What DEX Leaders at Truist and GSK See That Your Dashboard Doesn't

An HR colleague at GSK was having trouble with her screen. The default fix was the obvious one: give her a bigger monitor. She turned it down. What she truly needed was an accessibility tool to magnify what was already on the screen she had. 

Sarah Jones, Senior Director, Global Site Operations and Executive Services at GSK, shared that example in a recent HR Grapevine feature on Women in DEX, the global collective Nexthink launched in March. Had the bigger monitor shipped, the ticket would have closed as resolved. 

Traditional IT metrics tell you whether technology is available. DEX tells you whether it works for the person using it. And that’s exactly what Jones and Virginia Webb, SVP Global Digital Workplace and Analytics at Truist Bank, describe in this feature.   

Here are my three biggest takeaways: 

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1. Whether the fix was actually a resolution 

Jones makes the case plainly. For a long time, technology success meant the tool shipped, stayed stable, and stayed available. Those measures are still essential. On their own, they are no longer enough. 

A license tells you someone can access an application. It tells you nothing about whether they opened it, used it, used it well, and did better work because of it, or whether it delivered the business result it was funded to produce. Jones describes a shift from asking whether a tool was deployed to asking whether work actually got better and the digital friction went away. 

GSK is putting that into practice. Jones coaches leaders and product owners to ask about the full user journey rather than the delivery milestone. She has also stood up user groups across 18 countries where her direct teams sit, asking unglamorous questions about hardware and meeting rooms. 

The bigger screen was a delivery answer to an impact question. It would have shipped, stayed stable, stayed available, and solved nothing. 

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2. Design for the range, not the average 

Dashboards report averages. Averages are useful for capacity planning. They are less useful for experience design. 

Webb's example is generational. A Gen Z employee may pick up a new tool instantly while an older colleague may want a guided path, video walkthroughs, or in-product prompts. If you design for the midpoint, you serve neither. 

Age is one example of serving the full range. Gender is another. Webb argues that designing for every generation requires diverse perspectives in development, and that women's experience is part of what gets those tools right. 

This is why DEX leadership composition is an operational question. "Leadership should reflect the people that technology serves," Jones says. When a group is missing from the decision, the default gets set without their experience represented. A wider range of perspectives surfaces digital friction and unintended exclusion earlier. Earlier is the difference between being reactive versus being proactive. If an exclusion is caught in a user group, it is much easier to fix than an exclusion caught after a global rollout.  

Women hold roughly 21% of senior technology roles in the UK, per UK Government figures. GSK's chief digital and technology officer is a woman. Webb has worked for a female CTO, a female CIO, and the same female manager for 11 years. Both clearly stated this makes them fortunate rather than representative. What they consider lucky, Women in DEX is working to make standard. 

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3. The journey between the systems 

Webb notes that an employee can touch 16 systems to get through an ordinary day with none of their digital friction triggering IT action or a ticket. Digital employee experience tools, like Nexthink, see friction forming across every device, app, and network, and resolves it before the employee feels it. 

She describes leaders looking at the whole path rather than individual uptime, asking how those systems connect and what it would take to make the experience feel like one thing.  

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