Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Becoming a DEX leader w/ Emily Schlick (Vizient)

Transcript

Becoming a DEX leader w/ Emily Schlick (Vizient) · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

• 0:01
  Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGraw.
• 0:07
  Let's get into it. I change Makers, Welcome back to the Deck
• 0:11
  Show. I'm Tom McGraw. I'm joined as ever by Tim Flower. Tim,
• 0:16
  how are you? It feels like it's been a while since I've seen
• 0:19
  in a while. They doing well. Time, still lots of travel,
• 0:22
  so I always hate missing episodes. Unfortunately, it's tough to do a podcast
• 0:26
  when you're on an airplane. But I'm I'm glad I'm sitting in a seat
• 0:29
  today and can can jump in, especially with Emily. I'm looking forward to
• 0:34
  recording a podcast with someone from like an airport lounge. At some point we
• 0:38
  can arrange that still on my podcast. Yeah, well, you know,
• 0:41
  I think it's gonna happen. I think it's gonna happen. And you just
• 0:43
  mentioned Emily, our guest who we'll get to momentarily. But you're you're old
• 0:48
  compadres, Is that right, Timmy, You've you've worked together for a few
• 0:51
  years. I don't know. Yeah, So when I first started next think
• 0:54
  it was back in I started in twenty fifteen and then twenty sixteen. It
• 0:58
  was right when Emily was looking at a bringing nextic in. So, yeah,
• 1:03
  we go, we go back a few years. Well, let's let's
• 1:06
  welcome out to the show. It's Emily Shill. Emily. Um, I
• 1:08
  mean I'm not sure what your current current exact title is. I know,
• 1:11
  relative relatively new to your current position at Vision is a senior director for Strategic
• 1:18
  Business Operations. Is that right? Yeah? So you know the funny thing
• 1:21
  about titles is there's titles letter yeah, and from an HR workday perspective,
• 1:27
  and then there's what you actually do. So um, my external facing title,
• 1:34
  um is what you had just said. But internal I'm a senior director
• 1:38
  of Digital point Experience DECKS and implementing digital experience is something you've done for a
• 1:44
  few years now, Emily, Right, I mean this is you're one of
• 1:47
  the most i'd say experienced minded technology leaders I get a chance to talk to
• 1:52
  you, I would say, so, I said, before we get into
• 1:55
  what you're currently working on, I mean, maybe here about it a bit
• 1:57
  about your career in Deck so far. I mean, how did that journey
• 2:01
  start? First of all? Yeah, so maybe to answer why I'm a
• 2:07
  little bit different, as my career has been full of a lot of left
• 2:10
  and right turns. If we are all turning the same direction, all left
• 2:15
  terms, I'd be going in a circle, and I hardly think that's the
• 2:17
  case. So I have been in the healthcare industry for most of my career,
• 2:22
  but I started out in schooling and in the working world as an HR
• 2:28
  professional, so spent years doing recruiting and employee relations. So then I transitioned
• 2:35
  into technology by way of supplier management, managing big outsourcing of contracts for our
• 2:40
  service desk, other IT service management, production support, and then about seven
• 2:46
  years ago, I was tapped on the shoulder to start what we all know
• 2:51
  now as digital employ experience. And so it really started as a conversation when
• 2:57
  I went out to lunch with a trusted sponsor of mine within the organization,
• 3:01
  talking about the next steps in my career, and it just so happened he
• 3:06
  was the lead of all of our collaboration products within technology, and he was
• 3:12
  getting so many escalations, some of them from high profile exact admins supporting our
• 3:17
  executives, and he said, you know, I have an idea. My
• 3:23
  day's filled with just addressing escalations, emails like I can't even get to know
• 3:30
  emails of substance because it's emails of complaints about how the technology is working for
• 3:35
  them, And I really think you could come in and help get a handle
• 3:39
  on themes or metrics or just some type of information that we could pull this
• 3:45
  together, that we could use to improve it and get it out of my
• 3:49
  email. And he's like, I'm not going to do this if you're not
• 3:53
  willing, but I know you can do it. And it was another another
• 3:57
  one of those right left terms each other at the time, a risk to
• 4:00
  come over and say, yeah, let's do it. And so UM I
• 4:03
  started on his team about seven years ago, UM and began our very first
• 4:10
  digital point experience office at that time we called it EUE or in Gezer Experience
• 4:15
  UM, and started helping him put some data behind that. And your key
• 4:21
  metric then was the thickness of his in books had to be yes, very
• 4:27
  much, less emails, bless emails for him. It's a crude but I
• 4:32
  think meaningful metric right there. And I mean from from that first implementation,
• 4:38
  Emily, I mean, you know, maybe you know in terms of whether
• 4:41
  it could convey similar advice to somebody beginning of their journey. Now, UM
• 4:46
  was it was? It was it still irrelevant experience that first implementation, or
• 4:53
  things changed so much since that it almost his ancient history. What's your view?
• 4:57
  No, I don't think it's changed a lot. I I think it's
• 5:00
  been elevated, and we most definitely are seeing the connections to overall employee experience
• 5:08
  and digital employee experience more than we ever have before. But I think some
• 5:13
  of the lessons I learned and now as I'm challenged to and I'm blessed to
• 5:18
  get the opportunity to implement to a new organization or new at an organ and
• 5:24
  existing organization again that I haven't been a part of, it's a lot of
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  the same things I've seen before, So some of the lessons learned. So
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  I there's three that come to mind, and the big one is going to
• 5:38
  sound kind of like a shocker or maybe not and still true today. But
• 5:43
  technology isn't always the cause of technology problems. So sometimes it's in the processes
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  or lack thereof that we're using to roll new technology out or to update existing
• 5:57
  technology, or even your technology teams being in silos and not talking and communicating
• 6:02
  to each other. But they both that both many teams impact one experience.
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  So if I'm an employee. I use multiple technologies throughout the day. If
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  those teams aren't in sync, then you may be taking from one experience to
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  provide a better experience, so not having a visibility into that holistic experience.
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  So very early when we did this the first time, and I was,
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  you know, very much honored to come here and sit down and think about
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  this because it was like, gosh, we just did it right. Anytimes
• 6:38
  we take a pause and talk about what do we do, but very early
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  we establish what we call a content strategy team, and so that was to
• 6:45
  better communicate to and from our employees about their experience under a very successful brand.
• 6:51
  So just by asking our employees, listening to what they tell us,
• 6:57
  and then taking action on that feedback improved to their productivity and they just had
• 7:01
  that feeling we were listening. The second thing, which I don't know if
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  I did. I didn't knock this one out of the park the first time,
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  but I was already at a company, I guess, for gosh,
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  six years before I started the experience department. So I did have relationships already,
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  but they weren't necessarily the ones I really needed. So it's building partnerships
• 7:24
  early, both with leadership and then peer relationships. So a deck's team alone
• 7:30
  is not going to be able to solve experience related problems, so you have
• 7:34
  to invest time in learning the business and their pain points that employees are having,
• 7:41
  so you can use that knowledge to build partnerships with those both inside of
• 7:44
  technology like infrastructure and support, security, and then outside of technology, so
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  that one's huge, so like corporate communications, marketing and HR. And then
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  the final thing that I'm still experienced now is when it comes to experience,
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  you're collecting employee perceptions about the tools and technologies they're provided to do their jobs,
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  so that can change, you know, on the daily depending on how
• 8:13
  their day is going. Right, So there's never going to be one thing
• 8:16
  you can do that's going to solve for a better experience. There might be
• 8:20
  one thing of the day, of the week, of the month. So
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  there's also not one measure. There could be a measure made up of mini
• 8:28
  components, but there's not one measure that's going to tell you if you're having
• 8:35
  a good experience, and so having an initial survey or metric can be directional
• 8:43
  about what the employee perceptions are at the time, but you have to dig
• 8:46
  in and collect other data to find that call to action or measure of success
• 8:52
  that's going to fix the thing that's rising to the topmost now, so how
• 9:00
  do you know that you picked, you know, the right thing, It
• 9:01
  was the right design, and then it solved the problem that you were hearing,
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  and then you have to do it all over again to constantly keep that
• 9:09
  goal over and over again. So in the same thing could be sad for
• 9:13
  getting a DEUX department started. There's not gonna be one metric that's going to
• 9:18
  tell you that DEX is going well. So you have to sit down and
• 9:24
  say, what does it look like when we have a successful digital point experience
• 9:28
  and how can we measure that? Is it a number of projects shared goals
• 9:31
  with those departments I mentioned earlier, you could look at something more hard like
• 9:37
  minimize abrasion, ticket reduction or adoption called action metrics. Things in that start.
• 9:45
  And it really is great to have you on as a guest. After
• 9:46
  so many years, so many, so many stories about coming out to see
• 9:52
  you guys and working with you on the ground. It was a really good
• 9:54
  time to see you. And it's why I came to next think is to
• 9:58
  see customers or perspective, the customers that really get it, that want to
• 10:01
  do something different in it and change the paradigm. So um, it's um.
• 10:07
  It's always great to see a customer go through that journey. You were
• 10:11
  one of the very early customers though, who looked at next think a little
• 10:15
  bit differently. Most were looking at it from the device point of view and
• 10:18
  then aligning it with the employee. My recollection is when we came in,
• 10:22
  you were already down the path of doing an internal NPS and you actually had
• 10:26
  an MPs score that you had done either manually or through other means. But
• 10:31
  growing from those early days, does your approach to the implementation or the how
• 10:37
  you look at employee and the device is it. Are you looking at it
• 10:41
  the same way or have your thoughts on on implementing that kind of an approach
• 10:46
  changed. I would say they've evolved a little bit based on learnings, as
• 10:52
  it should, right. So um, Yeah, we started with MPs and
• 10:54
  that that was not the right thing and the most question that was not the
• 11:01
  right metric. But that's what we learned was it was not the right metrics.
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  So then we developed our own internal score that was made up of different
• 11:09
  components and you know that was going okay too, but it wasn't really widely
• 11:15
  understood. Therefore, it was tough for our engineers and other friends and technology
• 11:20
  to take action on something they didn't quite understand. So I think one thing
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  I've learned is to not overcomplicate it, like simplicity is better and too.
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  There's so much data we can look at, and you all know that aggregated,
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  there's you can you know, there's so many things, but really getting
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  a handle and understanding where does that data you're looking at on that technology or
• 11:43
  that technology in general intersect with the human that's using it and what is that
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  experience? Because you can if you prioritize without that feedback constantly, or you
• 11:56
  know, even just in little pockets like you don't have to pull the whole
• 11:58
  enterprise, so just start small. But if you don't understand, if I,
• 12:03
  you know, see this this action happening through my data, whether it's
• 12:07
  ticket trends, application crashes, whatever you're seeing, I'm going to go after
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  that because that's what the technology is telling me. But the colleague doesn't care
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  or they're you know, they're not even feeling it, and something else might
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  be a problem like how do I use in three sixty five tools to be
• 12:24
  more organized like that might be the biggest thing that impacts their productivity. So
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  I think the biggest thing that I've learned is to not go after that that
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  one metric, which is which is tough because our leaders want that, they
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  want the one metric of success, especially in the data driven organization, and
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  so it really you have to really shift to success that many success metrics based
• 12:50
  on what's really going to be in fact pactful. Like I said, when
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  the humans touching the technology, so you have to understand their jobs. You
• 12:56
  have to you have to do journey meth being or get in there and say
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  how do you do your job every day? And how can we look at
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  the technology you're using to make it better? And then you go look at
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  the data. Once you have that problem to solve, I wouldn't necessarily always
• 13:09
  use the data to come up with the problem to solve without that human feedback.
• 13:15
  Right. It is a paradox that I've seen for decades. Even in
• 13:20
  it, there's a desire to keep it simple, get rid of complexity,
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  just drive to the end, what's the final answer, don't get too complicated.
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  But technology is complicated and complex, and people are even more complicated,
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  right, So you've got to you've got to be able to look at all
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  the pieces but also cut through the noise and get to really what matters.
• 13:43
  So over the years, you know, are one of the exciting things is
• 13:46
  to see a product like ours evolve over time. It certainly has evolved from
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  when I was a customer. There was no act, there was no Engage,
• 13:54
  it was just the analytics piece. But what stands out to you,
• 13:56
  maybe not specifically to our product, but in general, how has the evolution
• 14:01
  of capability really impacted your ability to take action? What are the areas that
• 14:07
  inspire you the most and point to the future in terms of evolution of capabilities.
• 14:13
  Yeah, so, you know, I was a big fan of Engage
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  and I do miss it. The next thing here, we don't have a
• 14:22
  tool yet here at all, So we are in the very foundation getting off
• 14:26
  the ground here. So we'll keep looking at it. But for instance,
• 14:31
  we're getting ready to launch our survey strategy and I don't haven't solved the problem
• 14:37
  of not having it be an email and so what I really loved about the
• 14:41
  Engage module is we didn't even use it to its fullest capacity before we used
• 14:48
  it to collect our pulse survey, and I really liked that the colleague didn't
• 14:52
  have to go to an application in order for that to launch. They just
• 14:56
  have to simply log in for the day. I thought that was that that's
• 15:01
  really not another I haven't been able to find that anywhere else yet. And
• 15:07
  the way that we didn't use it though, was meeting them right in their
• 15:11
  journey, and so I think that's where the tools are involving. Is there
• 15:13
  understanding more about the behavior of the person, like I was saying before,
• 15:18
  the behavior of the person using the technology, and then being able to use
• 15:22
  some of that that AI or intelligence to say, you just did this action,
• 15:28
  Did you need help? Or you know? Can you know if we
• 15:31
  do this action, if we clean up something, it will help you run
• 15:37
  better? Do you want to do that? Yes? Or now? So
• 15:37
  being able to interact with the end user, I think more directly is definitely
• 15:43
  an evolution kind of that self service that I think I've seen evolve a little
• 15:50
  bit more over the past couple of years than when I first started using the
• 15:54
  tool. Yeah, and you've stayed in your industry, right, you mentioned
• 15:58
  you're you're in healthcare. You've got a long set of experience in healthcare.
• 16:03
  Do you see any specific challenges or opportunities related to decks in healthcare that might
• 16:08
  be different from others healthcare? So the biggest challenge for experience in healthcare is
• 16:18
  a sensitivity of the data from my perspective or from my seat, and trying
• 16:23
  to focus on employee experience of those working in healthcare is we've got to be
• 16:29
  as secure as we can be to keep individuals datas from getting out into the
• 16:36
  universe, keep it secure. They're trusting us, our clients and our patients
• 16:38
  and members, they're trusting us to keep their data secure. And you all
• 16:45
  may know, but experience and security don't always go hand in hand. Sometimes
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  you have to give a little bit, and usually it's not security that's giving
• 16:52
  a little bit. And so sometimes that makes our job a little bit different
• 16:56
  in helping our colleagues understand that this isn't the best experience, but it's what
• 17:02
  we have to do to keep our clients information secure. So that's that's one
• 17:07
  thing I see, And I don't know if it's it's necessarily healthcare. So
• 17:15
  I've been in it in healthcare, but always pretty removed from the front lines,
• 17:18
  but making sure our employees can can get their jobs done right. But
• 17:22
  I've now seen the difference in size and complexity of different organizations. So throughout
• 17:30
  my career line, I've worked from companies from when I first started four individuals
• 17:34
  that a little was staffing firm, to the biggest its a hundred thousand employees,
• 17:41
  and now in a smaller organization of about five thousand. And what I've
• 17:47
  noticed through that, and this might be with some of those big healthcare systems
• 17:49
  too, is the bigger you are, the more complex just getting the basics
• 17:55
  becomes. And so if I think about healthcare workers that might be on the
• 17:59
  front line of big health institutions or big health organizations, is you know,
• 18:07
  they're on the front lines getting their jobs done and sometimes those basic things just
• 18:11
  don't work right for them that could impact patient care. But because it's it's
• 18:15
  so big and maybe have mergers, acquisitions, things of that sort, it's
• 18:21
  tough to get those basic things right. And then an experience organization like mine
• 18:25
  would spend a lot of time just on basic technology but at scale, but
• 18:30
  at a big scale. So I think what we used to say like small
• 18:33
  problems, big company right now. In the smaller organizations, it's smaller scale,
• 18:40
  so it's a little bit easier to manage and get the basics right,
• 18:42
  and you can start moving into more exciting technology like AI, adoption, user
• 18:48
  the user interface, and more preferences and experience based than just getting the basics
• 18:53
  right. So I'm excited about that where I currently am. But that's probably
• 18:59
  more of what I've observed, because you know, technology is always two or
• 19:03
  three times removed from the front lines. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe we
• 19:07
  need to get out there, right, I agree, I agree. Maybe
• 19:11
  maybe speaking of which and getting onto sort of decks more generally once again,
• 19:17
  I mean in your in your view, Emily, you're well placed to comment,
• 19:19
  I think, But what personal qualities and professional skills best suit somebody to
• 19:26
  specializing in and focusing on decks? Do you think? Oh gosh, so
• 19:32
  what immediate immediately pops into mine his ability to influence others who don't have to
• 19:37
  listen to you. It's a new, it's new, it's on the map.
• 19:40
  So um, and you know that's that comes with experience. I don't
• 19:44
  know, I've I've asked others, others have asked me recently. Um,
• 19:48
  if I could, if I could talk to that or speak on that.
• 19:51
  I'm thinking about it. I'm like, I don't know to just sit down
• 19:53
  and think about retrospective what have I done and how that how I could teach
• 19:57
  somebody else. But um, I also don't think DECKS. I know DECKS
• 20:03
  doesn't have to have an extremely technical background, and sometimes it's better if we
• 20:07
  don't. I'm an HR professional contact I don't have the technology trained background.
• 20:15
  I shouldn't say I'm not a technologist. I've been in technology for thirteen years
• 20:21
  so through osmosis and solving problems, like I understand it, but I didn't
• 20:26
  go to school for technology, and early on I think that was impactful to
• 20:33
  me with not having some of the tech respective peers at the table. But
• 20:36
  I think when it comes to DECKS, that's the benefit that drives is when
• 20:41
  you don't walk into the room knowing everything about the technology solution that's going to
• 20:45
  be implemented, and you're coming at it from what the majority of our other
• 20:49
  employees are going to experience. So that's one is I don't I think sometimes
• 20:57
  we try to re purpose engineers. And don't get me wrong, I've got
• 21:03
  great partners in infrastructure and support, and we established shared goals and they spend
• 21:07
  some time on my team and we couldn't get ducks done without them. But
• 21:11
  we complement each other very well in them bringing the technical solution and know how
• 21:17
  and us bringing that perspective of this is what's going to happen with the human
• 21:21
  once we roll this out, or you know, when you say certain words,
• 21:26
  we're going to have to humanize them a little bit, such as you'd
• 21:30
  be surprised that, you know, in how many people don't know what SMS
• 21:34
  messaging is? Or maybe I am because I've been in you know, in
• 21:37
  technology for a long time now. But if you're sending a message out that
• 21:41
  we can't we no longer use SMS messaging to authenticate or we actually, if
• 21:48
  you say no longer use SMS authentication to a colleague that doesn't have a high
• 21:53
  tech acumen, they're going to cruise right by your message or check out.
• 21:56
  They don't know what you're talking about. But if you say, hey,
• 21:59
  you're not going to get texted anymore, that's what's real and so's that's the
• 22:03
  benefit when you're have more of that empathetic mindset, So the skills that I
• 22:08
  look for out of the gates, and some of the best employees I've hired
• 22:12
  actually have psychology, marketing, and some type of human behaviors or human centered
• 22:18
  design backgrounds, So they always have that mindset of we're starting with the employee
• 22:25
  and we're working back we're understanding the way they work, and we're working backwards
• 22:29
  to the technology and leveraging those relationships we've built that I've talked about earlier to
• 22:33
  help improve those experiences. It's a tough mix to find, right. A
• 22:38
  lot of people got into tech because they didn't want to deal with people well.
• 22:45
  And then so that makes so that's true, So I don't know that
• 22:48
  you're going to find one person that possesses both sides of that coin. So
• 22:52
  that's where those partnerships become key. And then what I've found is if you
• 22:57
  start early in building partnerships, then they want to have you around. They
• 23:03
  don't want to they don't want to do the communications or the surveys or understand
• 23:07
  the human behaviors. And that's fine. So then we'll take that part on
• 23:11
  and let's partner together and improve these experiences. And it makes for a great
• 23:15
  partnership cool such an interesting closing observation and really really great to speak to you.
• 23:23
  Emily. Thank you, and I'll do a quick plug too. In
• 23:26
  the Deck certification, I've had all my team go out and consume that.
• 23:30
  I'm sending it to my partners, even um new recruits I'm recruiting for a
• 23:34
  job right now. I sent them there. I'm like, go out,
• 23:37
  this is it. Like I couldn't have wrote it better. We've always thought
• 23:41
  very similarly in that and I enjoyed that. So that is we have some
• 23:44
  very close Deck Show colleagues who are instrumental architects in the certifications. I'd be
• 23:49
  really really happy to hear that, Emily. We'll let them be sure to
• 23:52
  let them know and make sure they listen to this all right, Emily,
• 23:56
  great to see you. To make sure that you need to listen episode,
• 24:00
  subscribe to the show an Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast player,
• 24:04
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• 24:07
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• 24:11
  If you'd like to learn more about how next Think can help you improve your
• 24:15
  digital employee experience, head over to nextthink dot com. Thank you so much,
• 24:19
  for listening until next time.