Enterprise hits and misses - employee engagement versus tech layoffs, marketers versus data needs, and social media dreams die hard

Jon Reed Profile picture for user jreed November 7, 2022
Summary:
This week - tech layoffs keep the "employee engagement" hype in check. Developments at Meta and Twitter expose social media fault lines. Marketers struggle with their need for 1st party data, and enterprise vendors hold up (mostly) against the macro-economy. As always, your whiffs.

loser-and-winner

Lead story - Changing the employee experience - are we getting anywhere?

When it comes to employee experience, (almost) no one gets a gold star right now. Those who advocate transformation have models for customer-driven transformations. But what would an employee-driven transformation look like? Wouldn't that have a profound impact on externals - customers and suppliers?

And yet - it seems like what counts for "good employee experience" is just not getting laid off. That's not exactly inspiring. Yet, for those looking to improve employee experience - and change the flawed relationship with IT - there are use cases to learn from. See Gary's Global food giant Mondelēz focuses in on employee experience for its 80,000 workforce. As Gary explains, Mondēlz uses Nexthink IT monitoring tech to maintain productivity through COVID-19. But "productivity" isn't necessarily a good metric for employee morale. Is there more? Gary quotes their global solutions owner:

One thing in our control is ensuring that employees are happy with their tech stack. In today’s work environment, proactive and efficient IT support and a reduction of IT desk tickets is crucial.

Lowering that stress in a hybrid work model isn't easy, but it's worth it:

It can be extremely stressful when you’re on deadline, finally distraction-free and in the flow, or just ready to have a productive day when technology fails you. That’s true whether you’re trying to do that in the office or at home.

You can't act without better visibility. Gary writes:

The solution Wright and his team eventually chose has been a huge factor in creating what he styles as a better overall Mondēlz digital employee experience. That is because, he said, because it gives him ‘visibility’ into technology interruptions by quickly surfacing for IT all software, hardware or latency issues any Mondēlz programs may be experiencing.

Phil picks up similar themes in The intranet comes full circle with Guru's take on employee engagement. How many employees truly love their old school "Intranets"? Can I see some hands? Up against hybrid work styles, those tools aren't getting it done. Phil:

That, I think, is the opportunity that Guru is playing into with this offering, which is to provide a digital mechanism for supporting that shared culture and having a better sense of people's engagement. Of course, the culture itself still needs to hit the right note — if it's a bad culture to start with, no amount of digital magic will make it any better. But the tools to actually sustain that strong cultural identity when people don't get to be together to build the shared culture in person is really crucial.

Granted, these types of projects don't come close to the employee-driven transformation model I am calling for. However,  targeted improvements build momentum - as long as the results achieve the agreed-upon metrics (e.g. reduced support tickets). As Phil points out, to get further into employee engagement, we have a silo problem to overcome:

At some point, someone is going to have to work out how to join up all of these separate silos of data about employee engagement. For now, we are still in the really early days of working all this out.

Diginomica picks - my top stories on diginomica this week

Vendor analysis, diginomica style. With consumer tech companies far ahead when it comes to big layoffs, what can we learn from the latest enterprise earnings? Short version: slowed growth, but not stalled out.

A few more vendor picks, without the quotables:

Jon's grab bag - More nifty use cases for your perusal:

Chris took a hard look at UK data privacy in UK data protection - on the horns of many dilemmas. Neil did the same with (over)hyped foundational models in AI needs foundational models - so what can we learn from GPT-3, BERT, and DALL-E 2? Finally, Stuart updates on Captain Ahab Mark Zuckerberg and his expensive metaquest in Reverse the Metaverse? Not likely while Zuckerberg has a dream...at any cost:

"Having a vision for the future is an essential attribute for a tech entrepreneur. Having a blind vision from which you won’t deviate, less so." Indeed - with $65 billion in lost market cap to show for it. But hey, on the bright side, ad impressions are up!

Best of the enterprise web

Waiter suggesting a bottle of wine to a customer

My top seven

Overworked businessman

Whiffs

Technically, I don't consider this a whiff, except that all layoffs have a grim aspect that deserves scrunity:

Thomas Wieberneit wanted to know what the CEO is giving up to face such times, but overall, a candid approach. If you're going to get yourself booted off of Twitter, here is a good way to go out:

If LinkedIn's self-promotional cheese wizz is getting you down, give Reddit's LinkedIn Lunatics a spin:

More rough news - if you didn't see the FedEx "last mile bot" on its world tour, I'm afraid that was your last chance, sorry 'bout that:

See you next time.... If you find an #ensw piece that qualifies for hits and misses - in a good or bad way - let me know in the comments as Clive (almost) always does. Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed.

Image credit - Waiter Suggesting Bottle © Minerva Studiom, Overworked Businessman © Bloomua, Loser and Winner © ispstock - all from Adobe Stock.

Disclosure - Oracle, Workday, ServiceNow, Rimini Street and Salesforce are diginomica premier partners as of this writing.

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