and i believe we're live yes indeed we're live welcome to another workflow wednesday this is troy pisola and today i'm here with dan turchen where we get to talk about and really revisit another third era webinar it's one of the things we aim to do when third era puts out great content and webinars if you haven't seen them yet please check them out and sign them up um but we had one and dan i'm i'm so thankful we were able to join after that one it was a panel discussion around artificial intelligence and employee experience hi dan troy good to be back i cannot imagine a better way to start my day than with a little troy energy [Laughter] a workflow monday and a tuesday and a thursday and friday as well we all be better off we'd all be better off but the reality is that's that's where so many of us fit is that there is workflow that needs to happen every day of the week um and that's to me that's why i enjoy being part of of third era and why i started now with troy is because there is so much where we agonize on there's got to be a better way to do this and so you know for this session i know we're tight on time i really want to jump into it quick dan we had a panel of five speakers including yourself brilliant minds from industry who have wrestled with you know in this covid great resignation just an angst of um i can't really meet my people in so many ways that i used to how do you build that culture technology has changed so rapidly in artificial intelligence and other things um what was your like one aha moment that that really sticks out to you from that webinar on that you had last week it was a great session and we had everyone from uh the great jason william the ceo of uh third era to uh wendy pfeiffer who's the cio of nutanix uh we had uh joel eagle who's the head of it infrastructure for mcdonald's we had dr mahmoud sumacha who is the cto at the international technological university uh and just a great wide-ranging discussion and the number one thing that stands out to me across you know the 45 minutes or so of an interesting conversation is how tightly coupled the employee experiences with the customer experience so the panelists just shared colorful examples about how much employees who feel valued and trusted and respected bring their best selves to work and when employees bring their best selves to work they produce the best work product and they love what they do and they spend less time doing the stuff they hate doing and more more time doing the stuff they're actually paid to do it made them take a job and it should be no secret but it's the companies that invest in better employee experiences that are the ones that outperform their peers and just to hear it from the panelists you know across a range of backgrounds and industries um i thought uh was was just uh you know really an inspiration to hear it from the trenches right i agree it and it was interesting it it also stuck out to me i kept hearing the word happiness and you know it goes way back you know the strengths movement um you know if you dig into strengthsfinder and looking at how do you invest in the things you're really strong at from a personality standpoint and instead of saying well here's your weakness let's shore those up it it a lot of the conversation was just like you said pointed back to how do we help build a culture that people can come to work excited to work yeah it'd still work but excited to work and like like you said i like how you you put it best be your best self as you're there how did you see technology really play into that you know as you talk about that engagement and creating that culture wendy from nutanix told this story that really resonated with me so they had to transfer 10 000 employees from office work to remote work over a weekend and and as a cio just do we just stop and pause on that a little bit right you know we think of digital transformation and migrations it's like all right 10 000 people over the weekend to a completely different model of work yeah yeah just resonated i just wanted to pause and interrupt and resonate on that a little bit now you know continue the story because i think it's important to really get that in context so nutanix as a technology company didn't have any buffer from their end customers the customers didn't say oh you know what we understand that a bunch of employees they're not going to be available they're going to be offline for a week and so it's okay if you know you're not available to support our products or you know it's okay you know you can stop you know in innovating or it's okay we'll we'll go to your competitor because you know they're gonna be ready for us right um unfortunately businesses don't have the luxury of being able to behave that way so wendy was tasked by her leadership team to do it over a weekend and that created a few a few different challenges one of which was just the sheer pressure of you know being on that on that clock but the second was the cso wanted to have a hand in this as well because they basically just stood up 10 000 new remote offices and that cisa went from having to manage let's say a dozen networks a dozen offices around the world to 10 000 and so in terms of you know everything from endpoint security to vpns and configurations and credentials and managing you know phishing attacks and everything that comes with having all of these new ip addresses on the network so it was a tight collaboration between it managing the deployment of these remote offices but in collaboration with a lot of other stakeholders and what wendy says is it was their ability to deliver a lot of these routine requests to routine services in an automated fashion using a system of intelligence using a system of record they were so far ahead of where any competitor was because they had already invested in digital transformation and they already thought through what it means to provide white glove service to 10 000 employees even before something unexpected like this happened and those are the organizations that have the foresight to think about what it means to deliver the best employee experience that are best equipped to accommodate when things change on a moment's notice right i like how you put that you know having that foresight to build that in helps you be prepared for the unknown you know it's it's like the saying that we we often hear is change is constant just deal with it and and i always push back on that and say no not it not in my experience change is not constant it's accelerating and things like the pandemic do happen where it just it transforms and shakes out entire industries and so it's cool to hear that story from wendy and see how they you know had the prep work to have systems in place to see the value of automation in that prep them for this change yeah you know another great example was from dr samaha who's he's both a professor at the university as well as its cto and he was talking about the experience of being a student in a fully online university and the dependency that you have on technology right so you're getting your degree it's a primarily it's an online-only university primarily offering students that have full-time jobs uh the ability to earn a master's or i believe they offer mbas masters possibly undergrad degrees but um if the systems aren't online whether it's you know systems that professors are using to lecture or you know systems to get your course syllabus or submit your exams things like that well the whole university shuts down so there's a pretty high dependence on the systems being available and his need to provide you know exceptionally good experiences for the learners and for the professors makes the difference between itu being successful they thrive through the pandemic they continue to thrive because of their readiness with systems that are technology first but all in support of helping it of helping learners and professors engage better you know interact better online that's not inherently a technology problem but technology is an absolutely essential component of making sure that university functions so completely different from what wendy went through but a similar example of where a better experience for the end user in this case a professor or a learner is the difference between engagement it's the difference between the business succeeding and the business family right right i can see that in and you know i think a lot of things that we've seen even doing things like this you know the the whole use of video has really scaled and grown um and really the acceptance to do it you know there was online schooling online universities prior but i think it's those like you're talking about that had had the systems in place that were able to really scale so as people were looking at how do you retool how do you learn something else how do i get a degree so i know what's next uh to have those platforms there uh with the resilience to really provide the service you know that's that's key yeah um how else from uh either kind of a field service standpoint how did some of that come up i know that was part of the conversation yeah um what stuck out to your mind to you there joel from mcdonald's spoke very eloquently about the opportunities that ai first technology has provided to support the mcdonald's business independent the pandemic mcdonald's operates 40 000 restaurants in 200 markets and every day every hour every minute every second even there are changes to menus and they have gone to fully app-based ordering curbside pickup kiosk-based ordering personalization of menu items personalization of services and that whole digital backend the whole ability to predict what a customer might want what time to make sure the happy meals are made in advance how to make sure the shake machine is always available their ability to predict the kind of services or the demand for their services is based on ai first platforms ingesting data and providing not just great experiences for the the crew members the the employees in the restaurants or the corporate the corporate teams but also making sure that that experience that the crew members have is what's gonna deliver the best possible experience for that hungry mom and her three kids at the end of a long day just wanting a hot meal and you know wanting to make sure the right toys and the right happy meal it turns out all of that's a data problem right and the way that they can deliver a vastly superior experience at scale is by making sure they have things like a virtual agent that speaks 27 languages and a set of domain ontologies that understands 5 million different concepts related to work i i.t hr how restaurants operate so this intelligent experience that their employees have is really what goes into delivering a better experience to the hungry mom and her three kids and that's you know that's work that joel and his team can really take pride in is feeling like you know they're they're they're making a difference for billions of people who you know whose primary source of nutrition believe it or not you know that one of the get me on a soapbox about uh the scale that mcdonald's operates on but for a lot of the world their lowest cost highest source of nutrition protein specifically comes from that treat that they get that maybe one mcdonald's meal a week that they can afford and so it's very important for mcdonald's leadership and everyone in a restaurant to be able to deliver that experience that these customers are expecting yeah with the consistency across that scale right yeah that's that to me that's the amazing part is is where you see that scale where you can really drive that consistency um you know in the minutes we have left dan you know i think there might be a lot of people a lot of leaders that watch that panel and they can see perhaps some of the same problems they they can you know empathize with some of the agony of the transformation that that occurred um but they might be looking for you know ways to really prep for the next change because it's coming or ways to really shore up their their systems to be able to add that layer of intelligence or increase the labor workflow what would your recommendations be for someone to really lean into that say where where would you start i encourage everyone watching the live stream to go and have a look at that recording of the exact round table from it was last thursday we're recording this on march 30th uh and what they'll hear is three actionable recommendations and i'll go ahead and repeat repeat them here but again i go into a little bit more detail one is be prepared to ask your employees questions so while a lot of the session was about the benefits of technology and the benefits of automation there's no substitute for demonstrating that you care about your employees by asking them what matters to you and what you'll find we we surveyed 250 organizations 250 cios and we summarized some of the results in the exact round table but it turns out of the top seven things that employees say matters most to them when you ask them what matters to you zero of the top seven relate to compensation seven of the top seven relate to the experience that they have when they enter the workplace okay so ask them questions the second this may seem obvious but as we interviewed 250 cios we found that there was a little bit of a gap there a little bit of an opportunity for them to improve how they communicate with employees and that's listen to your employees so proactively solicit feedback in subtle ways so provide community forums provide through things like a virtual agent proactively ask them for feedback and be willing to take all that data and engage them in a dialogue so for example um you know oftentimes employers will assume that the way to improve morale is by paying a bonus or by uh you know providing more pto and it turns out you know providing a virtual agent that speaks their language makes the people in other time zones that may have previously felt like they were second or third class citizens feel like they're parts of the organizational culture so listen to what they actually care about and be willing to change and then the third key item that we we cover in a little bit more more detail is reward success so one of the best ways again this comes out clearly in the data is employees feel motivated to do their best work when they feel like they're being acknowledged celebrated their whole self they bring to work when they feel like the little winds get celebrated so whether that's even something that might seem uh you know not worthy of note uh a new customer goes live for a customer success team um you know a a a new branding slogan goes out you know a new a new item gets pushed to a menu um you know we deliver a new release of a you know a buggy code we fix a bug in in real time faster than we thought take the opportunity to celebrate these little victories that to a team looking to do their best work is the validation that they need to feel really engaged and really motivated so it's a combination not just systems or technology but providing the right kind of environment that makes everyone feel like they can bring their best self to work those are the the three tips that came out from our survey that we felt like were actionable that we we uh we elaborated on in the panel yeah i like that i one of the things that that came to mind as you were talking through that is is i saw a video recently from simon sinek uh where he was talking about leadership and and talking about an example from the military where there's one you know person really struggling to get through this this test a new leader stepped in and didn't reprimand for some of the failures but instead found those early little successes in and highlighted put the spotlight on those little successes and the result was that the person you know excelled and did it and and i think in another way you know we're seeing that from your research we're seeing it from the panel that finding those successes and celebrating them with their teams matter so that's that's great um i know you've you've mentioned the survey that you have and kind of the the white paper the analysis that you've created um for anyone watching you know dan and i are easy to find on linkedin and if that's something of interest by all means reach out to either one of us glad to get you a copy of that and also look forward to an opportunity to chat with you directly if you've got interest in that the other thing i'll add is i get the pleasure of speaking with dan again next week on workflow wednesday as we talk about experience in in getting information back at third arrow we work with a number of strategic partners people rain is one and you'll see me talk with several you might think the third area is dependent on our partners we are in some ways but servicenow is all third era does and we do it with great depth and great scale across the globe but next week on workflow wednesday dan will be joined with marco from happy signals and one of the things we're going to spend time talking about there is how do we get that insight dan you mentioned a couple different times of really how do we subtly ask for feedback and so i'm looking forward to that that conversation next week any last thoughts from you dan before we close out this session of workflow wednesday one of the comments from the panel that uh really i thought um did a good job summarizing what all the panelists were talking about was from uh from your leader jason willian ceo of third era and uh he laid out a vision for the customer experience that in the the jason the leadership team uh jeff the cio at derdera are trying to deliver to the 600 plus now employees at thirdera and he said no employee should have to enter the same information twice and every employee should be able to get whatever they need within two clicks and i thought you know as a vision you and i know jason you can hear those words coming from his mouth he's so passionate about uh you know creating the company that he would want to work for that's a you know comment he makes frequently but i thought in terms of you know topics like the future of work and you know how do we combat the the great resignation you know hearing leaders like jason and you know listening to what they're doing to invest in better employee experiences really goes a long way toward providing a blueprint that i would hope all leaders in all industries end up following um so i'd say that was you know a lot of the comments like the ones we've talked about the stories um resonated but the the kind of leadership and the kind of value system that jason has and that you know he's he's creating company-wide for thirdera i i thought was really um a good way to summarize you know what i thought the key points were from the whole round table yeah right i have to say i'm biased i'm part of third era i've been part of it for over a year and it's just that that that jason does have an amazing vision of where he wants to go to serve clients the culture he wants to build within the organization and really the value that we bring to the servicenow ecosystem so it's been great to be part of it i'm thankful to be part of that journey and you know yes it does make a difference for how we do work inside a third era but the cool part of me as a client executive is seeing the impact that we get to bring to our clients you know we have more than 400 projects concurrently running you know we're talking about growing with scale we're scaling and scaling fast and really striving to have that consistent experience that we can be seen as a trusted advisor and an educator and advocate to help them really transform the culture within their organizations so it's very very cool but dan again thank you for your time and i appreciate it um we'll sound off from this workflow wednesday and we'll see you again next week reach out to dan uh or myself if you've got questions and we look forward to scheduling a meeting with you thanks always my pleasure troy thanks