This week’s podcast guest is Nerys Mutlow, Evangelist in the Chief Innovation Office at ServiceNow. Throughout this episode Nerys and I discuss:

• The gap between customer experience and employee experience and Nerys’s perspective on how employee experience is evolving

• How to design an excellent employee experience by thinking beyond personas to individual level wants and need

• The relationship between employee wellbeing and productivity, and striking the right balance in particular for hybrid work

• The importance of employee listening and experimentation in the hybrid work environment

Support for this podcast is brought to you by ServiceNow. You can learn more by visiting servicenow.com.

You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Nerys Mutlow, Evangelist in the chief innovation office at ServiceNow, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show Nerys, it is great to have you on. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to yourself, your role at ServiceNow, and that wonderful title of Evangelist?

Nerys Mutlow: Yeah, sure. Thank you, David, I am really super pleased to be here today. 

So yeah, my role as an Evangelist is basically to go out and talk to lots of different customers and I suppose, share really, our purpose and our messaging around ServiceNow. We talk a lot about making the world of work better for people and this is very much around enabling people to be their best, removing the friction, and just getting work done. The reason I have to go and talk about it a lot, really is because most people know us from the IT service management space and clearly that is where we started off and that is why we have a big, big footprint. 

But over the years we have really broadened out because IT tools are just one element of the employee experience and now we spend a lot of the time, I spend probably the majority of my time, speaking with CHROs and chief customer officers actually, about how they can leverage the ServiceNow platform and the ecosystem in which they already have invested in. Which is another important part of our proposition really, we live in a very much an eco system world and no customer invests in just one tool, so how can you bring that altogether to deliver those great employee experiences? 

David Green: And great with your experience and obviously what ServiceNow does, there are a lot of parallels often drawn between employee experience and customer experience, and certainly a lot of the companies we work with are learning what their marketing teams are doing around customer experience and bringing some of that learning in to their efforts around employee experience. 

The latter is often viewed as an end goal state though for employee experience, but I would be interested in your views, how far behind customer experience would you say employee experience is today, in most organisations? 

Nerys Mutlow: Yeah. So I personally think there is a little bit of a gap between customer experience and employee experience. But I think it is also worth noting really there that over the last 18 months, 20 months, there has been a massive acceleration around employee experience. So I think we saw some more future thinking organisations perhaps, that were really understanding, I need to invest in employee experience because good employees drive great productivity. And we have seen that with a number of different stats around great customer experiences because of having engaged and productive employees.

What I think the last 18 months showed us is that employees kept the business running. They powered those day to day operations. They went and worked on the front line. So we had an initial need if you like, to keep things safe and to keep them working and when it became obvious that it wasn't going to be a three month thing,
this was going to be much more longer term, we have seen organisations really recognise that, my employees are so critical to my organisation that I need to make sure that I start to prioritise this. And I think HR leaders as well, have really shone in the spotlight actually over the last 18 months, and it is a really good opportunity now to capitalise on the desire to lead with employee experience.

I think in terms of customer experience and the reason why I say we are slightly behind I think, around employee experience and customer experience, is when you look at that 360 degree view. So everybody has wanted that customer 360 degree view for quite some time and we have been working on it now for decades really, but we haven't been doing that within employee experience. 

So I think in terms of creating that more holistic view, we are slightly behind when it comes to employee experience. 

David Green: It is interesting. A couple of things I want to talk a bit further about, number one, if you think about the number of interactions a customer has with you as an organisation, any customer even your frequent customers, compared to the number of interactions your employees have with you working eight/nine hours, maybe sometimes more, a day. The opportunity to get the employee experience right, as you said, is perhaps an even bigger impact for a company. 

And then when you look at things like, I don't know if you have seen, the Edelman Trust Barometer. I saw something on that earlier this year, I think it came out in May/June.
Employees are regarded as the most important factor of an organisations success, even more now than shareholders and customers, so certainly some of the stuff that you talked about, yes it has been accelerated by the pandemic undoubtedly, but we were already moving to this sort of area as well. I would love to hear your take on those two areas?

Nerys Mutlow: Yeah, I agree, in terms of the high frequency of those employee contacts, absolutely like you say, the best customer interaction in the world, you are not going to have as many touch points as you do with an employee. So there is a much greater opportunity to get more, real time, data points around how that employee is feeling, how well they are performing? What are the blockers? If you like. What is the risk as well, from an attrition perspective? 

Again, these are concepts that we have been looking at from a customer point of view, even looking at what is the opportunity for the customer? How can I get more value from them? Is there a risk of them leaving and going somewhere else? But with the employee, we can take all of those little data points and very quickly, if we can build out that 360 degree view, then what we can do is we can take action very, very early. 

It always amazes me when you hear a manager say, oh, it is a total surprise to me that this person resigned. Because if you actually stepped back and probably looked at that, there was a lot of warning signs there. Perhaps in terms of how engaged they were, had their productivity suddenly slipped away? Were they being very interactive in terms of meetings? What were some of the pulse surveys and the employee surveys saying? 

I think the challenge has always been bringing that together into a single view and then driving action very quickly off the back of that. I think if you don't do that, and you don't implement those actions quickly, you lose trust and that is a big, big issue within the workforce because if people see that you are not following through on those actions and they have a bad employee experience, then it is actually a lot quicker to spread that negativity through the workforce than it is through the customer base.

So one unhappy employee can really end up driving a lot more broader unhappiness or the perception of a poor experience.

David Green: It is interesting what you say about those predictors of attrition because obviously that is something that a lot of the companies that we work with, and people analytics, are being asked to do quite a lot. One of the previous organisations I worked for, one of the predictors of people leaving was actually people's interaction with the collaboration platform with drop-off for a few months beforehand. So very interesting. 

What I would be interested in, again with ServiceNow’s experience in the customer experience and the employee experience side, what are some of the main ways that customer and employee experience differ? And why do organisations need to bear those in mind? 

Nerys Mutlow: I think from a customer and an employee perspective there are a lot of similarities, whether we are a customer or an employee, we both want the personalisation and the contextual experience.

I think what is interesting is when I talk to a lot of our customers, they talk about their customer being the internal customer. So if you are an IT manager or you are the head of shared services, for instance, your customer is that internal employee. And so trying to drive that same high quality experience as you get in the customer world in the employee world, is something that is a really, really common theme.

So I think some of the similarities are also around things like that Omni-Channel experience. So again, when we are talking about making the world of work, work better for people, we think about, what does a great consumer grade experience look like? Well, it is all about using the tool that you like to use. It is about being able to have that personalised information, that contextual information, to enable you to do whatever you need to do, in the most efficient way possible. And that is what we are seeing a lot now, is make sure we can meet that employee, in the tool of their choice, in the way that they like to consume information.

So I will give you an example. If you are providing services out to your employees, you have got to think about, are they sat in front of a laptop or are they a frontline worker in a retail store? If they are the latter, then actually they still need to have that great experience, but they need to consume it probably on a mobile device as opposed to on a laptop. And again, as a consumer, sometimes we are on the move and we want to do that journey, we want to have that interaction, on a mobile versus a laptop. So I think it is about making sure again, that we can meet people in the channel of their choice. 

David Green: With customer experience, is it maybe easier to tie it to a monetary value than it is on the employee experience side? And is that maybe one of the reasons why companies have gone down the customer experience route first, because it is just harder to show that return on investment?

Nerys Mutlow: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Customer experience is around driving revenue, ultimately, so that is why there has always been that focus on that. Whereas the employee experience as we know, that if you have got engaged employees then they serve the customer better. Serving the customer better will result in having a more loyal customer base and actually giving the customer what they need, which is likely to increase your revenue as well. 

But I think, there is an element of making sure now, that your business is resilient. That comes down to making sure that you have an engaged workforce, and that you have the correctly sized and skilled workforce as well. That is why the last 18 months again, there was more focus on employee experience from that resilience angle. And that is something that is coming up a lot, is how can I make sure that my business is truly adaptable, is truly resilient, for whatever is thrown at me next? And employees are clearly a key part of that as well. 

David Green: And I suppose if we think about the last 18 to 20 months, we are also thinking a lot of the focus on employee experience has actually been around employee wellbeing. Resilience obviously, is an element of that, but wellbeing, which again is probably a difference from how we look at customers.
Yes, customer wellbeing, can we give people deliveries to their house because they can't leave the house? Of course, that is an element of wellbeing, I guess, but particularly around employees around wellbeing. 

Nerys Mutlow: Yeah. Yeah. And as I said earlier, I think to begin with that was absolutely the focus.
How do we keep people safe and secure? And then when it transpired it was going to be for a lot longer, it is how can we make sure that actually, from a wellbeing perspective, they are not burnt out? 

We have seen a lot of people talk about being burnt out and they are having Zoom meetings back to back. So yes, absolutely, I think there is that focus on wellbeing as one pillar, if you like. 

But then it was like, okay, well, how do we make sure that we keep them engaged as well? If they are not coming into the office, how do I make sure that they are connected to the business? How do I make sure that they are still collaborating on those collaboration platforms and they are not losing that sense of belonging, which means there is a potential risk around them leaving?
And then, how do I make them as productive as possible? So, how do I give them the tools that they need in order to get their work done? 

So it removes the stress that we have sometimes, around doing some of the most simple tasks. I think everybody can relate to having to raise a purchase order and it being way more complex than it should be and not knowing who to go and talk to, or where to go, or how to do that.

So for us, it has to be those kind of three different pillars. Make sure the employee is well looked after and that their physical and mental wellbeing is looked after. 

Make sure that we keep driving up that level of engagement, so those people are engaged and feel part of our business. And I talk a lot around, it is so important to harness the power of everybody in your business to drive the innovation that you need, the only way you can do that is by engaging people. 

And we need to make sure people are as productive as possible, wherever they may be, in whatever environment they may be in as well. 

David Green: You talked about one of the components of designing employee experiences is meeting employees where they are. People that are customer facing versus maybe people who are currently working from home or working hybrid.

I would love to understand a couple of things. Number one, personas. What are some of the considerations that companies might make around developing personas? And then maybe if you could walk us through a few examples of employee journeys and how they might differ, depending on the individuals and some of those personas and circumstances as well? I think that would be really good.

Nerys Mutlow: So I think personas absolutely have a place in designing the employee experience. But I would also say that we need to go a level down from that as well, because just to say somebody has the persona of a retail shop floor worker, for instance, it is not really addressing them as an individual. And I think, that is for me, the next level of employee experience. It is really recognising the individual conditions for people to be successful in and that really flows nicely into the whole importance of diversity and inclusion in your business. 

People like to consume information in different ways. People like to work in different ways. Some people are very visual. Some people respond better to written type of communication, for instance. Some people want to work different hours, in different ways. 

So I think we need to be using personas initially, to kind of create that first level of categorisation. But I think if we are going to truly design great employee experiences, we need to be building basically a digital twin of every employee and within that, that digital twin says to us how the employee likes to work. What is the performance conditions for this individual. How do they perform best. What tools they like to use. How they like to consume information. What devices do they like to use, in order to connect with us. And then make sure that we can design experiences that can cater for all of those different kind of variables, if you like. 

Which you might think is quite a big challenge, but I would say actually if you can build up that picture the way that we can deliver, for example within ServiceNow, we can build those work flows in the platform, but we can expose it out in many, many different ways, based on what that end-user's preferences are. 

So it is not a case of extra work for everybody, in terms of building these experiences. You are just surfacing them in a way that makes most sense to that employee. And I think your second part of the question was for some examples?

David Green: Some examples, yeah, sorry. I asked a very long question so it was a bit of a challenge to remember the whole thing. So yeah, just a few examples of some of those employee journeys. 

Nerys Mutlow: So I think one that we all recognise is the on-boarding journey. We have all been a new employee within an organisation at some point. That is a really good example of making sure, regardless of the type of employee, you still get a good, consistent experience. And I think what we are seeing now is a lot of customers saying to me, look I have designed my on-boarding experience very much for the physical world. In ServiceNow, for instance, we used to have a big cohort of people that would come into the office on the same day, you would have a load of different presentations. You would be guided through a number of key tasks and you would have the lovely network straight away, that you had built on day one. 

Suddenly then we were completely virtual, so it was a case of, okay, well, how do we make this work in a virtual world? And so we still have that cohort of people that come together. We now have channels that are set up so you still have got that network immediately on day one. We did things like making sure that people were able to choose which device they wanted and it was sent to their house with guided instructions for them, on how to set it up. Then we made sure that we put those regular touch points with different people in the office, not in the office different people in the organisation, that they would have got if they had come into the office.
So we kind of modelled it or replicated it, as best as we could in a virtual world. 

Now we are in a scenario where we are thinking about, okay, well, what does it look like going forward? It needs to work for both, it needs to work for the virtual and the physical world. That gives us lots of opportunities actually, because if we can do that, it means that when we are recruiting new people, as offices are opening up, people can come into the office and be part of that cohort physically, if they want to. And that is their preference. And if they feel comfortable, but if they want to be virtual, they can still be part of that same on-boarding experience. 

So I think there is a really important piece here, which is to think about when you are designing these experiences, how can it work for the different kind of contexts that you will be in?

I think again other examples are around when we were helping employees getting access to services. Thinking about if an employee has an issue around their payroll for instance, you need to be thinking, well, how does this work if you are in the office? But how does this work if you are out on the shop floor? Or you could be out on a farm, in a field. So again, how can we still give everybody a really good experience, give them what they need to satisfy that request, regardless of the type of role that they are in. 

David Green: Obviously the whole hybrid thing is another nuance and complication and consideration. And I guess that needs to be factored into this.

Executives will talk to HR leaders and one of the questions they will ask, maybe, why is a personalised employee experience more likely to help employees and the organisation from a performance perspective? 

Nerys Mutlow: I like to think of it a bit like a coach in sport. So a good coach is there to ensure that you are at your best, right? That you are eating the right foods, that you have got the right training plan, they are removing all of those barriers to your success and that is how you get the best out of an athlete. 

It is that same principle really, for me, in terms of within the organisation. We need to give people the right environment to be successful in and we need to recognise sometimes, that we can't always have that optimal environment. Perhaps something has changed or perhaps they had a new baby or something like that, which means that their performance is going to perhaps dip slightly. But if we know what the optimal performance conditions look like for people, we can understand what we can do around any kind of a change in performance or we understand the reason, if that makes sense, in that change in performance. 

So I think it is around treating everybody as an individual. Making sure we know what good looks like for that person. And when there are changes in some of those environmental factors or those work factors, we understand then what the impact of that on the employee is. Sometimes we can change that. If it is suddenly the employee doesn't have the right tool for instance, that they need to do that job, we can change that. Sometimes it is a workload thing, again, as a good manager, as a good leader, we can change that and we can recognise that the reason that the person is not performing is because the work load is too high. So we can do something about that. 

Examples like I just gave around somebody having a new baby, well that is life and we all go through the challenges in life where our personal life and our work life of course intertwine, and we can't necessarily change that, but we can recognise that there is an external factor there that is going to have, perhaps, a temporary impact on our performance and we can make a little bit of an allowance for that as well. Which I think is super, super important too. 

David Green: Yeah. As you said, and that was a great link with sport, just give people the conditions in which they can thrive and be emotionally aware enough to know that sometimes people's circumstances change. So you might have to help them with the conditions, as you said, make allowances perhaps. 

So we have talked a little bit about this, over the last 18 months companies have had to quickly adapt the service they deliver to employees. It has been arguably the biggest remote work experiment in history for many of us, because I appreciate not everyone is working remote. Many have shifted to a fully digital model seemingly overnight. 

What lessons do you think that organisations can learn about the reactions and handling that change, with regards to HR technology and employee experience?

Nerys Mutlow: So I think the biggest lesson that we can take from this is, that we can change at pace and people can adapt to those changes at pace. 

I spoke to a customer recently that said to me, I had a plan to roll out Microsoft Teams. It was an 18 month plan. We had to roll it out in 18 days in the end, because if we didn't, we wouldn't have been able to operate.
And what that showed was not only can you implement these new technologies at pace but people will adapt at pace as well. 

I think the other interesting point around rolling out new technology is, we took a much more incremental, very pragmatic approach to it. So what did we need to do first? Well, we needed to connect everybody. We needed to make sure that people could still talk to each other and get work done, if they couldn't come into the office. So that is where the focus was. 

Then we kind of moved on and we looked at it and said, okay, now we have got people connected how can we make sure that we are still driving innovation and we are still driving productivity?
So we looked again at the tools that we are using, are they the right tools? If we can't innovate in a meeting room like this, how do we do this remotely? So we started to look at these different digital white boarding type tools, like Miro, for instance. Then looked at how we could then roll that out. 

Then we started looking at things like, how well are we looking after our employees? Well, we need to do more around pulse surveys. So perhaps we did some surveys maybe once a quarter, now we are going to start doing that on a weekly basis and we are going to start driving, then actioning, and tweaking if you like, that employee experience. 

So I think the best lesson we can learn from this is that you don't have to imagine the complete end state. What you need to be able to do is focus on the outcomes you need to drive, in a priority order, and then you need to deliver. And then once people have adopted that you look at the next one, and the next one. 

So it has really been an experiment in driving an agile approach across the organisation in my mind. And I think that is the exciting thing about it. When I talk to customers now, they are saying to me, look, we have a two to three year roadmaps for many things, but now we realise we can do things faster.

David Green: It is interesting because, even before the pandemic, things move so fast. Can any company really have a three to five year roadmap for implementing any technology really, because by the time they have implemented it, arguably it is outdated. So yeah, that agile approach is certainly something we are seeing more in HR.

So that is what we have done over the last 18 months. So as we now, at some point hopefully in 2022, emerge out of the other end of the COVID tunnel, and let's hope we do emerge out the other end of the tunnel, what should organisations prepare for in terms of employee expectations of the hybrid work environment? There is so much discussion around hybrid work at the moment and return to office and everything else, I would love to hear what advice you would give to organisations to prepare for that? 

Nerys Mutlow: I think the most important thing is the experimentation and the listening element. 

So what we have been doing in ServiceNow, is lots of pulse surveys, as I said, to kind of understand what is working for people, but also we are trying to do more listening as part of the process. So for instance, if it was an on-boarding process, getting that feedback straight away around how that on-boarding experience was on day one, but also then, how was it a week later? How was it a month later? And then starting to collate that and make sure that we are driving the actions and we continuously improve.

Nobody knows what it looks like in the next three months let alone three years, so all we can do is make sure that we have got that regular connection with our employees and that we are responding to that really, as well. And don't be frightened I guess, to make some changes and experiment a little bit.

I think the other important point is, coming back to even the technology stack, is having the modularity, if you like, in that technology stack so that it makes it very easy to plug in. For example new channels, in order to meet people where they are. So today there is a lot of focus around meeting people in channels like Microsoft Teams, because Microsoft Teams really has become so much like a digital workplace for many of us, over the last 18 months, two years. But actually it's mobile phones, it may be smart watches, it may be Alexa’s, who knows what that kind of experience layer for those different employees is going to be. 

So if you can almost separate that business logic from that presentation layer, it makes it very easy to then expose that out into whatever that channel of your choice is. Which helps, I think, with future proofing a lot of the employee experience as well. 

David Green: Before we turn to how ServiceNow is approaching this, now that the employee experience genie is out of the lamp, so to speak, and organisations have invested more in that. And thankfully they have during the pandemic. There is no going back now is there? This is a juggernaut that is going to carry on.

Nerys Mutlow: I mean, absolutely. And let's face it, if you don't invest in employee experience, there is plenty of organisations that will. 

I think, particularly the new generations that come into the workplace, they expect that consumer grade experience, but they also expect to be well looked after from a human centric way.
I remember when I had lots of graduates that worked for me previously, it was really important for them to have managers that not only enabled them to be successful at work, but that actually asked them about how they were feeling, what they did at the weekend, and what they are interested in, and help them bring some of that interest into some of the work that they were doing. So for example, if they were really interested in the environment, could we put them on an engagement that enabled them to help a customer with their ESG policy. Which meant it was aligning with their personal values as well. So it has very much got to be that broader, more holistic approach to employee experience as well.

David Green: More focus on wellbeing, leaders with better emotional intelligence, all those types of things almost seem to be very closely linked. If you are going to focus on employee experience, you have mentioned the need to action, those are the two areas clearly where action can occur.

Nerys Mutlow: Yeah, yeah. For sure. 

David Green: So let's turn to look at the role that ServiceNow plays in providing that next level employee experience. How does ServiceNow fit into the overall HR tech ecosystem?

Nerys Mutlow: We refer to ourselves often as, the platform of platforms. So we are not there to displace all of the great technology that sits within that HR space or indeed many of the other parts of the enterprise. We ourselves use Workday internally, we use Microsoft Teams, we use Facebook for work in order to really connect with our employees. But what we want to do is we want to make sure that we can provide a consistent, unified experience for employees, regardless of actually some of the underlying tools that may be used. 

So again, if I just talk to you around the on-boarding experience. Think about when you bring somebody in, you need to make sure that they have the IT equipment they need. You need to make sure that they have any background checks done. They perhaps have a desk. They have their payroll set up. You need to make sure then that the cost centre budgets are now adjusted to reflect that this employee is starting on this date, and this is that cost to that cost centre. There are many, many different steps involved and many, many different systems of record that are involved in that process.

But if you are a manager, you don't want to be necessarily chasing down every single department or sending emails to every single department to see if they have done that step of it. What we can do is we can give that manager a single place to go, to kick off that on-boarding journey, where they can see exactly who it is with and what actions have been done. And where we need to integrate into those different systems of records, or perhaps get information as part of that journey, or pass information to that, we can handle that kind of process orchestration piece of that as well.

Once you have started to orchestrate those processes, and this comes back to what we have talked about around the importance of data and listening, we can also start to use data from the platform to see how well those processes are performing. So we can start to see, are they performing in an optimal way? Are there any bottlenecks to this process? What is the employee C-SAT, if you like, around this process? And then we can start to continuously improve those journeys. 

And of course we can integrate into all of these different systems. So where you are using different systems for pulse surveys, for instance. You want to bring that data together, you want to turn that data into insight, there is then going to be an action off the back of it. We can be the system of action off the back of that. 

I think that is a really important point for everyone to recognise with ServiceNow, this is not about us being a core HR data analytics platform. It is not about us replacing all of these great systems that are involved in the employee experience ecosystem, but it is about really driving the process and driving the action associated with that process off the back of it. 

David Green: So almost, in many respects, a bit like an integration layer that allows all those systems to work together and deliver the experience and as you said, create the actions that come out of it.  

Nerys Mutlow: Yes. And if you think again about, especially in this hybrid world that we are in, you as an employee might have questions around perhaps a maternity policy, or you might have a question around when are you going to get paid during the Christmas break? You don't necessarily need to care about where you should go. What we say is, let's give everybody a unified portal where they can ask all of those employee experience related questions. Regardless of the department that is actually going to respond to that question, we can route the work through to the appropriate department, we can hide that complexity if you like, away from that end user. They just have a question and they need to get a response back to it, they don't need to care about where it is coming from in terms of the organisation. And that same experience then needs to work, as we talked about earlier, in whatever channel makes the most sense. 

David Green: And I know ServiceNow is experiencing phenomenal growth. I don't know if there is anything you can share with listeners around that?  

Nerys Mutlow: Yeah. We have had phenomenal growth over the last few years, and we are very much now present in the majority of Fortune 500 companies across the globe. A lot of the reason for that is because companies are recognising that, yes IT service management, where we started, is a part of delivering a great employee experience. But actually we can take that blueprint for great employee experiences and we can apply it across many other parts of the organisation that provide these employee facing services. 

And so we are starting to see so many of the big, multinational, customers using ServiceNow, really to drive a global business service type approach. That is why we are looking at growing to a 15 billion dollar company. So we have had this rapid growth trajectory and we have got some very, very big names, as you would expect there. They have seen a lot of benefits as well from adopting ServiceNow. We are seeing companies like Unilever, for instance, looking at how can they use, not just ServiceNow, but also the Microsoft set of products. So, how together can we use those in order to drive an employee experience, which gives everybody in Unilever some time back. That time back can then be invested in training. It can be invested in driving new innovation for the company. 

We are also seeing, take Coca Cola European partners, obviously another big name, that are looking to ServiceNow for, how can I deliver these services in a really efficient way, but in a way that is still a great employee experience, because we recognise if we don't do that then people are going to vote with their feet and go elsewhere. 

David Green: Last question Nerys. What we have talked about today, it is almost a world of high personalised experience at the individual level, which I think is where we need to get to.
How far away are we from that reality today? And do we even have the data available? What needs to happen to have that, do you think? 

Nerys Mutlow: I do think that actually we have got a lot of the data available. So if you look at what is there, we have things like workplace analytics that tells us how people are working, or the tools they are working in, the amount of focus time, for instance. We have the employee surveys. We have the feedback from the processes that we are starting to operate on platforms like ServiceNow. So we have got the data points, if you like, in a number of different systems. I think where we are a little bit further away is bringing them together into that 360 view. And once we have got them in that 360 view it is about, as I say, when we design these experiences, how can we make sure that we are then referencing your digital twin of each employee, in order to then deliver that experience in the way that makes most sense. 

So I don't think, from a technology point of view, we haven't got it. I think it is more now around actually bringing it all together and starting to action it, to be honest. 

David Green: So the technology is there, the data is there, not in every company obviously, but the data is there, the ambition is there. It is just a case of bringing it all together now.  

Nerys Mutlow: Yeah, and it comes back to the earlier point. You might not have all of the data points, but you are certainly going to have some of the data points. So starting to work with the data that you have, using that to inform what is the employee experience like, okay, we need to improve it in this area. So now driving that action into your business and then measuring it.

I think, again, we talked about what we can learn from the last 18 months. That kind of sensing, responding and adapting to what is going on in our organisation is probably the overarching kind of takeaway really. 

David Green: Well, Nerys, it has just been a fascinating conversation. It is a perfect one really for what is our last episode of the podcast in 2021, because it really looks forward to 2022 and beyond. Thanks very much for being on the show.

How can people stay in touch with you, follow you on social media, and find out more about the work that ServiceNow is doing? 

Nerys Mutlow: Yeah, sure. So I have quite a unique name, so there is only one of me on social media. You can find me on LinkedIn or you can find me on Twitter, which is just @nerysmutlow. I would love people to reach out and I would love to hear people's views really, around what they think about building that employee 360 view and where organisations are. 

David Green: Great. And ServiceNow has a blog presumably, which you contribute to? 

Nerys Mutlow: Yes. Yes, of course. We have a ServiceNow blog also you can go to the ServiceNow website, and you can find a lot more information there. We are working with a number of HR leaders, in particular, so there is some very targeted content right there. 

David Green: Well, Nerys, it has been wonderful to have you on the show. Thanks very much for sharing your time and expertise with us.