Getting Insight into the Real Experience of your Employees with Weston Morris, Director of Global Strategy for Digital Workplace Services at Unisys

This episode features an interview with Weston Morris. He is the Director of Global Strategy for Digital Workplace Services at Unisys. He is responsible for leading the global strategy for emerging technologies that impact digital worker productivity – including Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Merged Reality, Virtualization and IoT. In this episode, he talks about experience level agreements or XLAs, micro personalization as the future of employee experience, and getting an accurate picture of what employees are really experiencing at your company.

Quotes

*”About 45% of employees that are working from home are installing software that they know is not approved by corporate IT in their home environment. They just needed it. [They think,] ‘You’re not meeting my experience needs, and guess what? I'm going to bypass security and hopefully nothing bad happens as a result.’ And yet the corporation thinks that everything's fine. That is a jarring disconnect. It's something that every IT department really needs to be looking at closely.”

*”You really have to be careful about what you're measuring and what you're inferring from that. During the early days of the pandemic, productivity was up. But the reality was, we weren't able to do anything else. [Employees had] already binge watched Seinfeld or The Office, and they couldn't go to restaurants or sports events. So they just stayed home and worked, and worked some more. And so that's what showed that productivity was up, but that is not sustainable. You really need to make sure you're measuring the right stuff and have a holistic picture. And you need to have two way communication to understand what the real experience is of your employees.”

*“I go back to this organizational change management. You need to explain, what's changing, why it's changing, what [your] role is in that change. And then if it doesn't work right, where do [they] go to get help? If you can answer those questions, I'm going to feel good about it. And I'm going to mostly support, or maybe even be an ambassador for the change.”

*“Anytime that there's a failure, it's kind of easy to get into the trap of finger-pointing. But the reality is not all changes work. Where I've seen it really work well is when you try to fail fast and move on, not to allow the failure to linger and take forever to be discovered. And it's hard to do if you, as a leader, are discouraged. So one of the things I do is try to focus on my own attitude first.”

*”Don't be quick to judge somebody or put them in the box. A lot of times, that first impression is not quite right. And realize that everyone you meet is going to be smarter or better than you at something. So if you can find out what that is, and extract that gem from that other person, it's just going to help you. And then the flip side is be ready to collaborate and share. “

Time Stamps

*[4:00] The Flight Plan: Get to know Unisys

*[12:49] First Class: Best EX practices at Unisys

*[27:44] Turbulence: EX lessons learned

*[33:37] Advice for other EX leaders

Links

Connect with Weston on LinkedIn

Check out XLA.TV

Check out the Digital Workplace Deep Dive podcast

Thanks to our friends

This episode is brought to you by Firstup, the company that is redefining the digital employee experience to put people first and lift companies up by connecting every worker, everywhere with the information that helps them do their best work. Firstup has helped over 40% of the Fortune 100 companies like Amazon, AB InBev, Ford and Pfizer stay agile and keep transforming. Learn more at