So often in our organizations and communities, we fall into a cycle of reaction. A problem happens, and we respond. We fight fires. We contend with emergencies. Researchers call this "tunneling": We don't see the big picture, and we don't think about the future, we just keep pushing forward from one crisis to the next. What if instead we could shift our energies upstream -- uncovering and addressing the source of those problems?

In this talk, Heath will reveal how some leaders have learned to spot problems in advance: There's a school district that can predict which students will drop out -- 4 years before graduation. There's an internet service company that can predict which customers are likely to cancel their subscriptions -- as early as two weeks after they sign up! When we shift from downstream response to upstream planning, it can cause miracles: One company eliminated 25 million customer support calls by asking, "How can we make sure our customers never need to call us?" And one nation in Europe has almost eliminated teenage substance abuse by asking, "How can we create a teenage culture that offers such compelling sober activities that teens simply don't feel like drinking or doing drugs?"

Heath will share the three forces that push us downstream, as well as the powerful levers we can use to start preventing problems before they happen.

The way that organizations work has changed, and keeping employees productive through great employee experiences is a key performance indicator for IT teams. Employees are working in a distributed manner but there are challenges to delivering a consistent experience on any device while maintaining security. Learn from VMware’s IT team how they’ve been able to successfully navigate the transition with tips and tricks for other organizations to make the same shift.

In this session you will learn:

• How to ensure remote employees stay productive from onboarding to off boarding
• How IT can scale to manage and measure employee experiences of the distributed workforce
• What you should be considering for bringing employees back to the office

Join us in the networking lounge for group discussions on hot industry topics chosen by the editors of Reworked, or gather your own group and lead a discussion all your own.

Move your avatar around the networking space to meet people. To join a conversation, move closer. To leave it, move away. It’s that simple.

In the 2020 State of the Digital Workplace study, organizations reported marked advancements in implementing digital tools to support newly remote workforces.  Regardless of readiness most organizations had no choice but to leap into new ways of working, communicating and managing their teams and projects.  Having closed the year, we’ll speak with a panel of leaders of organizations that have made major advances in their digital workplaces from the start of 2020 to its finish, and gain insights into their DW trajectories for 2021 and beyond.  Moderated by Sarah Kimmel, VP of Research at Reworked/CMSWire, panelists will discuss:

• Digital adoption trajectories across various units of the workforce
• Comparisons of platform rollouts throughout the enterprise, what areas are thriving, and why (plus their top challenges, and solutions visited) 
• The leadership roles and team structures critical to the success of their digital transformation
• Next steps for their organizations as they seek to evolve and mature throughout continued uncertainties in 2021

HR teams everywhere are being asked to do more with less. Despite the investment in cloud-based HRIS systems, manual processes and tasks consume up to 65% of an HR team’s day. Instead of having your HR professionals spend their time filling out paper forms, tracking down signatures, and waiting for approvals, there is a better automated way. Every leading organization today is looking to rapidly improve their HR processes to attract, onboard, and retain talent with consistent business processes and digital experiences.  

Given the impact of recent events, HR teams benefit from documenting their HR processes and automating what can be automated to help employees stay connected while working remote. HR teams that can navigate these fundamental workplace shifts will be well-positioned for the new normal going forward.  

This session will provide practical, real-world guidance for leveraging visual and easy-to-use process mapping and workflow automation software to modernize HR processes and deliver exceptional digital experiences for employees.  

In this session you’ll learn how:  

• Mapping the processes helps set a standard on what to do  
• Automation fits the entire employee life cycle 
• To utilize forms to collect and store data, eliminating manual work and increasing the employee experience   
• To rapidly adjust processes: Automate work-from-home processes, from new policy sign offs to requesting equipment

In 2021, IT will be tasked with taking on a feat more difficult than the sudden transition to remote working – ensuring a smooth transition during strategic changes for the business; hybrid working, real estate downsizing and office space cuts, all while keeping people online and connected. IT performance is central to any modern business, both in terms of productivity and employee experience. But businesses are grappling with their largest set of challenges yet, which is why IT is stepping into a bigger role as a digital employee experience driver.

In this session, you will learn:

• What does a 2021 work environment look like and how to manage it?
• Did the pandemic help or hurt IT’s reputation?
• How can IT help the business take a customer approach to its employees and improve the quality of company culture when everyone is remote?

Join us in the networking lounge for group discussions on hot industry topics chosen by the editors of Reworked, or gather your own group and lead a discussion all your own.

Move your avatar around the networking space to meet people. To join a conversation, move closer. To leave it, move away. It’s that simple.

While recent advancements have created great opportunities for digital workplace success, the year ahead promises an abundance of decisions to be made at the enterprise, team and individual levels on how work gets done. Critical to maintaining today’s momentum is clear definition of the vision, goals and overarching strategy for growth by way of digital workplace optimization. Tools and technologies make success possible, but only the teams of humans who use those tools can make it a reality. Moderated by Siobhan Fagan, Managing Editor of Reworked, panelists from across industries will discuss the key components to a powerful digital strategy, harnessed by considerations that include:

• The keys to upskilling/reskilling your employees in digital channels, and why that will be critical as physical channels return
• How an enterprise grows workforce agility and trust, and why both are important to nurturing digital optimization
• The building blocks to a strong, resilient culture - specific to virtual organizations or hybrid environments 
• The 3 essential workforce considerations you must prioritize when resources are lean 

Employees want a simple and effective digital workplace so they can deliver value, so how can we meet their needs? When individual departments choose their own point solutions with varying taxonomies and data structures to meet their own goals, it results in a fractured employee experience. This “siloed” effect is the result of decentralized decision making and the lack of proactive data & knowledge management strategies.

At the core of the digital workplace are individual applications that serve different needs, each often offering its own set of data and knowledge that employees struggle to access. By thinking differently and focusing the enterprise IT strategy on AI-powered search and knowledge, teams can begin to unlock their potential towards a unified digital workplace that works for employees.

Join us to learn how Adobe strategizes to create a unified workplace experience that crosses company sites, departments and applications. You will learn the importance of:

• Using search and knowledge as core pillars to unify the digital workplace
• Combining design and agile thinking to meet the voice of employee
• Elevating IT’s role in shaping the employee experience

The sudden shift to remote work caused intranets in the digital workplace to become a valuable and critical asset to companies to keep employees engaged and connected. With so many competing priorities, IT teams need a compelling business case and ROI strategy that lives past the implementation phase.

Join Amit Bhatnagar, Sr. Director of IT at Nutanix, as he shares how he helped lead quantitative and qualitative tests to prove ROI. Get insight on strategies that help demonstrate the value of an intranet in your digital workplace. 

In this session, you will learn how to:

• Demonstrate ROI of your Intranet
• How IT can measure employee productivity of a distributed workforce
• Build an effective case showing ROI through A/B testing and surveying

Join us in the networking lounge for group discussions on hot industry topics chosen by the editors of Reworked, or gather your own group and lead a discussion all your own.

Move your avatar around the networking space to meet people. To join a conversation, move closer. To leave it, move away. It’s that simple.

Many organizations have invested heavily in the customer experience over the last few years to drive innovation and market leadership. But the top organizations recognize that investing in the digital employee experience is key to execution and long term growth. This organizational mindset is even more important in 2021 as employees remain in a hybrid work environment for the foreseeable future.

Join us as we discuss how world-class organizations like MGM Resorts, Amazon and Hilton recognize the importance in delivering a modern digital employee experience for all of their workers to deliver award-winning customer experiences.

In this session you’ll learn:

• How to use frameworks like the Service-Profit Chain to map out and build your ideal employee experience
• The role of technology in delivering a digital employee experience that works for every worker
• How to measure results that connect to your larger business objectives

The pandemic forced many into uncharted territory and fast adaptions. Darwin had nothing on the evolution organizations underwent, and the field of employee experience was no exception. While we lost normalcy, the experience created a greater need than ever to truly listen to employees and understand their needs in order to thrive in this uncertain environment. And this need created an opportunity to elevate the significance of employee listening to inform business decisions.

In her closing keynote address, Shawnté Holland shares the story of how her organization adapted its approach to employee listening and successfully accelerated its evolution toward an even higher value-add capability integral to workplace success.

I'll take '90s Pop Culture for $500 ...

Does the phrase "Be kind, rewind" sound familiar? How about, "Did I do that?" If so, your odds are looking good.

The winner of today's Jeopardy game will receive a $500 e-Gift Card, courtesy of our event sponsors.

Join us for this live, interactive game of Jeopardy! as we close out our DWX21 Winter Session. 

Dan talks with Reworked editor Mike Prokopeak about how the pandemic reshaped our priorities at work and home and what we can do to rise above the day-to-day and make meaningful upstream changes that improve our results.

For more conversations like this, be sure to subscribe to our Get Reworked podcast here.

The past year has led us to rethink fundamental assumptions—where to work, how to manage remote culture and collaboration, whether to reimagine our strategy and our products or services. Yet too many leaders and employees are reacting to events instead of proactively looking for opportunities to think again. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant has spent the past decade studying this problem at organizations ranging from the NBA to Pixar to NASA, and he finds that the very skills that make us good at thinking and learning can make us worse at rethinking and unlearning. Building on his new book, Think Again—which has been called “a must-read” by Bill and Melinda Gates and “brilliant” by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman—Adam examines how we can update our own opinions, open other people’s minds, and build a learning organization in which people know what they don’t know and are eager to improve on the status quo. His eye-opening evidence and entertaining delivery will leave you determined to never again say “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”