“DEX is not a hobby. It’s a discipline. And in order to make it a discipline, you need a program around it. It’s something like a center of excellence.” — Tim Flower>

Traveling back to the age of the dinosaur, we find the advent of the Digital Employee Experience founded in Windows 95.

Jumping forward about 20 years, and we have a whole new world of technology driven customer experiences that have changed the landscape of DEX.

In this special episode of The DEX Show, we turn the tables on Tim Flower, Global Director of Business Transformation at Nexthink, to talk about his career journey and how it led him to writing Digital Employee Experience for Dummies.

We discuss:

• The history of DEX and how it came to be what it is today
• Tim’s personal experiences working in DEX
• The challenges of writing a DEX for Dummies book

Resources:

• Tim’s book: DEX for Dummies

For more amazing DEX content, including podcasts, articles and exclusive research, head over to the DEX Hub (dex.nexthink.com)

To hear more interviews like this one, subscribe to the Digital Employee Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Digital Employee Experience in your favorite podcast player.

The post The DEX Show | Podcast #32 – Digital Employee Experience for Dummies w/ Tim Flower appeared first on Nexthink.

See how Nexthink’s IT department extended hardware refresh cycles while increasing employee happiness by offering device choices and incorporating sentiment and environment stewardship into the process.

Like many organizations, our IT team has fallen behind on hardware refresh cycles due to the global chip shortage and ongoing supply chain issues.

Faced with these challenges, our team decided to look for employee-centric methods of extending the lifecycles of existing devices nearing or at the end of their warranty plan. At the same time, our company is experiencing a period of rapid growth, so our IT department needed to establish a forward-looking plan to properly resource and onboard new employees.

To hear more about this IT experiment and see our team’s results, read on.

The Problem

During the pandemic, things became quite complicated for our IT team due to all the delays with new hardware deliveries. Supply chain limitations made it difficult to refresh employee hardware on schedule. Even now, we are still trying to catch up on our regularly scheduled refresh plans.

On top of this, one of our main goals is to ensure that every new Nexthinker receives a machine on their first day. We believe this is a key aspect of a positive onboarding experience.

But making sure each new employee has a device on day one isn’t always easy, especially with such complicated conditions over the past few years, like having to onboard every employee as a fully remote worker! If we were in the office, we would have leveraged desktops for in-office workers to offset the additional challenge of having scarce laptop inventory for everyone. Add to that the fact that Nexthink is a truly international organization—we have offices in Boston, India, London, Switzerland, Madrid, and more—and things start to get really complex.

At times, we experienced wait times of up to two months for new machines, forcing us to provide some new employees with a temporary machine, which we later replaced with a new device. Another solution we considered was repurposing returned equipment in good condition for new employees to fill gaps in our inventory.

Providing a positive digital employee experience is our mission, but these supply chain issues challenged our ability to provide that positive experience for existing and new employees. Managing this complexity has been very time-consuming, and it impacted the efficiency of our work.

Going through this process led us to think about ways we could extend our hardware refresh cycles and be more prepared for future unforeseen circumstances.

{Read More: Nonprofits Hardware Refresh Strategy Saves $400k}

The Solution

Our IT department here at Nexthink decided to proactively reach out to employees with an engagement campaign to help anticipate future hardware refresh requirements.

Instead of simply asking employees if they were happy with their device, we decided to add another layer of sustainability. We came up with the idea to educate employees on the environmental impact of using their laptops longer, while also asking about their level of satisfaction with their device.

Our goal here was twofold: we wanted to gain employee sentiment insights to help us better prioritize our hardware refresh plans, and we wanted to give our users the opportunity to weigh in on the decision-making process.

Working with my colleague Stuart Docker, we aimed our investigation at a specific group of users on devices with expired warranties or those due to expire at the end of the year. All of these devices had a DEX score equal to or higher than seven, indicating solid performance, so we asked these employees if they were willing to keep their machines for another year.

The first question shared the environmental benefit of using their device another year instead of replacing it, in addition to our findings that indicate the experience with their current laptop still meets their specific performance requirements to fit their individual workstyle to remain productive.

Employees could agree to keep their machine (which we really appreciate), or they could tell us they want a new device. We do ask for additional information on why they want a replacement.

The Results

We ran the campaign for about two weeks to a targeted group of 332 employees. We received 240 complete responses, a 72% response rate for this campaign. Of these employees, 73% (176 employees) wanted to keep their machines for another year!

We are very happy with these results.

{Please Read: Learn How to Get 10x Higher Response Rates from Employee Surveys}

We always close our employee communications with a feedback question regarding the usefulness of the campaign.

88 employees said they found the campaign useful.

That still left about 90 employees who did not respond. These users will continue to use their machines as well, which also helps support our original goal to extend device usage beyond warranty timeframes. They’ll also be rolled into the next hardware refresh cycle as long as the DEX score remains at a seven or above.

Going forward, we plan to launch this communication at least every six months as a continuous process to better prepare for future hardware refresh cycles whilst giving our employees a choice to have a higher impact on the environment’s wellbeing.

Extending Hardware Refresh Cycles and New Employee Onboarding

What, if any, is the connection between this engagement campaign to extend our hardware refresh cycle, and our goal of provisioning every new employee with their own device on day one?

We typically let new employees choose between a Windows machine or a Mac. We believe this starts everyone off with a high level of employee happiness – a key driver behind offering device choices.

We kept this same key driver in mind for this refresh project – with the environmental twist.  We thought most employees, given the option, would choose to keep using their machine for an additional year; and we believe it also provides them with additional happiness – knowing they made a positive impact on the environment.

As an IT team, offering device options shows employees we care about their experience, and now they can show they care about the environment as well!  We were able to extend the hardware refresh cycle for a large portion of users and increase employee happiness at the same time. Extending the lifecycle of these devices also enabled us to allocate our limited stock of new devices for new employees—increasing employee happiness across the board.

Learn more about the impact of technology on the environment.

The post Extend Device Lifecycles and Increase Employee Happiness appeared first on Nexthink.

The four-day work week was once a mere hypothetical, something for overworked employees to daydream about. But now it’s close to becoming a reality, both in the U.S. and abroad. 

In February, we covered the emergence of four-day work week pilot programs in the United Kingdom – with more than 30 companies participating in six-month trials of a truncated work week for their employees. 

These programs, as well as the growing amount of data that supports the benefits of a four-day work week, have inspired a similar movement in the United States – starting in the state of California. 

A proposed bill to shorten the workweek is currently working through state legislature. If the bill is passed, it will make the standard workweek 32 hours for businesses with more than 500 employees. The bill, AB-2932, includes stipulations that there would be no reduction in pay, and that employees who work more than 32 hours must be compensated no less than 1.5 times their regular pay rate. 

Many local legislators have publicly supported the bill, citing the promising results achieved by international companies who have adopted shorter work weeks.  

Not everyone is on board with the proposal, however. Fierce opponents of the four-day work week have emerged in the wake of this new legislation, claiming that reducing the number of hours worked will have a negative impact on businesses and the job market. 

As we await further news regarding this bill, let’s look at the key arguments from both sides of the debate around the four-day work week in the U.S.  

The Four-Day Work Week: Productivity Enabler or “Job Killer”? 

Proponents of the AB-2932 bill have argued that shortening the work week will increase productivity and ultimately drive profits for California businesses.  

Their theory has research to back it up, including a 2021 study on more than 2,000 Icelandic workers who participated in a four-day work week and ultimately enjoyed an improvement in overall productivity and service provision. 

According to Assembly Member Cristina Garcia, who co-authored the legislation, the bill was prompted in the wake of the Great Resignation, the mass exodus of employees leaving their jobs for new opportunities during and after the pandemic. 

 “There has been no correlation between working more hours and better productivity, Garcia said in a statement to the press. She added: “It doesn’t make sense that we are still holding onto a work schedule that served the Industrial Revolution.” 

On the other side of the debate we have the California Chamber of Commerce, who went as far as to include the bill on its list of “job killers”.  

Chamber of Commerce Policy Advocate Ashley Hoffman penned an opposition to the bill, in which she argues that a four-day work week would result in higher labor costs, untenable requirements for employers, and slower job growth among other potential risks.

“The significant rise in labor costs will not be sustainable for many businesses,” Hoffman wrote. “Such a large increase in labor costs will reduce businesses’ ability to hire or create new positions.” 

She ultimately states that the bill is the wrong solution to the problems that led to the Great Resignation. The correct solution, according to the Chamber of Commerce, is not to shorten the workweek but to promote more flexible workplaces for employees:  

“Employees want flexibility, whether it be through a more flexible daily schedule, alternative workweek schedule, or the ability to continue to telecommute after the conclusion of the pandemic. Yet, bills that propose increased flexibility are often not even set for a hearing.” 

Reimagining the Workweek 

No matter what side of the debate you fall on, one thing is for certain: the pandemic has led to a complete overhaul of how we think about the workplace, from where we work to the timing and quantity of hours we spend working. 

If the bill passes through California legislation, we’ll surely see the four-day work week gain traction across the country over the next several years. And even if it doesn’t, it’s inevitable that future legislation will aim to address the need for businesses to reimagine the flexibility and benefits they offer to modern workers. 

The post California’s Proposed Four-Day Work Week Bill Sparks Debate appeared first on Nexthink.

Wiley’s Dummies series is best known for repackaging technical, nuanced material into practical and accessible lesson books. In partnership with Nexthink, the company’s latest addition, Digital Employee Experience, delivers on this same reputational goal.

Most ‘for Dummies’ books are written either from a purely technical or from a higher level, management topic. The challenge for Nexthink was to write from both camps—to provide both a practical guide for IT Leaders with concrete examples and to highlight simple but subtle alterations to management strategies that can positively impact the modern employee experience.

In addition to the step-by-step learning objectives listed at the end of this article, we identified 4 common themes that run throughout the book:

There is an “expectations gap” between digital employees and IT/employers which sets the background for so many problems today.

• Meaning, as consumers, we’re used to receiving a high level of satisfaction with our devices and online experience. And our expectations are such that we expect the same great service when we log on for work or go to the office. Unfortunately, those expectations are rarely met. Instead, employees face problems with downed networks and devices that don’t respond, and the frustration of having to contact the help desk or figure out their problems alone. The longer this gap remains, the more likely a business will lose talent and suffer from productivity loss, decreased profits, etc.

Whether they want to admit or not, IT are the architects of their company’s work experience.

• The book argues that since most businesses have transitioned beyond the standard brick-and-mortar concept to either fully remote or at least a hybrid environment, IT has now become the only true agent capable of creating and monitoring the modern work experience. In other words, the lines between HR and IT have blurred to the point where the demands that IT once faced before the pandemic—mostly reacting to technical problems, after the fact—have drastically changed. Now IT is being asked to shape and mold digital work experiences with the aim of providing smarter employee productivity, wellbeing, engagement, and a host of other outcomes that traditionally fell to other departments.

Visibility into the human perspective at work.

• This is one of the core themes that underpins the entire book. The previously mentioned “expectations gap” can be reined in only when IT breaks down its siloes and visibility gaps with the employee experience (remote, in-office, or hybrid). The silver lining from the pandemic is that it forced companies to change focus from a location-based model to a human-centric one. But in order to view and interpret problems from the perspective of your employees, means that you need complete end-to-end visibility, from the worker’s device to their applications, network connections, and all the important nodes that exist in one’s digital workday. The book does a nice job of laying out how IT can unlock better visibility and contextual data, while also highlighting things to avoid in that quest.

IT as the principal conduit for a smarter way to work

• Also embedded in the end of the book is the idea that IT can play an influential role in how society thinks about digital work. The book supports the idea that rather than trying to free ourselves of work, we can feel free in our work (with the right IT support model).

Imagine a world where employees receive the exact hardware and software that fits their unique needs. Where they feel energized and liberated from digital distractions or barriers. Or a world where IT doesn’t have to spend all its time managing incidents, but instead it can focus on creative R&D projects. Imagine a world where other departments come to IT to help identify their own excess spending, rather than the other way around. And imagine a world where businesses are more flexible to employee work needs, where they can better impact retention, customer satisfaction, environmental sustainability, and profits. That world doesn’t exist in some fiction book – it’s real and it starts with your IT department.

Ultimately, if you work in a technology role and you want to bring a smart strategy to your company that achieves stronger employee engagement, increased profit margins, and longer employee retention—than this book if for you.

Contents at a Glance:

Introducing Digital Employee Experience Management to your Organization

Measuring Digital Employee Experience (DEX)

Bridging the IT/Employee Divide

Kickstarting Faster Problem Solving

Building a DEX Center of Excellence and Leveraging Experience Level Agreements (XLAs)

Envisioning the Future of Digital Work

The post Book Review: Digital Employee Experience for Dummies (A Wiley Brand) appeared first on Nexthink.

Digital dexterity is a fundamental attribute within the most successful workforces – and will only become more essential as businesses enter the rapidly approaching future workplace. Yet, many businesses struggle to assess and promote this vital skill among their own employees.

The increasing value of digital dexterity is due in large part to the digitization of the workplace, which was well underway prior to the pandemic.. But with the rush to remote work, we saw a massive spike in the purchasing of SaaS solutions to accommodate dispersed workforces. That’s not to mention all the new AI technology, IoT and blockchain trends promising even more change in the coming years.

Now, as employees return to the office and enterprises map out plans for hybrid work, the spend on digital solutions isn’t showing any signs of slowing. In fact, more than half of midsize companies significantly increased their spend in this area, and 69% are planning on increasing their spend on digital tools even further in 2022.

The frequent adoption of new technology means a lot of change and disruption for employees. In today’s workplace, the average employee uses 35 business applications and switches between them over a thousand times per day. This leads to higher rates of change fatigue, unhappiness, burnout, and high rates of turnover.

Change is inevitable, but the negative impact of change doesn’t have to be. In order to foster resilience in your workforce and insulate your business outlook, it’s time to proactively promote digital dexterity.

What Is Digital Dexterity?

Digital dexterity refers to the desire and ability of employees to embrace existing and emerging technologies to achieve better business outcomes.

Businesses increasingly rely on digital technologies to get work done – but  a business that seeks to successfully navigate and adapt to the swiftly evolving workplace needs a workforce that is  flexible and  adaptable enough to take these changes in stride.

New digital solutions are intended to increase employee productivity and profits, but without the right support, they can create negative digital experiences for employees – which in turn, lead to negative customer experiences.

The Digital Dexterity Gap

The digital dexterity gap refers to the skill gap for employees around digital technologies. If a business doesn’t understand and manage this gap, it can be a real impediment to digital transformation and overall business success.

Let’s say you’re a large financial institution. Your customer service department represents the frontline between your customers and your business. Pre-pandemic, everyone worked together in the office, and it was not so difficult to escalate customer issues to higher levels or across teams.

However, a hybrid setting with over half of the department working remotely has brought new communication challenges. In response, your business deployed a new collaboration tool to better facilitate communication across teams.  In theory, this tool should enable customer service reps to resolve customer issues more quickly, retain customers and stay ahead of the competition.

But the customer service team were not adequately prepped for the transition. And many of them preferred the older digital collaboration solution. Three months after the transition to the new tool, fewer than half of the team has fully adopted it,  the employees who are using the tool struggle to understand all of its capabilities,  and time to resolution for customer complaints has actually increased. Over the long term, this results in a loss of business revenue.

The root cause: the digital dexterity gap. Employees didn’t have the skills or support to adopt the new tool, and what felt like a small issue resulted in disproportionately negative consequences.

At this point, many enterprises understand that they need to invest in digital dexterity if they want to remain competitive but lack clarity on how to proceed.

There are many complicating factors to digital dexterity programs. Each employee comes into the work with different backgrounds—some may have very limited digital literacy, while others are extremely digitally dexterous, but have strong opinions on which digital solutions are best and can be resistant to change.

Questions of who owns digital dexterity can also be difficult to approach. At most enterprises, IT clearly owns the deployment of new digital solutions, while  employee engagement and skills development typically fall to HR. Bringing these two departments together is key to a successful digital dexterity investment.

Once HR and IT are aligned on a strategy, there are still questions around process. How do enterprises measure a soft skill like digital dexterity? How do they measure success?Having a plan to grow digital dexterity and a concrete, quantifiable method for measuring outcomes is essential to the success both of digital transformation projects, and for your enterprise as a whole.

How to Measure Digital Dexterity

The most important element of any investment in digital dexterity is leadership buy in. The C-Suite must be engaged in the process for success. In order to communicate the importance of digital dexterity and secure executive buy-in, you should:

• Track and establish baselines for digital transformation and adoption within your enterprise.
• Identify digital transformation roadblocks and draw the connection between these roadblocks, employee productivity, and business success.
• Highlight how a lack of adoption leads to poor business results.

The C-suite may be your toughest critic, but they are also the most essential ally in successfully transforming the digital dexterity of your workforce.

The next step after securing buy-in is to establish a plan for measuring the impact of promoting digital dexterity. Set quantifiable, measurable goals. Real-time digital employee experience metrics can help quantify that which feels only qualifiable. Understanding whether an employee has greater digital dexterity might not be measurable, but you can measure the speed of digital adoption, employee sentiment throughout the process of deploying a new technology, and the MTTR of common digital transformation roadblocks.

Once you have a plan in place, you need advocates and evangelists for digital dexterity throughout the organization. These don’t necessarily have to be members of the IT team or leadership, and in fact, it may be more effective to find employees outside of these two groups who are engaged and energized about digital transformation and digital solutions. Finding these individuals who can advocate for new digital solutions and encourage their teammates to persist through hiccups and roadblocks is essential to driving successful transformation.

By using data-driven insights to foster leadership buy-in, setting measurable goals, and inviting engaged employees into the process, businesses can invest in the digital dexterity of their workforce in a way that promotes employee happiness, reduces turnover, increases productivity, and drives future business success.

The post How to Foster Digital Dexterity in Your Workplace appeared first on Nexthink.

Investments in cloud computing services have steadily increased over the past few years, largely a result of the rise of the digital workplace and the challenges brought on by remote and hybrid work. But there’s another reason businesses are investing more money into cloud solutions: driven by the chip shortage and subsequent hardware crisis, businesses are looking to build their digital resilience. 

According to new research, global enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services approached $53 billion in Q1 of 2022, representing a 34% increase from the first quarter of 2021.  

This trend is only expected to continue over the next several years. As we covered in a recent article about the distributed cloud, the cloud computing market is rapidly evolving, with new solutions aimed at providing more flexibility to businesses who have become increasingly decentralized during the hybrid work era. 

Cloud services are also uniquely positioned to solve another relatively new challenge impacting businesses across the world: the chip shortage crisis. 

What is digital resilience? 

Digital resilience refers to a business’s ability to continue operating at their usual levels of productivity and efficiency during a crisis – such as a security threat, an adverse event that impacts the marketplace, a major technological failure, or any other threat to business operations. 

Digitally resilient organizations have a number of steps in place to mitigate damage in case of threatening events. They have a multilayered security strategy, rapid incident response procedures, and – most importantly – they prioritize data centers and infrastructures that are more reliable and less dependent on volatile resources.  

Hardware shortages are highlighting the growing importance of digital resilience. 

The semiconductor chip shortage has massively impacted the price and availability of IT hardware over the past year. This problem has impacted businesses across the globe, and it’s far from over – with CEOs of major tech companies preparing for at least another year of hardware availability issues. 

This global chip shortage has exposed the growing importance of digital resilience and drawn a stark contrast between businesses prepared to face the challenge and those that aren’t.  

Companies who rely on consistent, high-quantity hardware purchases have encountered unprecedented hurdles as a result of supply chain issues. These companies are now looking to the cloud to become more resilient, building out secure and scalable infrastructures that rely less and less on hardware availability to keep their workforces efficient and productive. 

That’s a big reason why hyperscale cloud solutions have become such sought-after commodities over the past year. Large businesses are signing massive long-term contracts with the leading cloud service providers – AWS, Azure and Google Cloud (these three providers accounted for 62% of all cloud spending in Q1 of 2022.) 

These businesses recognize that spending more on cloud solutions now will enable them to significantly reduce costs in the future. With the marketplace for new hardware experiencing unprecedented volatility, corporations who lack cloud-based infrastructures have no choice but to purchase essential hardware at high prices.   

That’s not to mention the frequency with which companies have to refresh, update, and replace their existing hardware. We’ve seen many organizations embrace new sustainable IT practices to prolong their hardware refresh cycles – and these strategies only become more successful when paired with cloud-based solutions that consume far less resources than strictly on-premises infrastructures. 

The hardware shortage may be a temporary problem, but it’s had a permanent impact on the global technology landscape. Business leaders now recognize that some problems are too far-reaching to ever truly prepare for – and that when these problems do arise, the organizations with greater investments in digital resilience will have the best chance at remaining competitive in the market when the dust settles.

The post Digital Resilience a Top Priority as Cloud Spending on the Rise appeared first on Nexthink.

How One IT Team Saved 100 Hours with a Self-Help Campaign

When a software update backfired resulting in an influx of IT tickets, this organization scaled the fix across all impacted devices, saving 100+ IT hours.

Whether organizations run into technical roadblocks, budget constraints, resource limitations or any of the other myriad challenges that can stop a digital transformation project in its tracks, 73% of companies fail to provide any business value from their digital transformation process. All that planning and hard work for nothing.

Are you willing to put your reputation on the line for your next project?

If your next digital transformation project hits a technical roadblock, do you have a plan to expedite the solution and get your employees up and running as quickly as possible?

A Software Update Gone Wrong

This global manufacturing company ran into one such technical issue with their MS Teams rollout. After a successful rollout with high user adoption, the IT team released a software update. Unfortunately, this update caused MS Teams to crash repeatedly on employees making the tool unusable. As a critical collaboration tool for all employees, these crashes disrupted employee productivity and collaboration. As a result, the IT team was soon overrun with IT tickets.

Rather than solving one ticket at a time, the IT team used Nexthink to quickly identify the full scope of the issue. Using Nexthink, they could see every employee who was interrupted, not just those who submitted tickets. The investigation revealed a total of 324 impacted devices.

Fixing the Issue for All Impacted Employees

When a software application falls on such a large scale, IT teams must scramble to fix it. A standard approach often entails setting up individual appointments with affected employees, a solution that wastes hundreds of hours of IT’s time. Alternatively, they can send out a single email blast with information on how to fix the issue, but email communications are easily ignored by employees, and the problem will persist. But what if there is another way?

Instead of setting up an appointment with each affected employee, the IT team used Nexthink Engage to send out a targeted pop up notification only to the 324 impacted employees. The self-help campaign displayed on each employees’ desktop, instantly grabbing their attention. The pop up contained a link enabling employees to fix the issue with one click by turning off MS Teams’ GPU hardware acceleration on their devices.

{Learn more: Nexthink Engage demo in 60-seconds}

Targeted Self-help Resolves 78% of Issues with 1-Click

The result? IT witnessed a 78% reduction in MS Teams crashes across the 324 targeted devices. This 1-click self-help fix quickly enabled all employees to quickly resolve their issue rather than individually meeting with IT. As a result, IT saved over 100 hours with this automation and employees were able to get back to work.

While the software update that caused the crash could have derailed this new digital transformation project’s success, the IT team quickly used Nexthink to identify the cause of the issue and automate a self-help fix to restore employee collaboration and trust in the project.

Want to learn how Nexthink Engage could help you achieve your digital transformation goals?

Let’s Talk

The post IT Self-Help: Reduce Tickets & Speed Software Adoption appeared first on Nexthink.

New immersive technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we communicate, and that will have a profound impact on the way we work. So what futuristic tools are on the horizon and how will the role of the IT team transform to meet the needs of the user?

In today’s episode, we chat with Mike Kenny, Global Technical Delivery Lead Unified Communications at Mondelēz International, about the workplace of the future, and how his company is approaching unified communications.

Plus, we also have Sam Holzman, the writer and editor of all the fascinating content you find at the DEX Hub, on the show to share research from his new eBook about the future workplace.

We discuss:

1. How far we are from operationalizing immersive tech in the workplace?
2. The potential and limitations of new immersive tech
3. How IT organizational structures will change in the future?
4. Why IT is becoming the facilitator of experiences?

Resources:

New infographic: Experience Toolkit: Assembling a DEX Super Team.

For more amazing DEX content, including podcasts, articles and exclusive research, head over to the DEX Hub (dex.nexthink.com)

To hear more interviews like this one, subscribe to the Digital Employee Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Digital Employee Experience in your favorite podcast player.

The post The DEX Show | Podcast #33 – Touring the Workplace of the Future w/ Mike Kenny & Sam Holzman appeared first on Nexthink.

Ever since remote work tore down the boundaries between our homes and our workplaces, employees around the world have been forced to learn new methods to achieve work-life balance. But here’s a question for you: if you could separate your work self and your home self entirely, would you?  

That question lies at the heart of Severance, the hit television series which recently completed its first season. In case you missed it, the series follows a handful of employees at a mysterious technology company who undergo a medical procedure that gives the show its title: when they join the company, they each have their consciousness “severed” into two separate minds – a work self and a home self. 

The characters enter the office and immediately forget who they are outside of work. When they leave, they become their regular selves again, but with no memory of what transpired in the office. Each character effectively becomes two different people – the protagonist, for example, is a grief-stricken loner in his personal life, but a rule-following, relatively relaxed do-gooder in the office. 

Okay, wait. Why, exactly, are we recapping the plot of a science-fiction series?   

Because despite all the sci-fi weirdness that transpires throughout the series, Severance’s core themes – the lines between home and work life, and the consequences that occur when those lines become blurred – could not be more timely. In fact, these themes closely mirror the most pressing challenges facing today’s corporate employees. 

Is work-life balance achievable in today’s workplace? And should it be? 

You don’t need any more plot details to understand that Severance’s storyline is a clear metaphor for our complicated work-life balance in the modern workplace.  

The allegory has struck a chord with audiences precisely because of how unfathomable its vision of work-life balance is in today’s climate. After all, most of us have spent the past two years working in the same place we sleep, eat, and relax. We have our email and communication apps on our mobile devices, right next to the games and movie streaming apps we use in our free time.  

Considering the fatigue and burnout that many employees have experienced during this time, it’s not unreasonable for some to daydream about their work and home life being 100% separate.    

In the world of Severance, the employer presents work-life balance as a benefit, but the frightening events that follow reveal it to be something else entirely. Things might not get so dark in the real world – but the idea is based in truth: many organizations promise to offer work-life balance, but don’t provide a workplace where such balance is actually feasible.

When an employer promotes work-life balance but fails to promote a Digital Employee Experience where work-life balance is achievable, they trap workers in a vicious cycle of burnout and frustration. 

The cycle usually goes something like this:  

• A company wins over a talented new candidate with the promise of work-life balance, ensuring them that they’ll still be able to set boundaries between work and their personal life even when working from home. 

• The employee starts working and quickly realizes that they were sold an empty promise. Their boss sends them messages at all hours of the night and expects them to respond. Their coworkers ignore their out-of-office statuses and treat them rudely when they don’t answer emails on their days off. And their days are so packed with unnecessary virtual meetings that they end up logging in during off-hours so they can actually get things done.

• The employee quickly becomes stressed, burnt out, and loses their trust in the employer that did nothing to follow through on its promise of work-life balance. 

 As work-life balance has become harder to achieve, organizations have started to consider alternatives – like work-life integration, a structure in which employees are given flexibility over their hours and time spent working so they can juggle work and personal responsibilities however they see fit. 

Both philosophies have their benefits and challenges. But one thing is clear: in a remote or hybrid workplace, employers can’t claim to offer work-life balance without continuously taking steps to ensure they’re actually offering it.  

That means setting and enforcing ground rules for team leaders and employees about respecting each other’s schedules, managing workloads, limiting redundant virtual meetings, and any other factor that could contribute to an employee sacrificing personal time for their work. 

Benefit or Bribe: The Ethics of Corporate Culture 

Within the central metaphor for work-life balance, Severance offers many subtler critiques about corporate culture and employer-employee relationships. 

For example: throughout the show, the fictional company’s leaders provide employees with a series of frivolous (and eventually, downright creepy) office perks. They throw them parties, serve them drinks, give them branded knick-knacks, etc. These perks aren’t just demonstrations of appreciation; they’re hollow attempts to keep employees happy despite the awful day-to-day experiences that they’re subjecting workers to. 

If you’ve worked at enough corporate companies, this probably sounds familiar. Have you ever worked for an employer who provided all the flashy perks – the parties, the free snacks, the ping-pong tables in the fancy office spaces – but made no effort to improve your actual employee experience? 

It’s a particularly resonant message today, as many companies look to end the conversation around remote work-life balance by mandating a full return to the office. And since many employees prefer remote work – 65% say they don’t want to return to the office full-time – employers are rolling out the enticing incentives. 

There’s even a real-estate firm who offered its employees the opportunity to win cash prizes, a new Tesla, or a trip to Barbados – the catch is: only employees who return to the office are eligible for these offers. 

Of course, no employee would complain about having the chance to win such a lavish prize. But benefits like these set a troubling precedent, as they exist in order to entice employees to work in a way that might contradict their own needs and preferences.    

Employee experience isn’t about the gifts and small luxuries our employers throw our way for doing our jobs. And it’s certainly not about a form of work-life balance that exists on an attractive Careers page but not in the actual workplace. 

True employee experience is about the way we feel every day at work, how much trust we have in our employers, and the tools and strategies our employers adopt in order to help us be as productive, engaged, and happy as possible. 

There’s nothing wrong with offering perks or continuing to strive for work-life balance in today’s increasingly digital workplace. But perks are only beneficial, and balance is only achievable, when employers worry less what they want and more about the Digital Employee Experience they offer to their workers.      

The post Real or Sci-Fi? ‘Severance’ and the Risks of Work-Life Balance appeared first on Nexthink.

For much of the past two years, businesses have been looking ahead to an eventual return to the office – a return that has been frequently delayed and disrupted by the unpredictable nature of the COVID-19 pandemic. But with some employees resistant to returning, companies are looking for new options to entice employees back. It may not be a return to the office at all, but instead a movement towards an entirely new way of working together. 

 While complications from the pandemic continue to disrupt plans, we’ve reached a phase of relative stability where major businesses are now investing heavily in physical workspaces once again. Technology leaders have recently announced plans to spend heavily on new offices, including Google’s announced $1 billion purchase of a campus-like workspace in London.  

These companies are not simply going back to their old offices or investing in workspaces that aim to recreate the pre-pandemic status quo. Even as we gain distance from the peak of the pandemic, there’s no denying that the way employees work, and what they expect from their employers and offices, has changed forever.  

New workspaces aim to promote flexibility for hybrid employees. 

The emergence of hybrid work during the pandemic has given employees more power over where, when, and how they work. As a result, employers have learned that they must provide a flexible experience for workers if they want to attract and retain top talent. 

This shift towards flexibility is clearly reflected in the approach major corporations are taking with new office spaces. One thing is for certain: the concept of the office as a central headquarters – where employees work at their designated desks, follow rigid schedules and rules, and come in from 9 to 5 every day of the week – is an outdated vision. 

Some businesses have downsized their physical workspaces in order to reflect the reality of hybrid work, where employees come and go depending on their schedules and preferences. Others are investing in several smaller “collaboration spaces” in lieu of one centralized office.  

There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy to a return to the office, of course. But one thing is true across the board: companies who do invest in physical workspaces are completely rethinking the way those spaces are used. 

Take Google, for example. Though this technology giant has far greater resources than most companies, their priorities still reflect the changes that medium and small businesses are adjusting to. 

 “We believe that the future of work is flexibility,” wrote Ronan Harris, Google UK’s managing director, in the company’s announcement of their new London office. “Whilst the majority of our UK employees want to be on-site some of the time, they also want the flexibility of working from home a couple days a week. Some of our people will want to be fully remote. Our future UK workplace has room for all of those possibilities.” 

The post goes on to explain how Google’s new office will promote flexibility – with more collaborative desk set-ups, flexible “team pods” that can be reconfigured based on the needs of specific teams, and outdoor covered spaces that emphasize employee wellness. 

Smaller tech companies are taking a similar approach. Though organizations are, on average, expanding the square footage of their physical offices, the occupancy of those workspaces are still expected to remain low.  

As they provide more space for fewer employees, companies are adopting a more agile approach, relying on “hot-desking” and other flexible strategies to maximize the efficiency of their workplaces and provide in-office workers with the most collaborative and productive experiences possible. 

Quality of experience plays a critical role in where employees choose to work. 

At the same time, many organizations are understandably anxious to invest too heavily in physical workspaces for hybrid workers. After all, how can they guarantee that employees will actually want to come into the office, after they’ve grown accustomed to the benefits of remote work over the past two years? 

One recent statistic provides a convincing answer to this question: according to a study from Robin Powered, when an employee had a positive experience in just their first office visit, they come to the office 10% more often than employees who had a negative experience. 

Employers can no longer sell the idea that employees need to be in the office in order to work at a high level. If they want in-person collaboration to be a central part of their company culture, they need to provide workspaces that energize and delight their workers. Whether they reconfigure their current office, or adopt smaller collaboration hubs, companies should give employees a significant voice in their decision-making process. Centering the needs and experience of their employees will be a deciding factor in whether the return to office is a success—or a complete flop. 

The post The Return to the Office: Major Companies Investing in Flexible Workplaces appeared first on Nexthink.

When Microsoft rolled out Windows 11 last fall, the announcement included what seemed like a relatively distant deadline: October 14, 2025, the date when Windows 10 support will end. 

Considering how many unexpected changes we’ve all experienced over the past few years, we understand if you’re hesitant to prepare for anything that’s not scheduled to take place until the year 2025. 

But we looked at more than 3 million devices from 457 organizations, across 8 industries, to understand just how ready (or not so ready) enterprises are for their impending Windows 11 upgrade. What we found were some key insights into how many employee devices are ready to upgrade to Windows 11 – insights that allowed us to set some pretty good benchmarks for how long, and how intensive, the Windows 11 upgrade could be for your enterprise.  

Above all else, our research made one thing clear: though Windows 10 will still be supported for a few years, IT teams should already be laying the groundwork for Windows 11 adoption soon, if they don’t want to fall far behind. 

Many employee devices are not compatible for Windows 11. 

Because we chose to look at employee devices within so many different work sectors, we encountered a wide variety of insightful data. But across all industries we examined, there were several illuminating trends in terms of how many devices are ready for the future of Windows. Here’s what we found: 

• Only ~65% of devices have CPU models that are Windows 11 compatible; ~35% have old CPU models that don’t support Windows 11. 
• 44.2% of devices have OS Versions that are not compatible (meaning: OS Versions older than the 2004 Windows 11 release). 

We broke down this data even further to learn that only 38.9% of employee devices are fully ready to upgrade to Windows 11. By “fully ready”, we mean devices that have compatible CPUs and OS versions, which enable them to be upgraded with at relatively low costs and resource consumption.  

Operating systems are just one piece of the puzzle, of course: upgrading to Windows 11 also requires employee devices to have the right hardware. Devices will need to have a 1GHz processor or faster, at least 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, and several more capabilities in order to be compatible for the update.  

Replacing hardware is the costliest step of preparing for Windows 11 – and considering the ongoing chip supply shortage, it’s simply not feasible for many organizations to refresh a large swath of their employee devices right away.  

But not all “old hardware” is created equal – as our research found that roughly half (47.7%) of devices that are not Windows 11 compatible are still performing well and still providing their users with a positive Digital Employee Experience. In the case of these devices, it makes more sense to extend their lifecycle while preparing to replace them with a Windows 11-compatible device prior to 2025. 

Do you have a Windows 11 migration plan? 

As you can probably tell by now, getting your hardware and software ready for Windows 11 is not a one-size-fits-all process. Your organization’s plan will depend on what your current enterprise looks like, the quality of your employees’ experiences, budget, resources, and additional factors. 

However, there are a number of steps that every business, regardless of industry, can take in order to build the foundation for Windows 11 readiness. Ultimately, a Windows 11 migration plan requires the same key ability that preparing for any future IT initiative requires: the ability to manage and analyze employees’ technology and their day-to-day experiences with that technology.  

When IT has the right tools to visualize experience across their entire enterprise, they’re able to perform the steps necessary to build an adequate Windows 11 migration plan – including: 

• Determining whether configuration & patch solutions are functioning properly on all devices. 
• Comparing the performance of different OS versions and the satisfaction of employees using each version. 
• Triggering OS updates on outdated devices. 
• Creating holistic computing personas to provide each device with the specific actions it requires to be ready for Windows 11. 

No two companies will have the same Windows 11 migration plan. But the only way to know where your organization stands is by achieving deep visibility into the current state employee devices – and more importantly, the current quality of experience these devices are providing to your employees.  

Stay ahead of the game: start preparing for Windows 11 today. 

To learn more about how your company should prepare for Windows 11, read our full report: Predicting Windows 11 Upgrades in Corporate IT. 

In this report, we provide a wealth of data about: 

• Employee device readiness for Windows 11 
• How hardware, OS, and Windows 11 readiness varies across work sectors. 
• The time and budget requirements for upgrading to Windows 11. 
• How IT teams should analyze software and hardware needs to prepare for Windows 11 adoption. 

It might not feel like 2025 is right around the corner – but we hope this exclusive research gives you the insights you need to start preparing for Windows 11 today. 

The post Windows 11 Preparation: Is Your Organization Ready? appeared first on Nexthink.

We’ve been talking about it for more than a year now, but the last few months have only affirmed the fact: hybrid work is here to stay. The myriad research that’s been conducted so far proves that not only do employees want the flexibility of hybrid work, but also that hybrid work has a huge potential to drive better business results. 

But these next few years will be a fascinating test case for this type of work environment. If businesses can make hybrid workplaces lucrative, they’ll continue to follow this structure and the benefits it provides their employees. If hybrid work becomes more of a headache than a productivity enabler, however, we could see companies put more pressure on their employees to return to the office full-time – whether they like it or not. 

So, what is the key to making hybrid work, work for everyone? The answer lays in the connection between hybrid work and technology. 

What Is Hybrid Work? 

Hybrid work refers to any working model where a portion of employees work remote, and a portion work in the office. There are various forms of hybrid work environments. Before the pandemic, the most common hybrid work setups saw a group of employees working 100% of their time in the office, and a second group of employees working 100% remote. 

But there are obvious flaws in that pre-pandemic model. Most notably: a fractured sense of community among remote vs. in-office workers that can manifest into resentment. Office workers who desire more autonomy could be envious of their work from home colleagues, while those remote workers worry about the effects of proximity bias – the belief that by missing out on the “water cooler” connections and face-to-face time with bosses could lead to them losing career advancement opportunities. Without a plan to combat these hybrid work risks, these negative feelings can result in a lack of engagement in work and increased rates of burnout. 

Today, as businesses strategize a return to the office, we’re seeing a far more flexible form of hybrid work emerge. In this hybrid work model, employees have more autonomy in their work schedules. They can decide when and where they work, whether that is in the office, at home, or on a tropical beach somewhere. The new hybrid work centers the experience of employees. 

But this model is not without its challenges as well. A Gallup poll found that 6 in 10 employees want some structure over when they need to be in the office, while only 4 in 10 employees wanted complete autonomy. So it’s clear that while people enjoy flexibility, they don’t wish to do away with structure entirely. Charting a path toward a hybrid work solution that works can easily start to feel like a Sisyphean task. Is it even worth it at all? 

Hybrid Work is Complicated, but Employees Are Adamant On Its Benefits 

Implementing hybrid work in a way that benefits the largest number of employees is a challenge, but it’s in the best interest of the business to make the effort. The research is clear: employees want flexibility, and they know that if they can’t find it at their current company, they can find it elsewhere: 

• 67% of workers want to be in the office 1-3 days per week. 
• 83% of workers say a hybrid work model would be optimal. 
• 74% of Gen Z respondents want more on-site opportunities, the most of any age group. 

Organizations that want a successful, productive, and engaged workforce need to implement flexible hybrid work models that reimagine what the office can be, and gives employees ownership over their schedules and work environment. 

Hybrid Work Challenges 

Of course, nothing worth having is easy, and that includes hybrid work. There are many complexities involved in implementing a hybrid workplace, including: 

• Flexibility vs structure: who should decide when employees come into the office? Is it an executive decision? The manager? The employees themselves? 
• Mitigating proximity bias and fostering connection between geographically distant employees. 
• Ensuring that both remote and in-office workers have the resources they need to create their ideal working environments. 

The solutions to these challenges will vary from company to company – but at every organization, IT will play a critical role. 

Hybrid Work and Technology: The Key to Success 

A successfully implemented hybrid work environment won’t be the result of any one team’s efforts. It will take buy-in from the entire enterprise, especially at the leadership level, for hybrid work to be successful. But there is one team who has an inordinate ability to drive the creation and implementation of a successful hybrid work strategy: IT. 

Even before the pandemic, IT leaders saw their teams’ responsibilities shifting. But the pandemic, and our current push towards hybrid work, has completely upended the role of IT in the workplace. Gone are the days of IT simply provisioning hardware and running updates. Now, IT is responsible for providing the technological solutions that make work, work. 

Think about it. For your employees to be productive and your enterprise to see growth quarter over quarter and year over year, what do you need? 

You need the digital tools to make every aspect of work as efficient and effective as possible. From collaboration tools like Zoom or Teams, to department-specific tools and the operating systems we work on, the workplace is now digital. You need to be able to provision the right employees with the right tools to get their work done.  

But for a hybrid work environment to work, you not only need to give employees the right technology, but you have to make sure they have the digital skills to use the technology adeptly. You need to focus on developing their digital dexterity. Are your employees using the software they’ve been given? How quickly are they adopting new solutions? Have you purchased the right number of licenses, or too many? 

And what about hardware? Do employees have access to hardware that works well both at home and in the office? Do in-office workers have the tools they need to collaborate effectively with remote colleagues? 

All these questions can be answered by your IT team. The success or failure of the hybrid work setup hinges on your IT team’s ability to access a detailed view of the digital employee experience of your workforce, no matter where they are located.  

With the right visibility, IT teams can see at-a-glance what hardware is working and what needs to be replaced. They can understand which applications are hindering productivity and quickly send out a fix. In short, they can organize and optimize the digital work environment so that your employees can easily collaborate and stay productive whether they are at home or in the office. 

Read More: Top Tips for Evolving IT Service to Enable Successful Hybrid Workplaces 

The Importance of Employee Sentiment to Hybrid Work’s Success 

There’s still one last piece of the puzzle that we haven’t put together: how your employees feel about their work environment. Hybrid work is complex, and the first iteration implemented by your organization may not be the best fit. Finding the hybrid work model that works for your employees requires a process of feedback and iteration. Employees want to be involved in the process, they want to feel heard, and they want to see the organization acting on their feedback. 

 Can this fall into IT’s wheelhouse as well? Absolutely. 

An IT team focused on the digital employee experience of the workplace needs the whole picture: the technical, and the emotional. With the right tools, IT teams can send out targeted surveys to users at the right time, gathering relevant sentiment data across the entire organization to understand how employees feel about their digital work environment. 

Maybe remote workers feel fine about their Zoom experience on their laptops, but employees in the office are frustrated with the faulty connection between their computers and the in-office systems. IT could fix this type of issue on a case-by-case basis – but they also might gather sentiment from employees over time, take this feedback to leadership, and ultimately decide to provide a new and improved collaboration solution for in-office and remote workers. 

Gathering sentiment is also critical to understanding the impact of any hybrid work policy the company enacts. For instance: if the company implements a mandatory “three days in the office” policy, IT can engage with employees to gauge whether productivity is up or down, how many more meetings they’re attending, and how they feel overall about this structure. 

To make a hybrid work solution that works for everyone, employee sentiment and a clear picture of the technology running the workplace is vital. By combining sentiment data with technical information, IT teams and leadership can adapt their hybrid work plans to meet the needs of employees – resulting in greater employee engagement, productivity, and retention. 

Prioritizing the digital employee experience as enterprises transition to a hybrid work model will result in greater business outcomes over the long term. 

Dive Deeper: How IT Can Solve the Most Important Hybrid Work Challenges 

The post Why The Success of Hybrid Work Hinges on Technology appeared first on Nexthink.

There are different moments in our lives that change the course of what we thought was going to be. From small acts like trying new foods and clothes to taking massive leaps.

Our guest on today’s show found this ideology shift on a beach in Morocco which led her to create a company bent on saving the planet.

In today’s episode, we chat with Lubomila Jordanova, CEO & Co-Founder Plan A & Co-Founder Greentech Alliance, about her journey in sustainability and how technology can be used to bring us together for a greener future.

We discuss:

1. The balance of activism and “talk” in sustainability
2. The financial cost of climate change for businesses
3. Harnesses technology to counteract environmental damage

For more amazing DEX content, including podcasts, articles and exclusive research, head over to the DEX Hub (dex.nexthink.com)

To hear more interviews like this one, subscribe to the Digital Employee Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Digital Employee Experience in your favorite podcast player.

The post The DEX Show | Podcast #34 – Changing the Narrative of Greenwashing appeared first on Nexthink.

At Microsoft’s 2022 Build Conference, which took place on May 24 through May 26, the tech juggernaut revealed a number of new technologies and iterations that are poised to impact the workplace and the world at large. One announcement in particular has already sparked major conversation among the developer community: the new Microsoft Dev Box. 

Dev Box is a new cloud-based IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that “provides developers with secure, ready-to-code developer workstations for hybrid teams of any size,” according to the company’s announcement. Built on top of a Windows 365 foundation, Dev Box can be used on any modern browser and supports all tools that run on Windows.   

The new service’s main selling point is that it enables developers to run preconfigured, virtualized workstations. This means they can access their necessary apps and platforms on demand, without the headaches and delays that come from setting up new working environments – like running into conflicting dependencies across their various projects, or making small changes that accidentally break down the workstation. 

In addition to accelerated onboarding and a more efficient process for switching between tasks, Dev Box provides a centralized app infrastructure, making it easier for developers to manage security, compliance, and monitor cost efficiency across their key business apps. 

Another obvious benefit of Dev Box is that it’s hosted in the Microsoft cloud, meaning developers can access Dev Boxes from any device, on-the-go or in their workplace. 

While Dev Box aims to revolutionize developer workstations, adoption remains an open question. 

The flexibility and compatibility that Dev Box offers is sure to entice many developers to migrate their work stations to Microsoft’s latest system. But it remains to be seen if Microsoft’s big ambitions for the service will come to fruition. 

After all, other vendors have released cloud-based IDEs in the past. These vendors ran into the hurdle that has curbed adoption of many cloud-based tools: developers who were accustomed to relying on their local infrastructures were scared off by the prospect of connectivity issues. 

Of course, cloud computing has evolved leaps and bounds over just the past several years. And Microsoft’s Dev Box provides capabilities that no other cloud-based IDE has offered in the past – including direct integration into Azure and far more expansive compatibility. 

Yet, as long as developers still have a choice, many will continue to work from their tried-and-true local environments – whether out of skepticism about the reliability of the cloud, or simply because they’ve grown comfortable and accustomed to their current setups. 

Regardless of how successful Microsoft’s latest tool becomes, this announcement is yet another indicator of the growth of cloud computing, as well as the commitment major companies have made to investing in new cloud solutions. 

The cloud may not replace the work systems of the past overnight – for developers or any other community – but there’s no question that the cloud will play an increasingly pivotal role in building the workplaces of the future. 

The post Will Microsoft’s Latest Tool Transform Workflows for Developers? appeared first on Nexthink.

In November 2021, a record 4.5 million workers switched jobs, topping the previous record set in September 2021. If there’s a side story to the global pandemic, it’s The Great Resignation.

This phenomenon has companies spending more than ever to retain their human capital, with less and less to show for it. At Nexthink, we believe part of the problem is this: Even the most inspiring and effective leaders in February 2020 were caught flatfooted by the unprecedented evolution in the way we work. Nobody could have anticipated in early 2020 that our relationship between people and work would change so radically, so quickly – and it has showed.

As Chief Strategy Officer at Nexthink, where we’ve grown to over 900 employees during the pandemic, I’ve felt these pressures to evolve as a leader myself. Which is why we set out on a mission to discover what was keeping people engaged at work; versus what was throwing them off course.

Because as we’ve learned over the past two years, the digital employee experience is not just important – it’s mission-critical.

The Digital Employee Experience (DEX)

How do leaders enhance the employee experience at work in this new dynamic? How can executives judge employee satisfaction from what can feel like a thousand feet view? And how can they use the tools at their disposal to engineer a better work environment in the digital age?

Here’s what we’ve found:

Nexthink’s solution requires leaders to think differently than they have in the past. Because the task of developing a smart and productive workplace in the digital space, requires a fundamentally different set of tools than in the physical one.

Architects of Flow

At Nexthink, we believe that – given the right tools – IT can serve as the basis for teams to unlock untapped potential and productivity.

Our platform is built on this founding principle, and the belief that IT must be imagined differently: IT shouldn’t just be there when something goes wrong; they need to be key stakeholders who are helping to ensure things go right.

Rather than simply responding when crises arise, or tech inevitably breaks down, Nexthink believes in empowering IT to become leaders in digital employee experience.

We’ve seen it first-hand with over 1,000 organizations.

When provided with tools such as real-time analytics, employee feedback and automated remediation, IT become the central architects of a more engaging workplace.

But success in this area requires management to think differently about IT. Instead of seeing IT as a service desk to respond to tech issues, they need to be viewed as key stakeholders playing a vital role in maintaining an organization’s health and satisfaction. The days of strictly reactive IT are over – it’s time to recognize IT’s potential as the architects of flow.

Already, forward-looking companies are being forced by outside events to adopt this mindset, with the understanding that the virtual world is often just as important as the physical world – and in some cases
more so.

As the revolution in working habits continues, so does this revolution in employee experience. As employees vote with their feet and head towards workplaces that cater to their needs, companies must evolve their operations and mindsets, or risk being left behind.

The post Keep Your Team Moving Forward appeared first on Nexthink.

Let’s start with a concept you’re probably familiar with: how it feels to get into a flow state at work. 

Maybe you were creating a new graphics package for a client deliverable. Maybe you were building a new website, or working on a coding sprint for the next product release. Maybe you were digging into some script automations for common technical issues. It doesn’t really matter what you were doing; what’s really important is how you felt while you were doing it.  

Have you ever been so absorbed in your work that you feel a sense that time is flowing by? You feel in sync with the task at hand, razor-focused, and happy about the progress you’re making. That is the elusive flow state, and as it turns out, it plays a vital role in the overall health of a business.

But consistently achieving a flow state is more difficult than ever in our increasingly digital workplace. And employees’ ability to reach the flow state depends on far more than their personal work habits – IT also plays a critical role. 

What is the Flow State?

The concept of the flow state wasn’t created for the workplace; it dates all the way back to ancient traditions of meditation.

But the modern concept and definition of the flow state was coined in 1975 by the Hungarian-American psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He theorized that people were happiest when they achieved a state of flow, which he defined as a state of comprehensive concentration in a given task. It’s a great feeling, and in the work environment, it can lead to increased productivity, motivation, and even loyalty.

But in today’s world of hybrid and remote work environments, reaching this flow state is more challenging than ever. According to a Microsoft study, a knowledge worker switches windows an average of 373 times while completing a task. That’s a new window every 40 seconds! It doesn’t take a psychologist to know that isn’t an effective process for entering a flow state.  

But why should business leaders care? If employees are getting their work done, why should it matter whether or not they reach this particular psychological state? 

Why Flow State Matters at Work

The importance of the flow state at work lies in its connection to employee engagement, and in turn, the connection between employee engagement and business outcomes. Of course employee happiness is a desirable outcome in its own right — but it’s also true there’s a tangible link between employee happiness and the success of a business.

According to Gallup research, actively disengaged employees cost the US $483 to $605 billion per year in lost productivity. The numbers don’t lie – failing to invest in employee engagement can have an outsized negative impact on your business long term.

Looking beyond the numbers, Gallup reports that “employees who are engaged are more likely to stay with their organization, reducing overall turnover and the costs associated with it. They feel a stronger bond to their organization’s mission and purpose, making them more effective brand ambassadors. They build stronger relationships with customers, helping their company increase sales and profitability.” 

So it’s clear: keeping employees engaged with their work and with the company they work for is a key driver of retention, cost optimization, and profitability. 

Engaged employees, according to Gallup, are those who feel that they are able to do what they do best, every day, while at work. And that’s where the flow state comes into play. According to Csikszentmihalyi, the flow state occurs when we have the right meeting of skill and challenge. In other words, when we’re given a task that we have the skill to accomplish, but one still challenges us to give our maximum effort.

That is why the flow state matters at work. Because according to research from MIT, organizations that rank in the top quarter of employee experience achieve more than twice the innovation (51 percent to 24 percent),  more than double the customer satisfaction (32 percent to 14 percent), and 25 percent higher profits than organizations in the bottom quarter. 

So there is a clear business incentive to create opportunities for employees to find their flow state at work. Now the question remains: how? 

What role does IT play in employee engagement and the flow state?

As the workplace has grown more reliant on complex digital technologies, IT has a greater impact on the flow and efficiency of the workplace than they ever have before. According to a recent research report released by Nexthink, 98% of IT leaders think that their department plays a critical or important role in facilitating a successful workplace flow in their organization. 

When it comes to employee engagement and finding flow, employees need a frictionless digital environment work environment free of disruptions and distractions. And it’s up to IT to create that ideal digital work environment that encourages consistent flow.

1. Optimize digital collaboration tools.

Digital collaboration tools are the lifeblood of a hybrid work environment. But for many workers, these tools can seem to be in direct opposition to flow states. Surely all those notifications and constant incoming messages provide more distractions than they do motivation, right?

Yes and no. In order for employees to have the right environment for a flow state, they need all the right materials and context for the task at hand. And they need efficient channels to relay their progress and results to others and receive quick feedback. Otherwise, employees might be able to work efficiently on their own, but their state of flow will break down when they need to communicate with team members and across the organization.

IT teams need to have a clear picture of not only the performance of workers’ collaboration tools, but also the experiences employees have when using them. Do all employees have the latest versions of these tools? Are they using them to their full potential? Do they report that the collaboration tools they use are helpful, or distracting and confusing?

By gaining a clear view of digital collaboration tool performance across the enterprise, and combining that with employee sentiment, IT teams can iterate these platforms and ensure that they’re optimized for efficiency. From there, IT workers can educate employees about how to maximize flow when using these tools, including helpful tips about turning off notifications and other productivity-driving methods.

2. Adopt a personalized approach to IT service.

IT personas are not a new concept. But basic IT personas based on location or job function can be too limiting, especially in our hyper digital workplaces where it can sometimes feel like there are more solutions than problems.  

In order for IT to help all employees achieve consistent flow states, they need to be hyper-personalized in their approach to providing service and provisioning the right technology to the right workers. Creating dynamic personas based on work styles, resource requirements, technical proficiency, and other unique characteristics will help IT equip every employee with exactly what they need – which in turn will save the organization money by avoiding costs associated with over-provisioning and unused software licenses.

3. Prioritize ease-of-use and monitor adoption when deploying new software.

It may seem like an obvious step on the surface, but having intuitive, streamlined tools is crucial to creating the right environment for the flow state. A lack of digital dexterity is a major inhibitor of productivity in today’s workplace. Employees already have it hard enough, considering the amount of new technology they’re asked to adapt to every year. If that new technology is confusing to learn and difficult to use, it’ll do the exact opposite of enabling a state of flow. 

IT has the power to make or break an employee’s productivity when they architect and deploy new software. Fancy tools with hundreds of complex features might seem great on paper, but IT has far more success with adoption and employee satisfaction when they provide software that is straightforward, clear in its intended purpose, and easy to learn quickly.

Of course, deploying an efficient and smooth-running tool doesn’t mean IT’s work is done. They should also track adoption throughout every new deployment, identifying fast adopters as well as employees who are not engaging with a new tool they’ve been provided with. From there, IT can target slow adopters with educational content that helps them understand a specific service, tailor it to their unique needs, and leverage the service to become more satisfied and productive in their day-to-day work.

4. Take a proactive approach to incident resolution.

Digital disruptions are the flow state killer. Applications crashing, devices slow to boot up, and any other hiccup in an employee’s digital experience will instantly break them out of their flow state. And according to a study from UC Irvine, it can take an average of 23 minutes to recover from a distraction. In other words, a momentary technical issue can result in nearly a half-hour of lost productivity.

Employees will never achieve consistent productivity if they’re still expected to send in tickets and wait for IT service every time they have a minor problem. But what if IT teams could fix issues before they impact productivity? With the right digital employee experience tool, IT teams can have a real-time view of employee experience across the enterprise, identify unreported issues the moment they pop up, and push fixes to every employee device that has even the potential to experience these issues.

With an effective proactive IT strategy, a graphic designer doesn’t get torn from their flow state because Adobe crashed – because their IT team deployed a remote action to fix an issue with the application, all without the hyper-focused worker even knowing about it.

5. Leverage automation to clear space for genuine creativity.

AI is scary, we get it. Robots are going to take our jobs, and so on. But putting aside dystopian fears for a moment, what if IT teams embraced the parts of automation that only alleviate the boring parts of our jobs?  

Achieving a flow state is beneficial to any work, even menial tasks like performing data analysis or organizing sales reports. But if IT leverages automation solutions to take these repetitive tasks off of employees’ hands, then employees have more time to focus solely on the creative and innovative projects that they’re uniquely suited to complete. In other words: they won’t just be able to achieve a flow state, but they’ll also make the most effective use of the flow state once they’ve achieved it.

 IT: The Architects of Flow

Change in the workplace shows no signs of abating. We’re increasingly reliant on digital solutions to get all types of work done, no matter what industry we work in or responsibilities we have. To keep in pace with all this constant change, IT teams are forced to step into a new role, becoming the architects of flow in the digital workplace. 

Strategic outcomes that may have previously fallen to HR and other departments are now shared responsibilities with IT. Internal communication, identifying employee change advocates, and promoting employee engagement are intrinsically linked to the technology that makes these outcomes possible.

This means IT has the great responsibility to create an environment where employees can find their flow state, a key to being happy and engaged at work. And in turn, the work IT does to help employees will translate into business growth and success.

Want to learn more about this changing role of IT in the workplace? Download our latest research report: IT in the Evolving Workplace. 

The post IT & The Flow State: 5 Ways IT Can Facilitate The Flow State at Work appeared first on Nexthink.

If an IT ticket is submitted, then it’s already too late. But what if you could get ahead of the pile up, reduce IT tickets, and solve issues before the tickets ever appear? 

Digital workplace technology is evolving fast, fueled by the post-pandemic realization that IT is vitally responsible for the productivity and satisfaction of modern organizations.  

But it’s not all going to plan.  

Work from anywhere, digital collaboration, SaaS application adoption, hardware shortages, and the general acceleration of digital transformation have become the main driver of IT incidents and Service Desk spending. 

The result?  

Incidents are reaching critical mass, and Service Desk teams are stretched thin, leading to wasted resources, poor IT service delivery and frustrated employees.

More Budget =/= Less Incidents 

The natural reaction to this crippling challenge is to increase Service Desk investment which essentially translates to hiring additional L1 and L2 Service Desk Agents. But that is not a sustainable strategy for two main reasons: 

1. The size of a Service Desk team has little correlation to the number of incoming incidents. 
2. Employees are still impacted by the same technical issues.

This means that, although the Service Desk can react and solve issues faster, incidents are still happening, and tickets are still being submitted because—most importantly—employees are still facing the same digital disruptions to their work, focus, and productivity.  

In the end, hiring additional Service Desk agents is a big investment that doesn’t solve the root cause of the issue.    

“The ITIL model is bankrupt, from what I’ve seen, its model is still based on the response coming back from the users. You don’t do anything—you wait.” – Jon Grainger, CIO, Slater & Gordon 

Proactive Visibility

Proactive visibility refers to the ability to look beyond reported issues and detect issues before a ticket is raised or, better yet, before they can negatively impact employees. Because, for every reported incident, there are many more employees with the same problem “suffering in silence” and even more who are “at risk” but not yet impacted.

In this example, an incident was reported 4 times. In reality, 82 employees have the exact same problem but did not report it yet, 3266 other employees are at risk to be impacted by the same issue.

This is where predictive and preemptive analytics become interesting.

End-point Deep, Enterprise-Wide

This level of visibility is only possible with a deep, real-time, experience-level understanding of the digital employee experience. A single pane of glass to see how every employee, device, computing environment, application, and network function together and impact the employee experience.

Instead of focusing on ticket resolution, IT can shift left and solve issues before impact. That is, detect non-reported issues across the entire organization and scale any troubleshooting across both impacted and non-impacted users.

“Nexthink allows us to be much more proactive… For my team, it allows us to free up more time and resources to help the business innovate.” – Jon Grainger, CIO, Slater & Gordon

Use Case: Detecting a Non-Reported MS Teams Issue Across 190 Devices.

Since their Work From Anywhere Policy started, a large European retail company struggled with collaboration tool issues. In fact, after 2 years, they were still facing a ticket overload which impaired their IT operations. Although they hired more than 3 additional L1 agents, ticket count remained unchanged.

The issue was not ticket resolution. It was the number of incidents.

This realization pushed them to take a more proactive approach, using Nexthink’s predictive analytics to identify the source of the root cause of the issue.  See the solution in action in this use case demo video:

The result?

In less than a minute, they were able to understand and drill down into the specific root cause of an issue that was affecting over 100 devices. What’s more, because they discovered the root cause, they can not only fix the issue for every employee currently affected, but more importantly, they can prevent this issue from impacting any other employees in the future.

The future of incident management is not to fix more issues faster, It is to stop issues from happening in the first place by fixing them before they can reach critical mass. Using proactive visibility strategies, IT teams can identify issues at their root and push fixes across the entire digital ecosystem, not only reducing the number of IT tickets in the pile, but also eliminating the risk of future incidents as well.

Find out more at: Scale Your Service Desk: How 5 Organizations Stopped Incidents Before They Reached Critical Mass.

The post How Proactive IT Prevents IT Tickets from Reaching Critical Mass appeared first on Nexthink.

“Human brains are sense-making machines, they’re pattern recognizing machines, we’re great at trying to figure things out from information. But when it comes to big data, it can be really hard for us to figure out how we process that.”

One of the first technologies we worked with was fire. From there it exploded into a multitude of different ways to integrate and make our lives easier.

The future of technology is just as complex as our evolution from fire to modern day computers. And it’s rooted in psychology.

In today’s episode, we chat with our very own Oriana Ott, Senior UX Researcher at Nexthink, about the intersection between psychology and tech and how they’re bridged by data.

We discuss:

1. Why IT has shifted from strictly computer-facing to incorporating more human factors
2. What qualitative and quantitative data shows the importance IT specialists and human interactions
3. How psychology and technology will continue to grow together

For more amazing DEX content, including podcasts, articles and exclusive research, head over to the DEX Hub (dex.nexthink.com)

To hear more interviews like this one, subscribe to the Digital Employee Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Digital Employee Experience in your favorite podcast player.

The post The DEX Show | Podcast #35 – From Computer People to Politicians: Psychology in Tech w/ Oriana Ott (Nexthink) appeared first on Nexthink.

Healthcare providers are under more pressure than ever to provide better care and improve patient outcomes despite clinical resource scarcity, high turnover, and burn-out. Staffing shortages of physicians and nurses, growing populations in need of care, and rising costs create real barriers to exceptional care. 

Critical healthcare staff—especially clinicians—have finite time, so time lost due to IT challenges is gone forever. Likewise, IT Support has finite resources to identify and resolve issues, so how should they prioritize their efforts? What if we could know which issues had the greatest impact on clinical productivity and care delivery? What if we could know about issues that users have not reported? Wouldn’t that be a better way to support clinical and other essential staff? 

Digital transformation has improved the efficiency of hospitals and health systems overall, but we have forced clinicians to spend more time interacting with technology as part of delivering care. Application crashes, workstation malfunctions, and slow response times disrupt clinicians’ digital experience, which has a direct impact on the quality of the patient encounter.  

Clinicians also do not have time to report or resolve IT issues, which prevents IT staff from having a complete picture of relevant issues. With the right actionable insights, IT can effectively prioritize issues and address the most pressing disruptions quickly, those that can truly improve clinical efficiency, satisfaction, and drive a better patient experience. 

The Impact of Digital Experience on Patient Outcomes 

Clinicians’ time is our scarcest resource, and every moment lost is one that cannot be reclaimed. The efficiency of each clinician’s interaction with technology directly affects the patient experience. If a terminal crashes or is slow during a patient visit, that is time lost for the clinician and the patient. This frustrating digital experience lowers morale and contributes to fatigue and burn-out.  

Despite the critical nature of clinicians’ technological dependence and experience, we generally do not have the right tools to assess and improve it.  

This is the essence of Digital Experience Management: having actionable information to resolve issues that will have the most impact on the quality of users’ experience – especially clinicians. In any environment, we will have a large set of things we could change, which leaves the question of how to prioritize. Digital Experience Management puts focus on the changes that will improve the digital experience of critical users and allows us to measure the impact of those changes. 

Get Valuable Insights to Prioritize Issue Resolution 

Healthcare has long discussed its challenges as an optimization problem, constantly improving the efficacy of care, the efficiency of operations, and shortening the time between discoveries and applied treatments. Yet no matter what we learn, build, and apply, we can never address every need because we shall always be bound by fundamental limitations of time and resources. 

While digital transformation has enabled healthcare efficiency at a macro level, it has imposed new operating constraints on our caregivers. Time facing terminals is time not facing patients, and any delay or difficulty accessing essential information via clinical applications is time lost and reduced productivity. 

As we look to focus on the needs of clinicians in their roles, we must give due attention to the quality of their digital experience and deploy platforms that give us the right insights upon which we can act to make notable improvements and measure the impact. There is no more valuable focus than digital experience to drive change priority; without such insights, we’re guessing about the true scope and nature of issues we address. 

Layer Clinical Sentiment Over Technical Data to Efficiently Prioritize Issues 

Supporting clinical staff as they deliver care to our communities is yet another finite capability: with a limited amount of time to resolve issues, which issue you focus on matters. The critical question is: How can we decide where to focus?  

Clinical and critical staff experience holds the answer. We must understand the behavior of systems and applications they are using, and we must know how staff feel about the quality of their experience. Sentiment is an oft-overlooked element of experience because it is difficult to assess. Infrequent, low-response surveys are common, but they do not provide actionable insight due to both their scarcity and paucity of actionable insights.  

If we have the information about which problems are impacting overall experience and the perceived impact, we can begin to remediate issues that directly affect productivity and satisfaction across the entire health system. A digital experience management tool gathers performance data from workstations, terminals, local operating systems, running applications, session-based computing, VDI, and within the browser to understand what users actually experience. We then layer the sentiment analysis onto this technical information to effectively prioritize the issues impacting the greatest number of clinical staff, thus improving the clinical efficiency of staff across the board. 

Closing Thoughts: Experience Provides the Ideal Focus 

If we allow our gaps in knowledge and understanding to continue to limit the impact of our efforts to deliver care and support those who do, we will continue to fall short of our potential. Only by gathering data about clinicians’ actual experience and prioritizing change accordingly can we make the best use of IT’s finite time to deliver markedly better outcomes. It’s time to take a good hard look at Digital Experience so we put clinicians and caregivers in the best position to succeed, for the benefit of everyone. 

The post How Healthcare IT Improves Clinical Efficiency Through Digital Experience appeared first on Nexthink.

“If used wisely and in the right manner, technology can offer a lot of democratization of knowledge related to climate change, related to any kind of issue that humanity faces or wants to address.” – Lubomila Jordanova, The DEX Show 

Lowering the corporate carbon footprint is a growing concern for businesses of all sizes, as climate change continues and threatens to impact business profits in the long term. And although there are myriad ways to begin to lower carbon footprint, from examining supply chain logistics to changing production methods, there is one area of carbon emissions that can too often be overlooked: the carbon emissions of our digital technologies.  

Our devices and the ways we use them can have a massive carbon footprint, but small changes can have a correspondingly significant impact on lowering those emissions. To lower the overall emissions of your digital ecosystem, you need to engage your most valuable asset: your employees. 

Employee engagement is key to successfully reducing the corporate carbon footprint of workplace technology. At Nexthink, we recently ran a campaign to see if we could engage our own employees, educate them about the environmental impact of their technology usage, and drive a drop in our own carbon emissions. 

Read More: How Nexthink Extended Hardware Refresh Cycles & Improved Employee Happiness 

Nexthink’s Green IT Engage Quiz 

An internal eco-minded group of Nexthink employees called the Greenthinkers collaborated with IT to launch a four-week Green-IT campaign focused on educating colleagues about how their use of technology negatively impacts the environment while providing actionable steps to start reducing their energy consumption right away.  

 We utilized real-world equivalencies for CO2 measurements to help quantify the impact of their digital behaviors. Then the Greenthinkers shared some simple and immediate actions that everyone can take to curb consumption and establish greener technology habits in the office and at home!   

In honor of Earth month, the Green IT challenge ran throughout April. During the month, a Nexthink Engage campaign asked employees one question per week, designed to help them understand the carbon footprint of their digital habits while at work, with specific actions to lower consumption and change behavior. In this article, we’ll review the approach and the initial results of this month-long challenge. 

Question One: Shut Down Your Device to Save Energy  

First, we kicked off the month with the simplest question of the set: we asked how much energy they thought their device used if left running overnight for 5 days. For this question, our goal was  to educate employees on the impact of device uptime.

This first quiz question had the highest response rate of the month, with an astounding 81% of targeted Nexthinkers responding to the quiz! But how did they do? Did our employees “pass” the quiz?

Respondents had to resist the temptation to select “all of the above.” At the end of the day, out of all the employees who participated, 45% were able to evade the temptation of “all of the above” and choose the right answer:

Leaving your device on overnight for 5 nights consumes the same amount of energy as (drumroll please): 10 hours of binge-watching on your TV!

After they completed that week’s question, each respondent was given a call to action to turn off devices after work every day moving forward to help lower overall carbon emissions. We’ll discuss the results of that call to action a bit later in the article. But first, it’s time to look at week two.

Week Two – Cleanup One Drive to Reduce CO2

The following Monday, on April 11^th, we asked over 500 employees our second question: what is the CO2 equivalent of 100GB of data stored in OneDrive?

This time, no tricks – the answer was All of the above!  The response rate remained high at 77%, with 36% responding with the correct answer

Week 3: Greenthinkers did the math!

Week three focused on the weight of email attachments. We asked employees what they thought was the carbon footprint of sending the official Nexthink sales presentation by email to 10 recipients.

Halfway through the month, we wondered if participation would lag, but response rates were still amazing at 75%, with 55% of Nexthinkers answering correctly: sending the Nexthink sales presentation as an attachment to 10 customers generates the same CO2 emissions as 60 fully charging smartphones.

Week three included a call to action to replace email attachments with OneDrive links to lower CO2 emissions, and reminded everyone to implement email housekeeping, to remove old emails as well as emails with large attachments.

Week 4 and the Home Stretch: Implement Digital Sobriety by Curbing Video Consumption

To wrap up Earth month, the last week focused on educating everyone about reducing video streaming with some startling consumption comparisons that are hard to believe.  In 2018, online video viewing generated more than 300 MtCO2. That’s more than the energy consumption of Spain (291 MtCO2 in 2018) or if everyone in the world visited the Nexthink website this year (609 tCO2).

Participation this week was at 60%, with 75% of people selecting the correct answer.

Summary & Initial Results: Were We Able to Lower Our Corporate Carbon Footprint?

Each question and challenge was designed to quantify how simple actions could add up to make a big difference. All of the questions and carbon emission comparisons were carefully researched, calculated, and specifically crafted to be relatable. We wanted to help everyone begin the process of rethinking our daily technology usage and adopt more mindful habits to lower our environmental impact at work and at home.

Shutting down devices at the end of the day makes total sense, but we often forget or are reluctant to close browser sessions and documents for fear of losing our place and having to start fresh the next day.

Sometimes it’s easier to send an email attachment rather than setting up a link to share, and it’s hard to remember to make time to clean up our file storage. But by sharing relevant equivalencies of carbon emissions, we hoped to inspire our employees to change their daily habits and lower their overall carbon footprint.

So, were we successful?

Perhaps the greatest success story of this campaign was the employee engagement. Our global participation ranged from 60 – 80%, suggesting that our employees really care about the environment and want to know how they can reduce their carbon footprint. But did we have any measurable reduction in carbon emissions?

It’s important to establish a baseline, and the more data you have, the more relevant the results will be.   IT collected a few weeks of data related to usage and consumption so we knew what our employee’s current usage was and could then measure and compare the before and after.

Now for those results.

After the first week of the challenge, we saw a 10% reduction in uptime. Now, two months after that first week of the challenge, we’ve seen a sustained 12% reduction in uptime for our employees’ devices. More employees shut down their devices at the end of the day, resulting in a temporary reduction in carbon emissions. But can we sustain it?

If employees continued to have a 10% reduction in uptime over the course of an entire year, Nexthink could save 5.2kg of CO2 per year*, the equivalent of driving a car 27,000km (or almost 17,000 miles).

The other three questions had less of a measurable impact in the immediate. For example, week four reflected a decrease in video streaming volumes, then it returned closer to the baseline. We are still exploring hypotheses for why this might be, as we dig into and plan future green IT campaigns. Each of these topics requires consistent and deliberate action to change behavior. We believe, more noticeable results will require more time. Our Greenthinkers team is strategizing ways to encourage these sustainable behavior changes without compromising employee engagement.

Free Report: What 3.5 Million PCs Revealed about e-Waste in Corporate IT

Employees that choose to change technology consumption behavior will be the ultimate secret sauce in company-wide Green-IT initiatives to lower carbon emissions from technology use, contributing to the world’s urgent mission to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.  Governments, Corporations, and each and every one of us will need to work together to achieve these lofty goals.

The Nexthink solution drove amazing participation, making this first eco-friendly educational campaign this year a great success! Stay tuned as we look for more ways to engage employees and promote environmentally sustainable practices that benefit our people, and our planet!

*Calculations of carbon emissions vary by country depending on energy mix; this number represents an estimate based on Nexthink’s global employee base.

The post Thinking Green: Can Nexthink Lower Our Corporate Carbon Footprint by Focusing on Employee Engagement appeared first on Nexthink.