficult to create a common technological approach for different types of user
experience requirements? You have fans, scouts, and employees. There are a lot
of different endpoints. How does a common technological approach work under
those circumstances?
Jones: The
diversity within our enterprise necessitates having tools and solutions that
have a lot of agility and can be flexible across the various requirements of an
organization such as ours. We are operating a very robust baseball operation --
as well as a sophisticated business. We are looking to scale and engage a very
diverse audience. We need to have the resources available to invest and develop
talent on the baseball side. So, what we have within the Citrix environment is
the capability to enable that very diverse set of activities within one
environment.
Gardner: And
we have become used to, in our consumer lives, having a sort of seamless segue between
different things that we are doing. Are you approaching that same seamless integration
when it comes to how people encounter your content across multiple channels? Is
there a way for you to present yourselves in such a way that the technology
takes over and allows people to feel like they are experiencing the same Miami
Marlins experience regardless of how they actually intercept your organization
and your sport?
The mobility of our workforce to
get out into the community -- but not lose productivity -- is incredibly
important as we evolve into a more sophisticated and complex set of activities
and requirements.
Gardner: Controlling
your content, making sure you can make choices about who gets to see what, to
protect your franchise, is important. Are you reaching a balance between offering
a full experience of interesting content and technology, but at the same time
protecting and securing your assets and your franchise?
Safe! at digital content distribution
Jones:
Security is our highest priority, particularly as we continue to develop more
content and more intellectual property. What we have within the Citrix
environment is very robust controls, with the capability to facilitate fairly
broad collaboration among our workforce. So again, we are able to disseminate
that content in near real-time so that we are creating impactful and timely
moments with our fans.
Gardner: Tim, this
sounds like a world-class use case for advanced technology. We have scale,
security, omni-channel
distribution, and a dynamic group of people who want to interact as much as
they can. Why is the Miami Marlins such a powerful and interesting use-case
from your perspective?
Minahan: The
Marlins are a fantastic example of a world champion organization now moving
into the digital edge. They are rethinking the fan experience, not just at the
stadium but in how they engage across their digital properties and in the
community. Adam and the other leadership there are looking across the board to figure
out how the sport of baseball and fan experience evolve. They are exploring the
linkage between the fan experience, or customer
experience, and the employee experience, and they are learning about the role
that technology plays in connecting the two.
Gardner: Tim, we
have heard over the past decade about how data and information are so
integral to making a baseball team successful. It’s a data-driven
enterprise as much as any. How will the intelligence you are baking into more
of the Citrix products help make the Miami Marlins baseball team a more
intelligent organization? What are the tools behind the intelligent baseball
future?
Minahan: A lot
of the same intelligence capabilities we are incorporating into the workspace
for our customers -- around ML, AI, and micro apps -- will ensure that the
Marlins organization -- everyone from the front office to the field manager -- has
the right insights and tasks presented to them at the right time. As a result, they
can deliver the best experience, whether that is recruiting the best talent for
the team or delivering the best experience for the fans.
We are going to learn a lot, as we always have from our customers, from the Miami Marlins about how we can continue to adapt that to help them deliver that superior employee experience and, hence, the superior fan experience.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Citrix.
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