It’s common knowledge that technology, productivity, and employee engagement are interconnected. Nowadays, people aren’t willing to tolerate a poor IT experience or working environment.
But how do you get two leaders with two very different responsibilities (and their respective teams) thinking collaboratively towards the same goals?
Sally Winston (XM, Consulting Leader at Qualtrics) offers 3 underlying principles:
1) Vision
2) Voice
3) Impact
Vision
Winston underscores that the vision for both HR and IT must center around the employee. For IT, this might be harder to apply than it is for HR.
But if you think about it, we’re nothing without the employees around us. No organization could function with one person alone.
This doesn’t mean IT has to sacrifice its focus on help desk support, operations, or tech innovations. It simply means that your CIO/CTO should instil the belief in the department that every project and every task is as a critical piece to the employee journey. If you work in IT, you might be focused on rolling out a new technology tool or freeing up more storage space, but ultimately, you’re doing that work for a person on the other side.
Likewise, HR leaders should expand their skills by learning more about the collaboration tools their employees use (and the decision-making that IT puts into purchasing, renewing, or discontinuing their use). An HR leader with even a cursory understanding of the company’s hardware renewal strategy or SaaS subscription policy is going to find it much easier to communicate with IT and collaborate.
Voice
For both HR and IT to do their jobs well, Winston emphasizes the need to ensure they’re capturing the same employee voice. IT cannot form its opinion solely on hard technical data. That time has passed. And HR can’t rely only on feedback surveys. They both need a unified way of listening, and they need context, which can come in the form of the right DEX & EX tools.
The employee experience today is a mix and mash of digital and human moments. This means the calculations used to qualify what’s a good versus a bad experience should factor in the most pertinent data from both worlds. Where is there overlap? Which metrics and pieces of data does IT find telling? And HR? Knowing what metrics are valued by each makes it easier for both leaders to speak the same language and support one another.
Impact
Finally, Winston stresses that for any IT/HR project, you find a way to trace the objective to the employee’s overarching experience. Might, for example, a faster network connection speed contribute to a positive employee experience? Yes. Is it the only metric that matters on that given day? No, the workday consists of thousands of relevant datapoints and contextual information.
In fact, context (both technical and social) plays a significant role in shaping the narrative for any work experience. What is happening on someone’s laptop might be very different from their work relationships with colleagues and vice-versa. So the aim should be to collect the right metrics and context, and find a way to index and score (measure) that information, consistently and continuously.
Small Steps Matter
One way IT and HR leaders can put theory to practice is to focus on ways to eliminate repetitive, manual effort, especially when it comes to analyzing data. Smart automation tools that integrate with existing IT workflows can help get you there, just make sure you’re not dropping real human feedback and context along the way!
Tools like Nexthink empower IT to manage the entire Digital Employee Experience, and they open doors with their intuitive DEX Scoring and dashboarding. If you’re interested in learning more about the partnership between Qualtrics and Nexthink, .
