Two years ago, DXC Technology committed to reinventing the workplace for our employees. We became a virtual-first organisation dedicated to creating a new employee experience that leverages the best technology to drive our teams’ productivity and satisfaction. In our paper, Put the employee experience first with a modern workplace, we described our route to delivering a personalised, friction-free workplace experience that empowers employees to connect, collaborate and work seamlessly and securely on any device, anytime and anywhere.
A year later Kristie Grinnell joined DXC as Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, taking on the responsibility of moving the mission forward. In this Q&A Kristie provides her perspective on how DXC’s journey to delivering an employee-centric environment has evolved.
Q: You joined DXC at a transitional moment for IT. What point of view did you bring to the strategy of improving employees’ technology experience?
A: The overall vision is to get to Digital DXC. That means we have an employee experience where the tools just work, where the information people need is at their fingertips—where it’s easy for them to do their jobs. To accomplish that we need systems and processes to talk to each other all the time to get the data to guide us in addressing pain points and getting people productive faster by giving them access to the services and knowledge they need, when they need them, in a one-stop shop. [DXC was created from a merger and acquisition, so our tools, systems and processes don’t always seamlessly talk to each other.]
When employees don’t have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do something, they can switch to delivering for the customer.
"The overall vision is to get to Digital DXC. That means we have an employee experience where the tools just work, where the information people need is at their fingertips—where it’s easy for them to do their jobs."
Q: It’s so important to be concerned with employee uptime, not just machine and services uptime. How does DXC IT bring a cohesive support experience to employees to enable that?
A: DXC UPtime™, our Experience Platform that is part of our Modern Workplace solution, is a big piece of that. People want their systems to be up so they can serve their customers. They want answers to problems lickety-split so they’re back to work, ready to execute for their customers.
UPtime holds a lot of the “gold mine” data to help us get a holistic view of our employees. We understand the devices people use so that we can get a new, correctly configured one out to them when they need it, or see how their particular system affects an issue they’re having. In UPtime, we have our virtual digital assistant, a chatbot that works with employees to help them fix an IT device issue on their own, search our knowledge base of articles for more information or connect with a live support agent if the problem can’t be handled in a self-service manner.
"From an end-to-end process perspective, we have pivoted our organisation to a value stream model. We are truly governing around the services that we offer, bringing everybody to the table—from HR to finance—for better business alignment so that we put the right systems in place, fit for purpose, to deliver on every process for every employee. "
UPtime and our digital assistant are rolled out to about 90% of our employees across the globe and we’re deflecting about 40% of tickets. We hope to get up to 50% to 60%. By continually driving automation and increasing the deflection rate, we’re driving cost savings, and improving employee satisfaction and productivity. The goal is to help users efficiently resolve the problem at the root cause, not to keep them from getting to an agent when they need one.
From an end-to-end process perspective, we have pivoted our organisation to a value stream model. We are truly governing around the services that we offer, bringing everybody to the table—from HR to finance—for better business alignment so that we put the right systems in place, fit for purpose, to deliver on every process for every employee.
Q: What opportunities are there to further enhance employees’ experience?
A: We’re working really hard to understand the user experience by measuring sentiment and perception data that we acquire right at the point an employee is getting a service. That lets us continuously get new data to act on.
We're also really taking things to the next level as we refresh our knowledge articles. There should be a knowledge article to answer any question to help users take action themselves. When our data shows that isn't the case, we need to act. For example, if we look at the data about support requests coming into the service desk and see that 10% of those tickets are on the same topic, and we haven’t covered it in UPtime, let’s get that information into the knowledge base.
We want to be able to answer our employees’ questions about multiple issues. For instance, we don’t want them to have to figure out whether they need to go to our HR or finance platform to get something done. I want to expand UPtime to extend across all our business functions. We’ll break down functional silos with a true one-stop shop so employees get whatever support they need.
And as we continue to get data through UPtime about employees and their tools, we want to use that to proactively address issues. Instead of waiting for an employee to request help for a password reset, our virtual digital assistant can acknowledge the issue and ask if the employee would like us to reset the password. We also are putting in technology to improve the PC refresh cycle. Instead of just automatically refreshing an employee’s PC at the 3-year mark, we’ll decide if a refresh is needed based on data about true performance. That saves us money without impacting the employee experience.
Q: What results have you seen so far from IT’s strategic focus on the employee experience?
A: Our UPtime rating has had a 25% increase in favorability in the last twelve months, and our Net Promoter Score from an employee perspective is going up. Employees feel proud to work for DXC because they know that they're adding value to the customer every day, and that's the culture we want.
"In IT we are encouraging our people to better understand the problems our business partners have so that we can resolve them better."
Q: What advice would you give CIOs about creating an engaging and effective employee experience?
A: The first is to understand the way your business works—its end-to-end business processes and value streams to govern services around.
The second is to get continuous employee feedback. We have our experience metrics but also ongoing surveys and listening sessions. In IT we are encouraging our people to better understand the problems our business partners have so that we can resolve them better.
Third, lean in with a high-performing IT organisation that really wants to add value for employees and the company. Our IT people are accountable for meeting metrics for very specific goals that are aimed at this.
Finally, constantly innovate, evolve and think about that “next thing.” Some things will be small, continuous improvements like a process change. Others might be a major overhaul to a process or data or technology. Be curious—always ask the “what if” questions.
Learn more about DXC Modern Workplace.
