Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Radical Experience Engineering in Action w/ Robin Milton-Schönemann 🤖✨

Transcript

Radical Experience Engineering in Action w/ Robin Milton-Schönemann 🤖✨ · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim
0:05
Speaker 1: Flower and Tom McGrath. Let's get into it.
0:08
Speaker 2: Hello, change Makers, welcome back to the Deck Show. I'm
0:12
Speaker 2: Tom McGraw. I'm here with Tim Flower. Tim. I got
0:15
Speaker 2: a question for you to kick things off today.
0:17
Speaker 3: Go for it.
0:18
Speaker 2: Where are you going to be twenty twenty five for
0:21
Speaker 2: thirtieth of September on the spot? On the spot?
0:25
Speaker 3: Does he know it's going to be It's going to
0:27
Speaker 3: be one city or the other for Experience Time again.
0:29
Speaker 2: Ah, you're going to be in You're going to be
0:32
Speaker 2: in London Town. Surely, Tim, exactly, so, exactly so is
0:37
Speaker 2: anybody who listens to this show notes you know, you know,
0:39
Speaker 2: you might call a next week experience the or the
0:43
Speaker 2: the event to our podcast, the sister event to our
0:46
Speaker 2: to our podcast. And indeed you could already, I believe
0:50
Speaker 2: book book yourself tickets and you can book in for
0:53
Speaker 2: going to London on the thirtieth of September and the
0:55
Speaker 2: beautiful Intercontinental Hotel there, or you can book and if
1:00
Speaker 2: you're on the other side of the world for Boston
1:03
Speaker 2: on the fourteenth to the fifteenth of October, the first
1:06
Speaker 2: ever two day event. Tim properly speaking.
1:11
Speaker 3: It's nice to see two days at both cities. And
1:13
Speaker 3: you know what, if you're if you're so inclined, do
1:16
Speaker 3: both of them go to both time.
1:19
Speaker 2: We do quite often, don't we, tim And we enjoy it.
1:22
Speaker 2: We enjoy it. Yeah, you should do the same. And
1:24
Speaker 2: why do I mention it Not only because you can
1:27
Speaker 2: book your tickets now and there we will be links
1:29
Speaker 2: in the show to do so, but because it brought
1:32
Speaker 2: to mind because if you were at London Experience twenty
1:35
Speaker 2: twenty four, and you were there for the opening ceremony
1:38
Speaker 2: as we called it, you would have seen a very
1:40
Speaker 2: a very charming and eloquent speaker on that main stage
1:44
Speaker 2: as part of the opening panel discussion. He's Robin Milton
1:48
Speaker 2: Huleeman and he's a very special guest today and we'll
1:53
Speaker 2: get into why he's been able to join us shortly.
1:55
Speaker 2: But welcome Robin. It's lovely to have you, my friend.
1:59
Speaker 4: Great meet you again. I'm hoping to continue the trend
2:02
Speaker 4: of hopefully sharing something people think is worth listening to.
2:06
Speaker 4: So nice of you to bring me.
2:07
Speaker 2: On without a doubt. And if you are seeing any
2:11
Speaker 2: of it, you know you can see some of the
2:13
Speaker 2: snippets video snippets on social media for our recordings, even
2:17
Speaker 2: though most of the episodes are audio only. As regular listeners,
2:21
Speaker 2: no doubt know Robin's are very good. Found A very
2:25
Speaker 2: beautiful spot is that in your house, Robin, You've got
2:28
Speaker 2: surrounded by books. You've got a globe that a sort
2:31
Speaker 2: of a fish in a case, You've got fantastic shelf
2:34
Speaker 2: again going.
2:34
Speaker 4: On, I wish I knew more about the fish, but no, Actually,
2:38
Speaker 4: we're visiting the in laws at the moment, so I
2:40
Speaker 4: took full liberty to use their little library nook as
2:45
Speaker 4: my background, so I look far more sophisticated than my
2:48
Speaker 4: own home. I thought it was only fitting, I think,
2:53
Speaker 4: so I think we should look as sophisticated as possible
2:55
Speaker 4: for such occasions. And what have you been up to, Robin?
2:59
Speaker 2: Has it all go.
3:02
Speaker 5: Well?
3:02
Speaker 4: I mean, since since we last spoke, I've been on
3:05
Speaker 4: the hunt for my next venture. So where I can
3:09
Speaker 4: next lead an organization in change? And what we're going
3:13
Speaker 4: to talk about in the moment, I guess is around
3:15
Speaker 4: a digital experience and what we can do next. And
3:20
Speaker 4: yes it's still very much looking. But I've mostly been
3:24
Speaker 4: keeping up with some practice and the o Y in
3:27
Speaker 4: between because I also moved recently, so a man with
3:31
Speaker 4: many strengths to my bar.
3:33
Speaker 2: Lovely a transitional phase in your life. It sounds like that,
3:36
Speaker 2: And this is one of the reasons we wanted to
3:38
Speaker 2: catch up, to do a bit of a retrospective of
3:41
Speaker 2: your time at Man Group and look at some of
3:44
Speaker 2: the highlights and the overall shape of your project there.
3:48
Speaker 2: And I think one of the things that always struck
3:50
Speaker 2: me about your work at Man Group when we when
3:52
Speaker 2: we spoke during your time was how you know your
3:57
Speaker 2: I T organization best saw itself as much more of
3:59
Speaker 2: an just a technology provider. I mean, how would you
4:03
Speaker 2: describe the ethos behind how you worked? First of all, well.
4:07
Speaker 4: I think there's a few things, But the simplest way
4:11
Speaker 4: I tried to boil it down to was I often
4:13
Speaker 4: asked the question are you having a good time? I
4:15
Speaker 4: used this as a litmus test to try and figure out,
4:18
Speaker 4: you know, are we doing the right thing right? Are
4:20
Speaker 4: we spending all of this effort? And this time, you know,
4:25
Speaker 4: pandemic happened And I'm sure many can recognize the situation.
4:28
Speaker 4: We had to quickly adopt to a more agile way
4:31
Speaker 4: of working. There were lots of change. It was very
4:35
Speaker 4: easy to get bogged down on what are the tech
4:37
Speaker 4: decisions we should be making that I always tried to
4:41
Speaker 4: retain that idea of like, well are you having a
4:43
Speaker 4: good time, because if we're just replacing one thing with
4:47
Speaker 4: something that might potentially be worse, then we've spent all
4:51
Speaker 4: of that effort, and people like us less, that feels
4:54
Speaker 4: like a wasted effort. So it really is a very
4:57
Speaker 4: simple question. I think that it's much harder in execution.
5:00
Speaker 4: I think we had some really interesting challenges. We moved
5:05
Speaker 4: towards more of an ad shile everyone gets a laptop,
5:09
Speaker 4: you can have flexibility a type approach. But what we
5:13
Speaker 4: learned was also we went out, we got the best
5:15
Speaker 4: kit we could buy for the budget we had, which
5:17
Speaker 4: was very decent, so we weren't really constrained in that sense.
5:20
Speaker 4: But every once in a while we're to count to
5:22
Speaker 4: someone who just vehemanly opposed to it. They said, I
5:26
Speaker 4: absolutely don't dig this at all, and I won't name
5:29
Speaker 4: any names, but we've had some great feedback from that,
5:33
Speaker 4: because one person came back to us and said, look,
5:35
Speaker 4: I've got poor eyesight.
5:37
Speaker 5: I don't care.
5:38
Speaker 4: About anything other than how big can you base the laptop,
5:42
Speaker 4: which is the opposite of ninety nine percent of almost
5:45
Speaker 4: every other piece of feedback we got, And it just
5:48
Speaker 4: showed this nuance that you know, when people is involved,
5:52
Speaker 4: you think you're doing the right choice, you don't really
5:54
Speaker 4: know it until you put it out into the world.
5:56
Speaker 4: So we always brought it back to are you having
5:59
Speaker 4: a good time, and then trying to see like each
6:01
Speaker 4: individual and sometimes just realizing well, for you, we're going
6:04
Speaker 4: to do a special thing, and sometimes it's just a
6:07
Speaker 4: matter of opinion. Maybe we have a different variation that
6:10
Speaker 4: works for you.
6:12
Speaker 2: So they're one of the biggest, bulkierst laptop possibly I
6:15
Speaker 2: guess that is a.
6:17
Speaker 4: Legal Oh yeah, that is a very unusual request. But
6:20
Speaker 4: it was like, because I want that eyesight was diminished
6:24
Speaker 4: and I was like, okay, well that makes so much
6:25
Speaker 4: sense when I know your context and I could emphasize
6:28
Speaker 4: that and then he would have a terrible time with
6:32
Speaker 4: a small laptop because so I think we tried to
6:36
Speaker 4: work that into everything that we did, And it also
6:39
Speaker 4: came kind of from some of the values of the organization.
6:42
Speaker 4: They often talked about meritocracy and how clients should be
6:45
Speaker 4: at the focus of a thing that's being done. So
6:48
Speaker 4: we just translated that to be, well, what is the
6:50
Speaker 4: best thing we can do internally for our internal clients,
6:54
Speaker 4: I your own company. So it felt very natural to
6:57
Speaker 4: continue what I think is a personal mindset, said that
7:00
Speaker 4: what's the best service we can provide with the values
7:03
Speaker 4: of the company.
7:04
Speaker 2: And we should stress it's an investment management firm, right,
7:08
Speaker 2: so that's going to align with I guess, you know,
7:13
Speaker 2: very valuable human capital, and you want to be tailoring
7:16
Speaker 2: the technology provision to those individual contributors exactly.
7:20
Speaker 4: And so these are all I'm sure there's plenty of
7:23
Speaker 4: companies that had a lot of intelligent people, but basically
7:26
Speaker 4: what we realized is that there were certain instances where well,
7:31
Speaker 4: if this person isn't productive for two days, well you
7:35
Speaker 4: could have bought twenty laptops worth of equipment or whatever
7:39
Speaker 4: it might be for that downtime. Right, So it gave
7:41
Speaker 4: a really interesting impetus that we could we use this
7:45
Speaker 4: often and it's like, okay, well is this a good
7:47
Speaker 4: good thing? Because you can never really protect yourself. Someone's
7:53
Speaker 4: just not going to like what you're doing, but you
7:55
Speaker 4: can always try to make it as generally acceptable as
8:02
Speaker 4: possible and if you're showing a willingness to engage in
8:04
Speaker 4: those conversations. Sometimes we sidestep. There were individuals where we went, Okay,
8:08
Speaker 4: we're going to go off beast, We're going to do
8:09
Speaker 4: something that completely bespoke for you, because you know, context matters. Again,
8:14
Speaker 4: this person really needed a bigger screen for dixite. There
8:17
Speaker 4: were other examples that may be a bit more indefinite
8:20
Speaker 4: and technical, but where we tried to adopt to those
8:24
Speaker 4: circumstances because no one really has perfect information, right, So
8:28
Speaker 4: it was one of the reasons why we got so
8:30
Speaker 4: interested in the sentiment thing. And I'm not I'm probably
8:33
Speaker 4: jumping ahead. Well we'll talk about that in a second,
8:35
Speaker 4: I'm sure, but fair fair.
8:37
Speaker 2: Now, let's let's get really concrete with it, Robin. Let's
8:40
Speaker 2: think about something like a new hire. Walk us through
8:44
Speaker 2: your team's involvement in that whole process. And I know
8:47
Speaker 2: from having read about my group before, that this whole
8:50
Speaker 2: process begins way before the official onboarding process begins, right
8:55
Speaker 2: like from the from the moment of the hire, almost
8:57
Speaker 2: And what were teams missing out? If they what are
9:00
Speaker 2: other teams out there missing out they don't engage in
9:02
Speaker 2: that such as such an early stage.
9:04
Speaker 4: Even yeah, and I think I think I'll split it
9:07
Speaker 4: into a few different ways we started, if we started
9:10
Speaker 4: months and years before we even got a new hire.
9:13
Speaker 4: The engineering decisions we tried to make was we made
9:18
Speaker 4: sure that we had I sometimes also said talked about
9:21
Speaker 4: the illusion of choice, because most people don't want to
9:26
Speaker 4: have an Amazon like experience with two thousand products that
9:30
Speaker 4: can pick and choose because you're overwhelmed. You want to know,
9:32
Speaker 4: you want to have a curated list of here's my
9:35
Speaker 4: top three, and you pick the one that aligns with you.
9:38
Speaker 4: So we tried to very hard to make sure there
9:40
Speaker 4: are hardware choices and the services we provided essentially boiled
9:44
Speaker 4: down to do like a Mac, do like a Windows.
9:47
Speaker 4: And then we tried to provide a bit of guidance
9:49
Speaker 4: around that going your peers in your team or in
9:52
Speaker 4: your department all have this or the other, and tried
9:56
Speaker 4: to use a bit of that context again to suggest
10:00
Speaker 4: you're probably best off with this one, but we're not
10:02
Speaker 4: going to stop you if you want one or the other,
10:05
Speaker 4: except in those instances where your job roll required one
10:11
Speaker 4: above the other, but one of the engineering facets. So
10:13
Speaker 4: we try to really keep that trim we tried to
10:16
Speaker 4: keep that easy. We tried to give that illusion of
10:18
Speaker 4: choice where essentially we knew pick any of these. They're
10:21
Speaker 4: all high end equipment. It's down to your personal preference.
10:25
Speaker 4: We then continue that with making sure that we had
10:27
Speaker 4: as many applications automated as possible. I'm sure everyone has
10:31
Speaker 4: come across the discussion about or should we have Edge
10:34
Speaker 4: or Chrome or Firefox or Opera or whatever web browser.
10:39
Speaker 4: And instead of shying away from that and trying to go, Okay,
10:42
Speaker 4: well this is the only one that we're providing, we
10:44
Speaker 4: provided three options predominantly, and we try to do that
10:48
Speaker 4: for all of the applications that from a company perspective,
10:52
Speaker 4: doesn't really matter. Well, you're going to have to use
10:54
Speaker 4: the accountancy software that we provide because that's where the
10:57
Speaker 4: accounts are for all of the other things. And I
11:00
Speaker 4: think you may have heard me talk about this before,
11:02
Speaker 4: is try to separate what is a tech decision from
11:07
Speaker 4: your subjective opinion. Is the tech decision really you must
11:11
Speaker 4: have Chrome or you must have Edge, or is it
11:14
Speaker 4: you must have a modern browser? Ifn't, they then have
11:17
Speaker 4: the waste separate there. So we did loads of work
11:20
Speaker 4: on the on the front just to make sure that
11:22
Speaker 4: everyone could get the good stuff when they came to
11:26
Speaker 4: the engagement. So then when you come turn the engagement,
11:28
Speaker 4: so we have about three months up from you joining
11:31
Speaker 4: the teams, would the hiring manager would often be prompted
11:34
Speaker 4: to go, actually, I actually, what do you want to
11:36
Speaker 4: talk to the team? And I think there's so much
11:39
Speaker 4: untapped potential here in the onboarding and we could talk
11:41
Speaker 4: about some ideas I have for what we could do
11:43
Speaker 4: and do more, But we essentially started with do you
11:48
Speaker 4: back to that single question, do you want to make
11:50
Speaker 4: our windows? And we then guide you through those options
11:53
Speaker 4: because we knew all of what everyone else in your
11:56
Speaker 4: team had, so rarely, if we would rarely let you
12:00
Speaker 4: see the entire unfiltered list, there would already be a
12:02
Speaker 4: curated list of a curated list where we'd go, hey,
12:05
Speaker 4: your peers, hasn't this Because we also had some spoken
12:08
Speaker 4: versions for developers where they also got very heavy computational
12:14
Speaker 4: capacity in our clusters and any other services that maybe
12:19
Speaker 4: a normal office work it wouldn't get. So we curated
12:22
Speaker 4: those really hard. We gave them that interaction, and then
12:25
Speaker 4: what we learned when we did the transformation to laptops
12:29
Speaker 4: during the pandemic is if we structure it, give you
12:34
Speaker 4: a date when your kid's going to arrive, before you've
12:36
Speaker 4: even started. We schedule an onboarding session with you for
12:42
Speaker 4: just as that has arrived. Then you already have a
12:45
Speaker 4: timeline for when I'm going to get kid.
12:47
Speaker 5: You know what kit you're going to.
12:48
Speaker 4: Get, and you already know over here with someone who's
12:51
Speaker 4: going to help me. And we try intentionally made it
12:53
Speaker 4: so that we had a baby two days between on
12:56
Speaker 4: average from you receiving the kit to having the onboarding,
12:59
Speaker 4: because we want people to test a little just just
13:03
Speaker 4: have a play log on it's not really urgent yet,
13:07
Speaker 4: but get familiar. So when you got to the onboarding
13:09
Speaker 4: and we tried to avoid those conversations of oh, yeah,
13:12
Speaker 4: I haven't opened it yet, or now that the delivery
13:15
Speaker 4: was late. And we found that was so successful we
13:18
Speaker 4: worked that into our day to day processes, so all
13:21
Speaker 4: of the teams across the globe then started doing. When
13:23
Speaker 4: we had new joiners, we'd schedule in two hours with
13:27
Speaker 4: them on their second day or something like that. We
13:29
Speaker 4: were well first day most of the time, actually here's
13:32
Speaker 4: your kid, let me go through that, let me get
13:34
Speaker 4: you started. So people felt welcomed and looked after all
13:39
Speaker 4: the way through, and we did that. You know from
13:42
Speaker 4: engineering that no one will see to the hands on
13:46
Speaker 4: people who helped you on your first day, who you
13:48
Speaker 4: then would have a relationship with and go, I want
13:51
Speaker 4: to talk to that person again if I know they're
13:53
Speaker 4: going to help me if I need something. So we
13:55
Speaker 4: tried to really focus on all of those aspects. I
13:58
Speaker 4: think there's so much more we could do in this
14:00
Speaker 4: area as well, but.
14:03
Speaker 3: You've got a great approach to it, right. There's a
14:06
Speaker 3: there's a fine line between needing standards, managing cost, reducing
14:12
Speaker 3: even the volume of patches that you need, and balancing
14:15
Speaker 3: that with the need for some level of flexibility. Right,
14:18
Speaker 3: Tom and I use Chrome when we record this podcast,
14:21
Speaker 3: but I use Edge as my primary browser, and there's
14:23
Speaker 3: no conflict between the two. As long as I've got
14:25
Speaker 3: compatibility for my apps, things work fine. But the onboarding
14:30
Speaker 3: piece has been a it's a perennial problem for IT
14:33
Speaker 3: teams because of the complexity that's involved. A lot of
14:38
Speaker 3: a lot of teams that are involved in in the
14:40
Speaker 3: onboarding are not in it. You've got to get other
14:43
Speaker 3: teams involved to create that full blown process. I've written
14:47
Speaker 3: about it recently because it is a it's a complicated thing.
14:51
Speaker 3: You've talked about some of the outcomes and the things
14:53
Speaker 3: you drove to do. How do the teams actually create
14:56
Speaker 3: those seamless personalized experiences for newmployees. What's the back end
15:01
Speaker 3: look like?
15:03
Speaker 5: Well, I mean.
15:05
Speaker 4: One of the hard points and you touched on that
15:07
Speaker 4: is logistics, right, because most I'll go out on a
15:12
Speaker 4: limb and say, most of our enterprise companies right now
15:15
Speaker 4: still need to do some type of stock maintenance, or
15:19
Speaker 4: if that's predicting, are we having one hundred new joiners
15:22
Speaker 4: next month or ten or whatever. And I think what
15:27
Speaker 4: we found early in the process was we ended up going, Okay,
15:32
Speaker 4: well we need to buy one of this or one
15:34
Speaker 4: of this. And when we actually retrospectively looked at how
15:38
Speaker 4: much hard were we bought across the world, we could
15:41
Speaker 4: make a pretty good guess on what we needed the
15:43
Speaker 4: next three months. And we never encountered a situation where
15:47
Speaker 4: we went, shoot, we've bought too many laptops, no one
15:51
Speaker 4: wants them. That never occurred in our entire So what
15:55
Speaker 4: we did was we took away some of the headache
15:58
Speaker 4: from that and let a team self manage so that
16:00
Speaker 4: you always had again the curated list, Always have some
16:05
Speaker 4: of that stock in, always replenish it, always make sure
16:08
Speaker 4: that it comes because what we found could come to
16:11
Speaker 4: back to your seamless transition. Sometimes the line manager had
16:16
Speaker 4: just made a decision which may or may not be
16:19
Speaker 4: what the person who was joining us actually wanted, or
16:23
Speaker 4: they misinterpreted or thought it didn't matter. There were several
16:27
Speaker 4: times where we had someone approach and got oh, I
16:30
Speaker 4: thought I was going to get the other option from
16:34
Speaker 4: whatever they got. So again having that stock and having
16:37
Speaker 4: that experience and then go on, no worries, We'll just
16:42
Speaker 4: shift this for you on the day we had that
16:44
Speaker 4: stock available. So for us, a key component of it
16:47
Speaker 4: was the logistics. Make sure that we have kits so
16:49
Speaker 4: that we can give that flix. Because if someone comes
16:53
Speaker 4: to you and say I got the wrong thing, but
16:55
Speaker 4: could I have that one and they pointed one of
16:57
Speaker 4: your other options, if you say solutely, they're going to
17:01
Speaker 4: think you're a stellar organization who's flexible adjusts to my
17:06
Speaker 4: We only had three options really, and most people were
17:09
Speaker 4: happy with one of those three, and in the rare
17:12
Speaker 4: instances they weren't. But then it was back to always
17:16
Speaker 4: making sure we had people handing out the kit if
17:18
Speaker 4: we could, always making sure we had that onboarding experience.
17:21
Speaker 4: We really took that to heart that from our roll
17:24
Speaker 4: up project. Make sure that someone talks to you on
17:27
Speaker 4: that first day, just goes through how it comes together.
17:30
Speaker 4: Every company has their own quirks on how you access
17:34
Speaker 4: intranet and policies and what it might be, and having
17:38
Speaker 4: a trusted human guide you through that just made gave
17:43
Speaker 4: us really good feedback.
17:47
Speaker 3: And I touched on a little bit of the notion
17:49
Speaker 3: that or not even the notion, the fact that you've
17:51
Speaker 3: got to collaborate with other teams to get somebody completely onboarded.
17:56
Speaker 3: I think the biggest partner in that chain is HR.
17:59
Speaker 3: How did the partnership with HR drive the kind of
18:02
Speaker 3: innovation and success you've seen?
18:05
Speaker 5: So there's a there's a few teams above and beyond that.
18:07
Speaker 4: We also had I'm sure an identity access governance team
18:14
Speaker 4: that looked after a lot of these things because being
18:18
Speaker 4: a financial organization, there are obviously a lot of restrictions
18:22
Speaker 4: and governance and frameworks that need to be adhered to.
18:25
Speaker 4: If you if you're an investor of an investment profession
18:28
Speaker 4: of a certain type, you can't have access to that data,
18:31
Speaker 4: but you can have access to this data. So we
18:34
Speaker 4: had an entire team that was dedicated to the actual
18:37
Speaker 4: nitty gritty of what should you have access to, what
18:40
Speaker 4: what what would you need access to in your day
18:43
Speaker 4: to day And I think they had more of a
18:45
Speaker 4: day to day interaction with HR making sure that we
18:48
Speaker 4: followed all of the protocols that were required. But what
18:52
Speaker 4: we kept pushing for was that onboarding experience. We can
18:56
Speaker 4: do even more as as I left, I know one
18:59
Speaker 4: of the commerce stations we had was can we get
19:03
Speaker 4: it to the point where we actually can we ship
19:07
Speaker 4: you all of your kit maybe two to three weeks
19:09
Speaker 4: before you've joined, Because again we took we throughout the
19:14
Speaker 4: process right, we went how many times do we rescind
19:18
Speaker 4: an offer after someone's gone through all of the interviews,
19:22
Speaker 4: they've signed the paper, they're about three weeks out from joining,
19:27
Speaker 4: Can we just ship them the kit? And that one
19:30
Speaker 4: in one hundred or whatever it might be, I can't
19:32
Speaker 4: remember what number we got to was astonishingly low that case,
19:37
Speaker 4: do we just pay for a courier ship that back? Sorry, okay,
19:41
Speaker 4: send that back then? But for the other ninety nine,
19:44
Speaker 4: you've already gotten a goodie box, right. We envisioned that
19:48
Speaker 4: you could stick some culturally appropriate things in there, you know,
19:52
Speaker 4: if teese or cookies or muffins or whatever, something that
19:56
Speaker 4: just gives you a bit of a wow. They're already
19:59
Speaker 4: engaging with me three weeks prior. There's no real skin
20:03
Speaker 4: of all back in tech, so I know those conversations
20:06
Speaker 4: were very heavily ongoing to go, Actually, can we take
20:09
Speaker 4: that onboarding experience one step further? And I'm going to
20:14
Speaker 4: be keen to hear from from my friends who's still
20:16
Speaker 4: there where they land up when they end up.
20:18
Speaker 3: Actually, so that's actually good segue into the kind of
20:23
Speaker 3: the follow up taking it one step further. There's this
20:28
Speaker 3: concept that an employee is always onboarding. Things are changing
20:33
Speaker 3: so rapidly that there's really no finish line and enablement
20:37
Speaker 3: never ends. You're always onboarding or enabling something. So how
20:41
Speaker 3: was your onboarding approach extended beyond new hires to support
20:45
Speaker 3: that that entire organization day to day?
20:51
Speaker 5: Good question. So I think.
20:56
Speaker 4: There were a few things we tried to do because
21:00
Speaker 4: are an old CEO the company I worked for said
21:04
Speaker 4: change is the only continant that was if you met
21:06
Speaker 4: him in the corridor, that would be what he said.
21:09
Speaker 5: That was his tagline.
21:11
Speaker 4: But it is interesting because we would hear we would
21:14
Speaker 4: see that sometimes in we deployed sentiment feedback, so we
21:18
Speaker 4: gathered sentiment from everyone in the organization once every quarter,
21:21
Speaker 4: but we did it we kind of paste it throughout
21:23
Speaker 4: the quarter. So we had, on the one hand, a
21:26
Speaker 4: bit of a temperature gauge. Whenever we did a big
21:29
Speaker 4: rollout or a change of something, did we suddenly see
21:33
Speaker 4: a spike of people going I don't really understand why
21:36
Speaker 4: we're doing this thing, then we could trim or rather
21:40
Speaker 4: target or comms of gone okay, actually, well we're getting
21:43
Speaker 4: some feedback here that people don't understand why we're doing
21:45
Speaker 4: something or what they seem misaligned with what we're doing.
21:49
Speaker 4: But most of the time we tried to we used
21:53
Speaker 4: slack predominantly, and so we made sure that we had
21:57
Speaker 4: an informal communication style that said, hey, does this have
22:00
Speaker 4: this is where it's going to come. If it was
22:02
Speaker 4: a bigger type of rollout, we would have sit in sessions.
22:05
Speaker 4: Sometimes depending on what type of change it was something
22:10
Speaker 4: that required training, then we would to provide more sit
22:13
Speaker 4: in sessions. We had a really interesting situation with a
22:18
Speaker 4: merger of a company we brought on board much smaller,
22:23
Speaker 4: maybe ten percent the size of Man at Large, and
22:27
Speaker 4: they needed clearly understand a lot about what was different.
22:32
Speaker 4: So again we did all of the engineering efforts, we
22:34
Speaker 4: made sure all of the applications worked, all of that,
22:36
Speaker 4: but then we had those sit in sessions we tried
22:39
Speaker 4: to explain what are the differences, what is it that
22:41
Speaker 4: you're going to get now, how does it work differently?
22:44
Speaker 4: And then we followed up on that in all of
22:48
Speaker 4: the channels we had available, including we always measured the sentiment.
22:52
Speaker 4: The sentiment was almost like our baseline of whatever else
22:55
Speaker 4: we were doing. We always referred back to that to
22:57
Speaker 4: see if we'd missed anything in our emails, in our
23:00
Speaker 4: are that kind of instant messaging commps, etc.
23:04
Speaker 3: And for anybody listening that's ever heard me talk at
23:07
Speaker 3: all out in public, you've heard me say technology is
23:10
Speaker 3: the easy part. It's the people that are hard. I've
23:12
Speaker 3: seen some teams absolutely hesitate to proactively reach out and
23:16
Speaker 3: ask questions because they've got an inability to act on
23:19
Speaker 3: the response, or there may be a fear of increasing
23:22
Speaker 3: ticket volumes you almost I've actually even heard executives say
23:26
Speaker 3: we can't reach out to people because we don't know
23:28
Speaker 3: what we're going to get back. Why is that the
23:30
Speaker 3: wrong mindset?
23:33
Speaker 4: I mean, it's interesting you mentioned this because that's a
23:36
Speaker 4: side story i'd like to share just before this is
23:39
Speaker 4: something I've been known to say to my team for
23:42
Speaker 4: a long time. Is imagine a firefighter who' sees a
23:46
Speaker 4: fire and walks away from it. Pretty rubbish firefighter, right,
23:50
Speaker 4: And I think it's an mentality that we need to
23:53
Speaker 4: have when we're producing services. If there is a complaint
23:57
Speaker 4: that's brewing, you need to go and address that.
24:01
Speaker 5: As early as you can.
24:02
Speaker 4: If someone is telling you, hey, I don't like this thing,
24:05
Speaker 4: go into it before it becomes a de facto situation.
24:11
Speaker 5: Oh you know, it always does this.
24:13
Speaker 4: Whenever you hear that type of sentence structure, you know
24:18
Speaker 4: you've missed something and you're you're way after when it
24:21
Speaker 4: actually happened. So I always try to encourage that with
24:24
Speaker 4: someone's being annoyed, that's great, get in. It's not great
24:28
Speaker 4: that they're annoyed. It's great that you hear that they're annoyed,
24:31
Speaker 4: because they're still willing to share with you. It's when
24:33
Speaker 4: people stop sharing with you that you're really up in
24:37
Speaker 4: a problematic situation. Right, So I was very heavily in
24:43
Speaker 4: the camp of, well, let's communicate early, let's communicate transparently. Again,
24:48
Speaker 4: if we go back to the sentiment I signed the
24:50
Speaker 4: sentiment campaigns of those listening, a little pop up on
24:54
Speaker 4: everyone's computer with my name, my picture, and my title.
25:01
Speaker 4: And I've made it clear, I'm sending this to you.
25:04
Speaker 4: This isn't some nondescript function sending this and every so
25:08
Speaker 4: off and someone would reach out to me and I
25:10
Speaker 4: have every single time, they would be annoyed at the
25:13
Speaker 4: beginning of it. At the end of it did go actually,
25:17
Speaker 4: that's really interesting when I got a chance to actually
25:20
Speaker 4: talk and engage. So, I think, from my own experience,
25:23
Speaker 4: if you are hiding from it, you're not. I'm going
25:27
Speaker 4: to be as bold as saying you're not really doing
25:29
Speaker 4: your job.
25:34
Speaker 3: Oh, you're right. And I'll give you another extension of
25:36
Speaker 3: that firefighter analogy, and that people have heard me talk
25:38
Speaker 3: and heard this as well. It they love being that
25:42
Speaker 3: it firefighter. We love running into the fire and putting
25:45
Speaker 3: the fire out. We solve the problem, but that problem
25:48
Speaker 3: is probably self induced. There's an it arsonist. We lit
25:51
Speaker 3: the fire a month ago, and then we show out
25:53
Speaker 3: up to put out the blaze. That too, is not sustainable.
25:56
Speaker 3: You can't run away from the fire, but you also
25:58
Speaker 3: have to stop lighting the fire.
26:02
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think.
26:03
Speaker 4: I mean, this is where we're all of the boring
26:06
Speaker 4: aspects of the job, or brother boring for others, I
26:09
Speaker 4: find them accelerating. Is where you have good patch scheduling,
26:13
Speaker 4: where you have good processes, and in all of these
26:16
Speaker 4: things that no one really sees. Because with the best
26:19
Speaker 4: will in the world, if we did a perfect day
26:21
Speaker 4: to day operational job, we'll still have fires. So what
26:25
Speaker 4: why Let's not focus that on the things we can prevent, right,
26:29
Speaker 4: Let's save our creativity and energy for there are going
26:32
Speaker 4: to be events that we just have no control over them.
26:35
Speaker 2: Mhm. And as we describe this kind of shift in
26:42
Speaker 2: the natural focal point of an IT professional, what's your view,
26:46
Speaker 2: Robin on how it is changing as a career or
26:50
Speaker 2: as a function big picture or looking ahead free to
26:54
Speaker 2: five years. I mean, does it move organically closer to
26:57
Speaker 2: what we traditionally associate with HR in terms of really
27:01
Speaker 2: owning the employee experience? At large. What's your view.
27:05
Speaker 4: I think, you know almost like some teams have really
27:09
Speaker 4: branded their HR acquisition to talent and talent teams where
27:14
Speaker 4: you want to retain talent.
27:15
Speaker 5: Right And.
27:18
Speaker 4: I I think that when I started in tech, you
27:22
Speaker 4: could do tech for tech sake. You could be into
27:25
Speaker 4: the nuts and bolts, and that was fine because there
27:27
Speaker 4: weren't many people who could do it. And we're seeing
27:30
Speaker 4: now as there is a move in the industry towards
27:34
Speaker 4: technology is easier to ease and easier to manage. Most
27:36
Speaker 4: things is now in a web portal. You don't need
27:38
Speaker 4: to have twenty years of experience to change a few settings.
27:43
Speaker 4: I think the people who are going to be successful
27:47
Speaker 4: in technology are the people who are very mindful that
27:49
Speaker 4: you are an enabler. That is the fundamentally what you're doing.
27:53
Speaker 4: You're providing tools set for the business to do their work.
27:58
Speaker 4: And I think another way I've thought about this is
28:03
Speaker 4: sometimes it is in a very unfortunate position that you're
28:06
Speaker 4: stuck between. You have to enforce certain standards, and these
28:10
Speaker 4: might be regulatory or from an internal governance body, whatever
28:14
Speaker 4: it might be, and you need to be the voice
28:16
Speaker 4: of reason for people who want to get their work done.
28:20
Speaker 4: So prove that you're on average, always on the side
28:24
Speaker 4: of people who want to get work done, because you're
28:26
Speaker 4: going to say and need to say no for something,
28:28
Speaker 4: we're going to need passwords. Unfortunately for the foreseeable, we're
28:31
Speaker 4: going to need certain things still to maintain a secure environment.
28:35
Speaker 4: But make you earn that trust so that when you
28:38
Speaker 4: provide those guide rails, people don't immediately go.
28:42
Speaker 5: Deep sigh, it.
28:43
Speaker 4: Has done a thing. Maybe Instead, even if you get
28:47
Speaker 4: two more people to go, oh, actually, well they have
28:50
Speaker 4: given some context I can understand why. So I think
28:53
Speaker 4: as we're moving into the future, being mindful of what
28:57
Speaker 4: helps people is going to be what decides on who's
29:00
Speaker 4: successful in technology, because.
29:02
Speaker 5: It's going to be so hard to do tech for tech.
29:04
Speaker 2: Sig before we let you go up and say goodbye.
29:09
Speaker 2: Any further examples you haven't touched upon of how it
29:13
Speaker 2: at Man group was able to sort of act as
29:15
Speaker 2: an enabler of productivity. Anything you're particularly proud of, we haven't.
29:19
Speaker 2: We haven't covered yet.
29:23
Speaker 4: Well, actually, if I if I continue down the kind
29:25
Speaker 4: of password route that we're read at the time in
29:29
Speaker 4: technology right now, where it's really interesting, we uh without
29:33
Speaker 4: opening up for another half an hour segment on topics.
29:36
Speaker 5: Of zero trust.
29:38
Speaker 4: We have some new security architecture and kind of ideas
29:43
Speaker 4: are thinking about tech that enables a better user experience
29:48
Speaker 4: and the higher security, and I think I would really
29:52
Speaker 4: encourage everyone to while the terminology is big in might
29:56
Speaker 4: sound scary, it's password less than zero trust. We used
30:01
Speaker 4: it for good. So what we did was we tried
30:03
Speaker 4: to push more for using biometrics or face fingerprint, things
30:08
Speaker 4: like that, make sure that actually, how can we reduce
30:11
Speaker 4: the frequency that we ask you for passwords by looking
30:14
Speaker 4: at other things like is your device patched? Is it
30:17
Speaker 4: actually safe and compliant for other reasons. So we managed
30:22
Speaker 4: leverages one or rare location of higher security and higher
30:27
Speaker 4: user experience, and we deployed that at large and let
30:29
Speaker 4: people go, well, you pick the one you prefer. If
30:32
Speaker 4: you want to type a long password, do you do that?
30:34
Speaker 4: Or you could just use your face. And then again
30:37
Speaker 4: we didn't mandate it because some people, certainly in mainland Europe,
30:41
Speaker 4: there are some countries that are a bit more apprehensive
30:44
Speaker 4: about using biometric for authentication, whereas other parts of the
30:48
Speaker 4: world they're clearly like no, absolutely, if I can use
30:50
Speaker 4: my fingerprint I'm doing that all day, every day. And
30:53
Speaker 4: we even deployed that all the way to administrators getting
30:57
Speaker 4: access privileged actors into certain systems where where they need
31:00
Speaker 4: did a second fingerprint. So really proud of how we
31:02
Speaker 4: tried to combine and as I said, we try to
31:04
Speaker 4: earn that trust that hey, we're actually doing a really
31:08
Speaker 4: good thing for you, so that when we come to
31:11
Speaker 4: say no wants something, you at least understand that's because
31:16
Speaker 4: we couldn't do anything else.
31:18
Speaker 2: Sure. Sure, and we've got into a lot of specifics here, Robin,
31:22
Speaker 2: But I mean a big question to end on what
31:24
Speaker 2: would your vision of a truly universal white glove IT
31:28
Speaker 2: experience look like in the boldest broader sense.
31:32
Speaker 4: I mean, it is hard to imagine that the AI
31:36
Speaker 4: and LLM trend is going to go away. So I
31:40
Speaker 4: think what would be really cool to me is if
31:45
Speaker 4: you can tap these into the general knowledge based of
31:48
Speaker 4: the company, If you can have these contextualized helpers agents
31:54
Speaker 4: that go, hey, actually someone else encountered this problem, and
31:58
Speaker 4: you could even tweak how you prefer having their language.
32:00
Speaker 4: If you're an executive, you normally want quite terse, very
32:04
Speaker 4: actionable information. If you're more junior or maybe technically inclined.
32:08
Speaker 4: Do you want to get a bit more of a
32:09
Speaker 4: boss and the ability to meet every person where they
32:12
Speaker 4: are so you can help not only do you write
32:15
Speaker 4: your message, but you have maybe these technologies to actually
32:18
Speaker 4: adopt rkay. I know Robin likes to have the context,
32:21
Speaker 4: so give him a little bit of a blurb on
32:23
Speaker 4: the context before before we give them this message. And
32:27
Speaker 4: if we think about all school white glove servers, it
32:30
Speaker 4: would be a person that runs up to you and
32:32
Speaker 4: helps you with whatever you want. And if we move
32:36
Speaker 4: that into the digital age, it would be some type
32:39
Speaker 4: of agent that goes, hey, I see what'll Microsoft tried
32:42
Speaker 4: to do with Clippy twenty years ago, maybe with the
32:44
Speaker 4: world as finally ready for it, but a good one.
32:48
Speaker 4: I really think that it's that that you can get
32:51
Speaker 4: expertise from the entire company much faster, and you can
32:54
Speaker 4: get a tailored to how you like to be spoken to,
32:57
Speaker 4: and then you can take it to it to a
32:59
Speaker 4: human if you need to after.
33:03
Speaker 2: We love it, Robin, love to having you on listen.
33:06
Speaker 2: I'm sure you've acquired some some new admirers today. If
33:10
Speaker 2: anyone wanted to reach out to you and have a
33:12
Speaker 2: conversation about bringing this level of the sophistication and nuance
33:15
Speaker 2: to their own organization. I presume they come to you
33:18
Speaker 2: through LinkedIn, would that be right?
33:20
Speaker 5: Absolutely?
33:20
Speaker 2: Please, excellent, excellent, well look, I mean we certainly, we
33:25
Speaker 2: certainly commend it. And Robin, it was lovely lovely to
33:28
Speaker 2: see you again post experience, and thanks for telling us
33:32
Speaker 2: about that amazing, amazing Era Man group. It was really fascinating.
33:36
Speaker 5: Thank you very much. Always a pleasure, gentlemen.
33:39
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