I often get a blank stare when I ask CIOs about their objectives for improving employee experiences. My follow-up question on whether they have a Digital Trailblazer assigned to develop a vision and plan digital transformation initiatives driving the future of work can be a head-scratcher. Sometimes, they respond, “Well, HR administers a yearly employee satisfaction survey and recommends improvements.”

Should employee experience be a top digital transformation priority? Probably not, and I would expect investments in customer experience, data/analytics/AI, and security to be more urgent. However, ignoring employee experience can impact hiring, retention, productivity, innovation, culture, and morale.

CIOs and IT leaders will get better traction with executive sponsors by unpacking “employee experience” into several initiatives that improve the quality of working at their organizations. These initiatives should look for “and” or “while” impacts, so for example,

• Improve productivity and job satisfaction.
• Reduce work complexities and increase opportunities where employees can directly contribute to strategic drivers such as customer experience and innovation.   
• Simplify the skills to complete a job while investing in employee lifelong learning so they are ready to take on new responsibilities.

I call these force-multiplying digital transformation initiatives as they impact multiple business drivers. Employee experience initiatives are usually force multipliers when productivity improvements and job satisfaction are linked to revenue growth, cost savings, quality improvements, or risk reductions.

Below are three employee experience initiatives CIOs should consider.

Champion the hybrid work experience

I’m writing this post as I fly back from the Cisco WebexOne conference, where they showcased some of their latest innovations for workplace collaboration. For example, replacing conference tables’ speakerphones with ceiling mics provides a seamless employee experience and improved audio quality, an investment that can yield significant collaboration benefits.

Want more forward-looking innovations? Cisco showcased Workplace Designer and demoed Cisco Spatial Meetings, which utilizes Apple Vision Pro for a highly immersive experience. These two innovations can improve collaboration, especially for global and hybrid-working organizations.

These simple examples of improving employee experience can go a long way, especially for a new generation of Gen Z entering the workforce who have never experienced pre-pandemic work.

“Cisco always had a hybrid work policy even before the pandemic, so that’s nothing new for us, and it has worked very successfully,” says Anurag Dhingra, SVP and GM of Cisco Collaboration. “There’s just not enough qualified people available, and we attract better talent now, especially with AI, because of our hybrid policies.”

Technology companies like Amazon and Dell’s global sales division have recently announced departures from hybrid work and require employees to be in the office five days a week, while other large enterprises have cut back on remote flexibilities. IMHO, these top-down decisions can be daggers into employee morale and impact opportunities for people who require a flexible working environment.  

CIOs should promote hybrid working, especially when top-down mandates impact the organization’s ability to hire and retain talent. Superior technology, tools, and services to enable global teams to collaborate are critical to workplace flexibility.  

Evaluate AI agents in HR, ITSM, and customer service

I have two upcoming articles in InfoWorld on how AI agents impact the future of work. Spoiler alert: one of the first areas where AI agents have fast times-to-impact is in service organizations such as HR, ITSM, and customer service.

People working in these areas are under pressure to resolve requests quickly and accurately and must develop expert-level knowledge to service a wide variety of inquiries. Increasing self-service capabilities can help, but according to Gartner data shared at Cisco WebexOne, only 14% fully resolve their problems with self-service approaches in customer service.

Enter AI agents that tap into enterprise service data to help address end-user and customer problems. For example, Webex AI Agent is voice-driven, listens to customer issues, and provides natural-voice responses to their problems and questions. Cisco also showcased AI Assistant, an AI agent for human agents that guides employees in customer service functions when responding to inquiries.

These are great examples of force multipliers because they make work easier for customers in service functions while providing better and faster support to end-users and customers.

CIOs should sponsor evaluating AI agents in service functions as they may find little upfront work and significant benefits. Accuracy will depend on having high-quality data in service desk tools, knowledge bases that integrate into these platforms, and tools like Cisco Webex Agent Studio with no-code interfaces to configure the agents.   

Plan for significant transformation in developer experience

Copilots and code generators are just the beginning of how gen AI transforms developer experiences. LLMs are already impacting low/no-code development, the SDLC, data science practices, data governance functions, and DevOps/IT operations.

But of all these areas, I believe developer experiences will see the greatest transformation as AI agents mature in capabilities. IDEs will shift from code-first experiences to ones focused on functional requirements, code evaluation, and quality assurance.

What should CIOs do to plan for this future? For now, I recommend increasing the developers’ time for lifelong learning and experimenting – key employee experience drivers. I will discuss this topic more in a future post.

In summary, CIOs must remember the humans in the loop in this gen AI era. Improving employee experiences is one way to surpass productivity improvements and deliver transformational benefits. Top CIOs who partner with their CHROs on improving employee experiences also drive culture change and cultivate an agile mindset.