CIOs and CTOs are operating in a very different world than we were a year ago. Back then, it was business as usual, working in the environments we were used to with processes that we were familiar with. Then, suddenly, we were thrust into a massive disruption in which we became leaders of remote teams.
Now, as we're starting to see a faint light at the end of the tunnel, we’re beginning to plan for a hybrid work environment in which we accommodate both in-person and remote employees, and consumer and enterprise technologies.
[ What might office life look like following the pandemic? Read: Your post-pandemic office life: 4 predictions ]
Over the past ten months, our IT organization has been focused on enabling employee productivity within our company. It’s here that we've taken a page from the consumer technology playbook and adopted some of that industry’s approach to customers.
Eye on internal customer satisfaction
Any consumer technology company’s ultimate goal is to make their customers happy. They want them to enjoy their product, be able to interact with it easily, and consume its content in a way that's nothing short of delightful. Those are the customers who stay connected and regularly use the applications and services, and that’s how you win them for life.
That's our goal, too. We want to attract and retain our internal customers, make sure their teams are engaged and productive, and that they're happy with the products and services we provide.
Key indicators: How we measure
We do this by measuring key indicators of employee happiness and employee engagement through our net promoter score, which we tie to our measures of employee happiness and engagement. This isn’t a measure of how efficiently we delivered a service, but how that service delivery made people feel.
This is important for a number of reasons. While you might check all of the boxes on your service delivery and pat yourself on the back for that, if the customer had a bad experience or the natural language processing element is frustrating, it's all for naught. If people don’t feel enabled or productive, we haven’t done our job.
Right now in IT, we’re being called upon to recognize the moment we’re in and focus our energies on creating experiences for our employees that lead to something deeper than satisfaction—we want them to lead to delight or happiness.
In 2021, CIOs need to embrace the new opportunities that have come from the massive shift to remote work. We can look to the consumer technology industry and extract lessons on creating great user experiences, which we can apply to our own internal customers. Positive experiences lead to happy customers, and that’s what leads to productivity.
[ Will your organization thrive in 2021? Download the HBR Analytic Services report: IT Leadership in the Next Normal. ]
