In this keynote address, MIT research scientist Kristine Dery shares the findings from her research on the dynamic between technology and the way that people work, including the design and management of the workplace to understand how organizations use digital capabilities internally to create more effective ways of working, and the impact of new ways of engaging with talent in the digital era.

As organizations are moving from supporting remote work as an afterthought to becoming a true anywhere organization, employee experience is paramount to make that shift. Learn how Dell Technologies was able to adopt a digital workspace platform to deliver the right experiences to their distributed workforce to make employees successful across their lifecycle at an organization.

The basic tenets of Agile are clear...that is, until teams attempt to seamlessly integrate design practices, processes, & approaches. Philosophical & logistical conflicts (e.g., the role that designers play, the timing of research & design activities) crop up almost routinely. I'll describe how user researchers, user experience designers, and visual designers can effectively embed on Agile teams and collaborate with developers to deliver optimal user experiences. I'll lay out an ideal project flow from building empathy for our users and their needs through delivery & refinement of solutions that optimally fulfill those needs. The session will include discussion of lessons learned as well as common challenges and how we can address them.

Learning Objectives

1. Understand the role that user research plays in defining and prioritizing a team's work.
2. Overcome key challenges that many teams face when attempting to integrate design and Agile.
3. Enable effective, successful team collaboration and deliver outcomes with strong user experiences.

There is still a huge amount of confusion, hype and expectation surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Author and Consultant Katie King will share the evidence and insights drawn from her deeply researched book and her role on the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) taskforce looking into adoption of AI in business.

During this pragmatic, enlightening session, Katie will share real-world examples of how AI is impacting HR, focusing on culture, internal processes and operations, and how AI alters the nature of work, and how best to structure an organisation accordingly.

With case studies drawn from multiple industry sectors and geographies, Katie will reveal how AI and wider collaboration tools can be deployed to improve employee productivity. She will also provide invaluable insights on both successes and failures, as well as practical implementation strategies.

Katie will shed light on some of the major issues including the future of jobs, privacy, ethics, the skills gap and more.

Learning objectives:

• Gain actionable knowledge and insights on how AI is impacting HR, with techniques and tools to assist with structure, culture, team building and much more
• Access Katie King's Scorecard for Success - a pragmatic, workable plan to consider the merits of AI and its real world applicability in a next-gen digital workplace
• Become a disruptor and run a future-proofed productive digital workplace

Follow the journey of Wells Fargo’s move from platform dependency to microservices efficiencies from Digital Workplace VP, Christy Punch. Gain an inside look at the model built by this financial services giant to integrate multiple systems and applications into a seamless digital experience.

Facebook recently committed to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work and to do this in a way that is measured, thoughtful, and responsible. Part of this shift will include redesigning and remodeling employee journeys, analytics and practices to cater to an increasingly remote workforce.

Join Janis Avila, Director Employee Experience at Facebook and Sameer Chowdhri, Global Head HR Solutions at Workplace from Facebook as they deep dive into the thinking behind building and optimizing for employee experience in our new working normal.

Few tools impact every aspect of the employee experience like an intranet. When done right, it can transform an organization's culture and work style. When done wrong, it could take years -- and lots of resources -- to recover from such a high-visibility mishap.

Session participants will hear from Ideal State, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s (CFF) former intranet project manager, and intranet software provider Beezy about the carefully crafted process CFF used to select and implement the right intranet technology for its 700+ employees.

What you'll learn:

• How to select the right intranet technology and provider?
• Best practices for creating a great employee experience with your intranet
• Get tips on how to manage cultural shifts when implementing a new intranet

Today’s workplace, even with the mid-pandemic impact we’ve been through, is still moving at an exceptional pace, and employees are often left to fend for themselves.  Today’s digital workplace experience leaders need to keep ahead of the market to ensure their organizations can not only survive — but also prepare for the future.  This session will cover important market trends that were identified in an SAP-sponsored market research project with IDC into the future of work and the intelligent digital workplace.

In this session you will learn:

• What causes negative impacts on work productivity and how to overcome them
• Market trends and drivers impacting work transformation initiatives
• Key business challenges in work transformation

Hootsuite has enjoyed rapid growth since 2008, expanding across 15 offices in 11 countries.  This speed of growth led to new challenges around information sharing and retrieval, and internal communications struggled to keep pace. To succeed Hootsuite needed to centralize information sharing and announcements across its entire team. The organization also wanted to foster a culture of openness and accountability around accessing that information, making it easier and sustainable for every employee to find what they needed as the company grew. Grace Carter, Director of Internal Communications at Hootsuite, will share how the team overcame these obstacles to grow a connected and informed global team.

Instead of slowing down and ossifying like many big companies, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are only getting stronger as they get larger. Their secret? An enthusiastic embrace of workplace technology that's allowed them to remain nimble and inventive despite their size and age.

The tech giants use internal technology to minimize the time their employees spend supporting existing products - they give their employees the chance to dream up their next new business. They then put new ideas through well-honed processes meant to bring the best to life. By looking deep into the tech giants, as speaker Alex Kantrowitz did in his newly released book, Always Day One, we see the big picture strategy driving the world's most advanced digital workplaces.

Learning objectives:

1. Think more strategically about the digital workplace. This talk will show the broader strategy that makes installing workplace technology so important in today's economy.
2. Learn about the technology keeping the tech giants on top. AI, automation, and collaboration technology are core to the tech giants' success. Get the inside scoop on what they use and how they use it.
3. Discover the secrets behind the tech giants inventiveness. The pathways these companies build to bring ideas to life are just as important as the technology they use to help generate them. Find out how some of their most important products came to life.

It’s not enough to simply have an L&D program in place. The best learning and development programs are invisible, adjusting seamlessly to the evolving wants of the learner, while meeting business needs in real time. Learning happens in an integrated fashion, as part of the way work gets done.

With the growing skills gap at work, many organizations have turned to high profile upskilling and reskilling initiatives to close it. Done right, they benefit both organizations and employees. Companies develop a more productive, more skilled and adaptable workforce. Employees get the skills they need to succeed in new and higher level roles. It’s win-win.

In this fireside chat, GE Healthcare executive Christopher Lind will share:

• The theory and practice of learning in the flow of work
• How adaptive learning is a game changer for skill development
• What needs to happen to make reskilling and upskilling a reality

Growing teams, dwindling workspace -- it gets more difficult each day to thrive and remain inspired in our surroundings. UXers' space needs are significant and nuanced; constantly fluid, with spatial landmarks that draw people together. How do we utilize integrated technology that serves to connect people and work that doesn't feel like a barrier? Learn how a Google team pioneered a UX Hub to align with how we build our products.

Although the idea of flexible working has been around for many years, the use of technology to enable this has plateaued in recent years. The COVID-19 crisis, coupled with the expectations of Millennials and Generation Z for flexible and remote work options, has provided a much needed opportunity to reassess exactly what is required today, with a clear view for the future.

Building technology capabilities which enable flexibility in the workforce has now become a MUST for all organizations. Closing the gap between employee expectations, technology delivery and support models, is the challenge.

In this session we will look at the key elements of delivering a Flexible Work level of service to gain a position of advantage. We will cover how end point analytics and optimal data utilization help achieve a productive employee experience.

In this session, you will learn:

• The benefits of flexible working based on technology that matches employee expectation
• How to create enhanced productivity through employee engagement amidst a flexible working environment
• The opportunities created with an IT / HR collaboration when planning for long-term remote work arrangements

Onboarding is a critical milestone in an employee’s journey at any organization. Learn how you can leverage a digital workspace app to engage employees after they sign their offer letter until they join the organization, no matter if they are working at home, in an office, or both. You will learn how personalized access to a digital workspace app can support employee onboarding, from providing the pre-hire employees the tools to make their first day productive to returning employees to the office safely. This session will provide an overview to digital workplace app functionalities and opportunities that will help you select features when shopping or building a DW app, with a focus on VMWare’s Workspace ONE.

Learning Objectives:

• The value of digital workspace app for employee engagement during onboarding
• Requirements of digital workspace platforms for IT and HR to support employee onboarding
• Advice on building a return to office planning guide

The way we work will never be the same. The pandemic has created a new urgency for companies to digitally transform to succeed in the face of constant change. How and where work happens has been decoupled. Agile “anywhere, anytime” workplaces are on the rise. Managing the complex digital workflows of a distributed workplace will be critical to providing employees the services they need to be productive. In this session we will discuss the future of the workplace: How do we ensure the health and safety of our employees as they return to the workplace? ServiceNow leaders share how to unleash the power of technology to deliver great employee experiences as part of a digital transformation.

Adopting a new tool, process or procedure comes with a lot of angst for many users. Most of the time, all they want to know is - in the new tool, how can I replicate the work I've been doing for the last 20 years. To truly transform a workplace and adopt new ways of working in a digital workplace, we need to help users come along with us through our training and communications initiatives.

In this session, we will discuss:

• The impact of the change cycle in user engagement
• How to incorporate the company's strategic initiatives into your adoption planning
• The critical role of implementing a communication plan during training to increase adoption velocity
• How to design your training initiative to follow the project life cycle, and play a more effective role in user engagement

After 50+ years of computing power growth supported by Moore's Law, and 60 years of AI development, we've entered an industry 4.0 era, with affordable cognitive computing power. The speed of innovation, competition and change is unprecedented, and advancing technologies mean both exponential competitor growth possibilities, as well as employee augmentation growth opportunities.

With this the meaning and model of work and learning needs an overhaul. How do we level up work performance and creativity from individuals and teams in this new era?  The method requires total reimagination.

What is the power of "AI + Human/Team/Organization"?  How does it work?

In the session you will:

• Understand the upcoming technology landscape and forces of change
• Consider new visions for the collaborative intelligence of AI and humans at work
• Learn how to prepare employees to work and learn with AI, through case studies

Join Siobhan Fagan, Managing Editor and Sarah Kimmel, VP of Research, as they report key findings from the updated 2020 State of the Digital Workplace report, including: 

• Impacts of the pandemic on the maturity of digital workplace practice
• Shift in top priorities for digital workplace
• Increasing effectiveness of digital workplace tools 
• Surprise, surprise! Transitioning to digital workplace was easier than anyone thought.
• Organizational plans for return to the office...or will they?

Fast Company Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Mehta spends time with the entrepreneurs and inventors who are transforming business at dizzying speeds. She also knows, from her years interviewing leaders of the biggest corporations in the world as an editor at Fortune and The Wall Street Journal, that big organizations are working hard to inject their cultures and processes with entrepreneurial and innovative zeal. A natural storyteller, Mehta provides a lively, anecdote-filled roadmap that offers executives practical, actionable insights on how they can drive their digital company toward true transformation.

Creating a seamless and integrated digital workplace experience requires putting employee needs front and center. But that's a challenge when you have siloed and disconnected applications that are creating fragmented experiences. Troy Campano, Head of Product at Workgrid, shares how you can align your technology around the employee and craft flexible experiences that scale and grow with your organization's needs.

Key trends across the globe will be highlighted in this session by this international corporate leader. As more people collaborate across departments, functions, business units and time zones, how are digital workspaces achieving the merger of the accompanying internal and external communications and collaboration? How are successful businesses coping with five generations collaborating in the same workspace? What are the latest happenings for Firstline Workers, who make up 80% of the global workforce? What promising developments are currently underway as COVID-19 impacts the way the world is working - right now?

In this session, you will:

• Gain insight into workplace trends around the world, from 4-day work week trends, remote working and new ways of working
• Learn about the benefits and challenges of the changing landscape of modern ways of working
• Understand the critically relevant role of change management capabilities in today's global climate

As our company grew from 75 to 5,000+ employees in the span of five years, the imperative grew rapidly to comprehensively recreate our basic Wiki into a holistic intranet that would support the business's rapid growth.

What made this project a success?  In this session we will discuss how we structured our project team.  We will present the problem our new intranet looked to solve, how we engendered new trust in the tool, the failures we overcame and the lessons learned, our information architecture development, content migration strategy and integrated change management practices.  We'll also include how we measured success, the metrics tracked and how this approach - while we built this internally - can be applied to any intranet-like project.

Learning Objectives:

• Create a project team based on the trifecta of people, process, and technology
• Integrate change management, communications planning, and employee participation in an intranet project
• Learn from our mistakes!  Learn what worked during our project, what didn't and how you can apply our experience to your intranet project

An efficient digital workplace is about getting the right information to the right people at the right time – the holy grail of personalization and the decades long efforts to optimize knowledge processes.

With the advent of artificial intelligence, some believe that traditional information architecture approaches are not needed any longer. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact AI requires IA (information architecture) now even more than ever.  Current incarnations of IA include knowledge architecture and knowledge engineering. 

In this session, Seth Earley, author of the AI Powered Enterprise, will review developments in artificial intelligence and knowledge and information architecture and show how each of these disciplines need to come together to speed up the information metabolism of the organization and streamline the user experience across every department and process.

The foundation and underpinning of information structures are required for the modern digital workplace — especially as more work migrates to remote locations and distant collaboration.

As the global pandemic is turning the business environment on its ear, organizations are figuring out that employees can't be productive and efficient if they do not feel supported or have the right resources. Attend this session and get a detailed plan for building a digital experience that supports employees long-term success, plus find out how The Riverstone Group made their employee experience vision a reality, by putting employees’ needs first.

In this session, you will learn:

• Why a great employee experience is critical to business success
• Keys to effectively deliver digital experiences that put the employee in the center
• How to future-proof your employee experience through choosing the right technology and approach

Research shows that informed and engaged employees are happier and more productive in the workplace, leading to better business results. The success of your digital workplace can directly affect the level of engagement amongst employees.

Join Rob Ryan, Senior Director of Strategic Development and Business Value, to learn best practices for driving employee engagement in your digital workplace. Hear real examples and practical strategies around aligning your workforce, promoting a common corporate culture, streamlining the onboarding process -- and overall increasing employee engagement.

Newly distributed workplaces make intranets more crucial than ever. The industry has been shaken up with smarter deployment options, a second look at underlying technology, and new approaches to how organizations define what an intranet should and, more importantly, should not be.

In this session you will learn:

• How organizations are rethinking their intranet deployment models to help today’s distributed workforce
• What you need to consider the next time you overhaul your organization’s intranet
• Case study examples of how leading companies are proving the value of intranet modernization

Companies must modernize how they work. Otherwise, they risk leaving customers unsatisfied and employees unengaged. Modern work starts with a digital workplace, and a digital workplace requires information and insights. 

Too often, employees spend hours searching across silos and systems for information, as companies lack a business strategy and practical design for their digital workplaces. They build clouds, content platforms, apps, and analytics, and then hope to transform processes using AI augmentation. In reality, these technologies throw off inhuman amounts of data, which overwhelms the people doing the work. 

Sinequa’s enterprise search provides the missing building block. 

Join Sinequa and industry leaders to explore how to build digital workplace experiences that engage employees. Because employees gain a unified view of their information delivered in a familiar search-based experience they adopt digital workplaces more easily.

The COVID crisis has completely reshaped how employees engage with their company and their colleagues. Hybrid Work is becoming the new normal and requires a merger between your Intranet and Microsoft Teams for an effective and comprehensive Digital Workplace structure. In this session, we will review with Lorne Phelps from Powell Software and Erick Straghalis from StitchDX the different aspects that need to be considered in order to define a modern digital workplace that truly drives the Hybrid Work transformation.

A great intranet is a unifying platform enmeshed with the organization's fabric and culture, tied tightly with the internal brand engagement. In this session we will explore the ways in which an intranet can best serve its constituents.  We will look at why an intranet should be approached as the core employee experience destination, and the importance of high alignment between your intranet and every employee engagement touch point.

We will explore how a modern intranet contributes to greater employee retention, productivity and collaboration, and we will discover the ways in which an effective modern intranet is built, implemented and communicated to garner more productivity, shared knowledge, and engaged employees.

In this session you will learn:

• The anatomy of an effective modern intranet
• The value of aesthetics and design, and key intranet design components
• Talking points that will help garner "buy-in" from leadership

What does change management really feel like? A series of stories on thinking and working differently, with real-world examples and practical take-home ideas.  Join this breakout from Jim MacLennan, former SVP and CIO at IDEX Corporation, for a leader’s perspective on the difference between leading v. managing big change, collaboration in practice and bringing it all together for powerful transformation.

Creating a compelling digital employee experience is now an imperative with the mass global shift to remote work. But modern digital workplaces also have to deliver significant benefits to the business so that investment and evolution can continue through fast-changing times. Learn how leading organizations are using tools and techniques like benchmarking, talent analytics, business intelligence, strategy execution platforms, and popular goal tracking frameworks like OKRs to ensure their digital workplace is moving the needle for the business. Come away with real-world examples and actionable steps to instrument your digital workplace to all new heights of performance using measurable outcomes and ROI.