October 28, 2025 • 24 mins
This week, Tim and Tom are joined by RB regular and DEX Hub editor Sean Malvey to unpack Nexthink’s first Workplace Productivity Report, “Cracking the DEX Equation.” Drawing on data from nine million endpoints, the report quantifies the real productivity impact of digital employee experience — revealing where enterprises lose nearly half a million hours a year to poor DEX, and how small score gains deliver measurable ROI.
In addition, the team acknowledge the various huge milestones in the air, from the show's approaching 200th episode, to Nexthink's new $3bn dollar valuation and investment.Â
Download The First Annual Workplace Productivity Report here - https://nexthink.com/resource/cracking-the-dex-equation-or-the-first-annual-workplace-productivity-reportÂ
In addition, the team acknowledge the various huge milestones in the air, from the show's approaching 200th episode, to Nexthink's new $3bn dollar valuation and investment.Â
Download The First Annual Workplace Productivity Report here - https://nexthink.com/resource/cracking-the-dex-equation-or-the-first-annual-workplace-productivity-reportÂ
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome it, change Makers to the deck show with Tim
Flower and Tom McGraw. Let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello change makers, and what a week of change has been,
not just the next thinkers, but for the whole digital
employee experience industry. I'm Tom McGraw, joined us ever by
Tim Flower. How are you doing today?
Speaker 3 (00:22):
Tim? Good? Tom? Just back from a little bit of
a trip. Was out on the road for four weeks,
multiple experience events, a quick little PTO overseas trip out
to California. But feeling feeling good today in light of
some changes, we can talk about.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Why didn't we?
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Why don't we?
Speaker 2 (00:41):
You know, in case somebody is tuning into the show
and it hasn't seen the buzz on social media or
the industry news don't Why don't you lay it out him?
What has taken place this week? That's a momentous for
the organization we work for and for the wider industry.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yeah. I put something out on LinkedIn too, So it's
interesting timing for me having just hit a birthday with
a zero in. It crept up on me, but it
happens to all of us. But also on Sunday was
my official ten year anniversary. October twenty six was my
ten year anniversary at the company.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
This was it, Tim I was talking about and I'm
taking it.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Very coincidentally that on Monday we announced a majority stake
investment in Next Thing. And I think it's you know,
we're we're now valued at a three billion dollar company.
We still have our sites on a public position down
(01:39):
the road, but this sets us up to be even more,
even more invested in innovation, in technology and growth of
our business. It shows the faith and interest in this
market and seeing it grow. So I think it's a
(02:00):
I think it's a huge sign for what's to come
for us.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
That's really what put And you know, look, Tim, you
know you've got the birthday with a zero and it
relatively recently. You've got your your ten year anniversary. We've
got the v the the news of this new valuation,
it's new investor, the next Thing, and then and then,
as if that isn't enough anniversaries, we we are basically
slap bang on the two hundred anniversary of The Deck Show.
(02:27):
Can you believe it? Two hundred episode? You're a two
hundred year old podcast? You know, not yet?
Speaker 4 (02:35):
Yeah, everybody longer than some democracies out there to wow.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yes, if you if we were to equate it in
that way in episode per year two two are crazy, right,
and we're gonna we're gonna be celebrating everybody. We got
it kind of crept up on us too, I should stress.
And we're going to be celebrating it next week hopefully,
hopefully a very special guest is in the pipal for
(03:00):
next week. And you know, even if it falls through,
we'll do something. We'll have a you know, we'll have
a little episode party, So do tune in for that.
But we have you just heard in the background. You
just heard Chip in there our special guest today. Regular
listeners to this show will know him only too well
as a as A as a regular reality bites valued
(03:22):
it was a panelist panelist, and he's a senior editor
and content manager and editor in chief at the beloved
Dex Hub. Sean Malby, how are you doing, Sean, Welcome
to the other version of the Dex Show.
Speaker 5 (03:36):
Once again, thanks a lot, thanks for having me.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
I would like to be referred to as senior panelists
from now on as well.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Senior panelist quite as quite. I think you've probably been
in like fifty sixty episodes of a texture yourself a
good slice of the pie, I believe.
Speaker 6 (03:52):
Yeah, you're you're a vet here and we're here to
talk about a report you recently wrote, and you've recently
written and helped spearhead along with David Adelman from our team,
who couldn't be with us today to discuss it because
he's so busy helping with the comms.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Around all of this this next thing investment news. So
you're flying solo to talk about this research report which
is cracking the Deck's equation for first annual Workplace Productivity Report.
Speaker 5 (04:26):
It is a big deal.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
We do a lot of fantastic studies and research and
we cover a lot of from here on the Deck Show.
But I kind of feel Sun if you tell me
if you disagree with this might be the most significant
research project you've ever been a part of we've been
a part of as a team before.
Speaker 5 (04:44):
Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
And definitely shout out to David for all the work
he did behind this. So I know he's not here
right now, but he helped a lot with this project.
The difference of this report so and first off, anyone
who wants to download it just go to our website
next thing, dot com, slash resources just the show notes
as well, right, And so we've done surveys in the past.
(05:06):
Obviously there's two types of data reports. One are surveys
like external surveys where we go to IT professionals and
sometimes employees to get their opinions and feedback about their
workplace and their issues. And then the other type of
survey we've done only a few times in the past,
is looking at our own anonymized data sets, usually just
for like specific niche topics like Windows eleven we've done
(05:30):
in the past, and things that impact startup food time,
what variables might impact that. And this this round we
decided to take a much bigger cut. Now, we didn't
grab all twenty five million end points that you know
we work with for our customers, but we have a
pretty large subset of nine.
Speaker 5 (05:49):
Million end points where we looked at our own data.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
And tried to really trace and articulate the relationship between
one's deck score or the digital employees sperience, what's felt,
and productivity gains or losses. And I won't jump in
too far ahead, but basically we've seen this over the
years with our customers. At a customer level how they've
(06:12):
been able to kind of trace this relationship and see
reap the benefits from understanding it. But we wanted to
kind of take a bigger cut of the data across
the market and see what we could find.
Speaker 5 (06:25):
Well, let's take it.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Let's take it further because this kind of drills into
the question as the report's caul film the decks equation
and what I guess we're asserting here we have the
data to make this assertion is that we've cracked it.
Speaker 5 (06:40):
We've cracked that dex equation you alluded to it.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Just then we've put hard numbers next to the kind
of productivity gains that the DECKS can facilitate and create.
So tell us what the main findings were and why
it matters.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
Sure, yeah, and definitely to underline this, you know, this
is our best guess as that we can from our data,
and it's only going to get better. We're hoping to
do another report next year and individual reports throughout the quarter.
So if anybody does have like research topics that they
would like to see, you can also contact us and
submit those queries. But we're essentially able to figure out
(07:17):
like the estimated time loss caused by a poor digital
employee experience and conversely a positive one. So one of
the biggest stats that we were able to kind of
extrapolate is that the average enterprise of say thirteen thousand,
five hundred employees loses about four hundred and seventy thousand
hours a year due to poor digital employee experience. Now
(07:37):
that might be very shocking as a headline, we also
view this as a number that a lot of people
didn't even know existed prior to working with us.
Speaker 5 (07:47):
So these are.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
Tickets and issues that would have gone under the radar
if it wasn't for our software. And actually, when we
looked at a separate survey earlier this year, when we
spoke to IT leaders, it was about a thousand of
them that responded that what they believe their organizations lose
per year to poor decks is around one hundred and
ninety eight thousand hours or just under two hundred thousand
(08:11):
hours excuse me, So there's a huge they've obviously underrated
that estimate massively, So that's one thing to look at
that figure. It's also to kind of identify issues that
many of which can be automated away for certain remediations
that our software can deal with. There's also stuff that
has nothing to do with the technology that I think
(08:32):
Tim will get into later that can impact that time loss.
But I'll stop for now because there's some other good
points that we can get to.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
So Sean, I'm sure you know and folks know, I've
done a ton of work here on ROI, and it
can be very complicated when you look at it savings
versus business savings and avoiding issues. The report shows this
is one of the benefits of the deck score. But
(09:03):
the report shows a ten point increase and a DEX
score can recover twenty two minutes of productivity per employee
per week. So how should employees interpret that in terms
of ROI? Is it hard savings? Is it soft savings?
Is it an employee benefit, a company benefit, an it benefit?
(09:24):
Whatt's talk a bit about the increase in the DEX
score and it's linkage to ROI.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
Sure, and it's so short answer a little bit of everything.
What that means is you're recovering like software asset management costs,
hardware costs, reallocating and us your support headcount. But we
have specific examples. So when we looked at that estimate,
we said, all right, that's a pretty good figure. I'm
(09:48):
certain there's a more conservative estimate that can be done though,
and just luckily in parallel with us, if you go
to the next Think Experience site in the replay section,
we have a great cut customer talk from BDO, which
is an advisory firm out of the UK that has
done this exact thing that we've done, but with a
(10:09):
more conservative estimate. They found out that if you increase
the deck's score by one point, you can recover about
five minutes of productivity. Now what does this all mean
in individual customers and industries Those numbers have different impact
depending on where you are. So for this particular customer, BDO,
they found that by tracking the deck score and making
(10:30):
improvements and watching it improve by the number of productivity recovered,
they were able to actually gain back an estimate of
three hundred thousand pounds just in value from after one
year of doing all this work and kind of tracking
the score.
Speaker 5 (10:45):
So that's just one example, but.
Speaker 4 (10:49):
I believe it was a study a couple of years
ago by the Forester. They did a total economic impact
study on next Thing customers across the board, and they
found that there was almost a three hundred percent ROI
within the first three years.
Speaker 5 (11:01):
Just now, this is a bit old. This is a
couple of years ago.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
So we have some new fresh products that have been
in play for just the past two three years. So
I'm sure we'll do studies like that in the future
to keep looking at it. But that should give listeners
a sense of the type of ROI they can expect.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Yeah, like I said, OROI has always been a bit
of an art as well as a science, determining what
the formula is, trusting the data, trusting the calculation, and
elevating the conversation. I think it is a good point
to make there. But the analysis also shows and this
we've gotten kind of a bit of customed to this set.
(11:41):
Next think over the past few years with Infinity, but
with twenty five million end points in the cloud, I
know we didn't use them all for this. We wanted
to kind of pull our most mature customers. But the
analysis shows workplace productivity loss by industry. So as a customer, myself,
as an IT the enterprise IT guy, we were always
(12:03):
pushed to be top quartile. Our CTO, our CFO wanted
our operation to be in the top quartile for our
market segment, and the question always was, well, how do
you know, how do you know when you got there?
How do you know you're measuring the same things that
the analysts come in and tell you, we'll get you
to the top quartile. How long did it take? What
do you do after you get there? There's lots of
(12:25):
conversation you could have about getting to that, But some
of the industries reported more loss than others. So walk
us through the data and what it means for it
leaders in terms of comparison across industries.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
Yeah, and I think this is one of the most
interesting parts of the report. So first off, stepping back
from time loss even across all industries, we found it
was pretty much the same, where the average employee would
face off to fourteen technology disruptions per week regardless of
your industry. But when you get into the actual time
loss of those individual events, it does vary greatly. So
(13:04):
digital workers like in retail, healthcare, and financial services suffer
delays about one point seven times longer than their peers
in the tech industry. So if you're working in the
tech industry, you're doing pretty good compared to other industries,
which I think is kind of that makes sense. I'm
hoping if we do this again, which we will next year,
(13:24):
but I want to dive more into the things that
were impacting those top three industries, for example, with retail, healthcare,
and financial services and how they stack.
Speaker 5 (13:34):
Up year over year. I can take a wild guess.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
You can probably articulate it better, Tim, but my guess is,
you know, in healthcare and financial services, you probably have
more custom applications and stuff that's built in house that
could be impacting time loss, whereas you know, other stuff
that's sold on the commercial market, it might be a
little bit easier to get tech support and troubleshoot and
things like that. But that was really eye opening to
(13:59):
see the the discrepancy between the different industries.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
The other thing I think that would be interesting to
look at but more difficult to assess, is and I
think we'll talk about it here in a bit, but
the maturity of those industries. So the tech industry obviously
has more technical people in their company to be able
to find and fix things more quickly, whereas in healthcare,
some of the evidence tells us that a medical professional,
(14:26):
a nurse, a doctor, a practitioner will just push a
windows on works, a windows on wheels machine into the corner.
I've heard stories about them pushing it into the elevator
and hitting floor seven just to get the device off
their floor. So those kinds of frustrations, those kinds of
delays are inherent in the response to issues and not
just the issue itself. So I think there's a lot
(14:48):
to be explored there for sure.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
I mean, Tim, you've actually a couple of questions for
you to round us LF. Maybe you've obviously worked closely
with organizations at different stages in their deckhops of maturity.
What is the significance and what does it tell us
about that level of maturity for an IT department that
(15:12):
is able to correlate productivity wins or losses with the
DEX score or with the DEX investment.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
I think the ugly truth in IT and business in
general is that IT leaders frequently focus on the losses
because they're more visible, right, or they're focusing on the
fear of loss. There's a lot of pressure in IT
to make that next change, to make that next deployment
(15:40):
without impacting employees. So there's this focus and fear of
failure or of losses. Why we have end of quarter
and end of year moratoriums. The change moratorium is there
because the business is so confident that you're going to
break them, they don't allow you to change anything. So
there's a lot of focus on failure are celebrated very quickly,
(16:02):
but just in the context of thank god, that didn't fail, right.
We pushed out the patch, we pushed out the upgrade.
We only got three percent tickets, let's move on to
the next one. But the score and the ability to
see where you are in your maturity journey elevates that
conversation even in failure. So for example, you can take
(16:23):
a look at that score and communicate your improvements over time.
We went from a six point nine to a seven
point three over the course of a month, and here
are the specific things we did to improve that or
those big changes where there's a fear of failure, you
can show the massive amount of change you made with
(16:45):
no breakage and our score state flat. We didn't impact anybody,
we didn't degrade. So you've got a different conversation with
the business, you've got a different focus in it. And
each of the stages of maturity, whether it's getting better
at reactive or proactive or preventive or strategic. You've got
different different things to plan and to celebrate along those
(17:07):
along those milestones.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Hmmm, that's interesting, and I think anybody listening to the
shows and some of the podcasts we've been making, well, no,
the dexops has been something you know that it's hotly
discussed at the moment among sort of next Think customers
and dex influencers. Maybe you could just epitomize, however, what
exactly dexops maturity specifically means, and how next Think is
(17:34):
able to approach different customers at different stages, with an
emphasis on what it's able to do within full customers
who have already developed quite far.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
I like to look at that maturity on a very
basic human level, right, go from a human maturity. You
start out as a as a child, as a toddler,
you learn to walk, you learn to talk, you learn
to run, you learn to ride a bike. All of
those things you learn at the very early stages of
your maturity are fundamental for building the next level. As
(18:08):
a teenager or as a young adult, you're in college,
you're learning, you're planning your profession, you're putting a career
plan together. You're getting a degree, and then middle of
your career you're planning your next move, you're building a family,
and then later stage planning the retirement and joining the
rest of your life. So if you look at the
maturity in dex and in dex ops, it's very similar.
(18:33):
Everyone's on a different journey and everyone's in a different
place on that journey. Ticket reduction may be a win
for some people, but it could be ancient history for others.
We tackled that years ago. We're stable, we're solid. What's
the next thing we're going to do in our maturity
to become a strategic partner with the business. The customer
success plan and an internal roadmap help identify what the
(18:57):
next win will be and not just chance, but plan
the wins by design. It's not just as they occur.
So designing your next win, for example, we're going to
gather employee sentiment and then map that into our next transformation.
Make sure we're accommodating what the business needs. Fix the
problem of what it is typically criticized for in that
(19:23):
they don't understand the business. So plan and include the
celebration and the communications around those wins, just to kind
of lay out that that maturity model. Again, Reactive is
fixing things faster. Things are going to break and they
may not even be in your control. And it's not
just technology fixes, its adoption fixes and process fixes. Proactive
(19:48):
is finding those issues without tickets, find the process bottlenecks,
find the failures, don't rely on employees to call you
the next level of maturity. And a lot of people
get proactive and preventative confused. They'll say, well, if you're
breaking things and fixing them, you're really not proactive. Well
you are because you're breaking your dependency on employees having
to tell you about it. You're proactively fixing things that
(20:10):
are broken. Preventative is knowing that something will break and
not breaking it in advance, or finding it early in
a pilot stage and stopping your rollout until you can
come up with a remediation and a workaround and prevent
issues from spreading. And it's not just those kind of phases,
it's the operational rigor that goes along with those that's important.
(20:33):
How do I collaborate across my teams, how do I
spur innovation? How do I go find new problems to
solve versus just going and finding things that are broken
and bringing new AI and especially with automation and coupled
with AI today, how do I find those old age
old problems that I can now not just remediate but
(20:55):
improve and automate and bring to the business to solidify
my my strategic position with them. So dex up maturity
is different for everybody because of our age, are our position,
how long we've been at it. But I love the
maturity model because it gives a very defined stage of
(21:16):
how you move up, the move up the ladder.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
But I was concerned him to hear you miss so
many important milestones. You know, the first fist fight, you know,
the appearance in in Oliver Twist, you know it was.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
I think we covered those experiences.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
But anyone too, For anyone who.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Wants to hear more about those milestones. Do you listen
to our I think last published episode recorded live experience Boston.
It was good fun and that's there's some really good
closing reflections there. Thank you Tim, Thank you Sean so much,
not just the coming on the show, but for spearheading
along with David Edelman. This this amazing report. Last time Sean,
(21:59):
give us give us a plug. The people can download
anything else you wanted to do any you know, they
can reach out as you mentioned about future topics, how
would they do that?
Speaker 5 (22:09):
Yeah, please do.
Speaker 4 (22:10):
You can actually just go to contact us button anywhere
on the website and when you submit your query, just
reference a report. If you have a research topic an idea,
submit it. We'll get back to you. We definitely want
to go after interesting questions that we think are interesting
on our side, but of course we're open to feedback
(22:30):
from other people outside of Next Thing, so please do so.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Thank you so much, Sean. And you know, look, just
before we sign off, for everybody out there listening, who's
part of the Next Thing community, not only a Next thinker,
but a customer or a partner, an analyst perhaps who
supported Next Think and help get the word out there.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
In terms of shout out to Diana Gardner, shout out
to Dana Gartner.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
People who have you know, who have been behind decks
for so many years making a difference to it it. Congratulations.
I think this is a huge week for everybody and
reflective of the incredible strength for culture if it's been
built around X and that we've all of us built together, Tim,
Isn't that right?
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Absolutely? Yeah, and another shout out to uh and I'm sure,
I'm sure you get it to Tom when we were
at experience. The number of people is growing that come
up to you and say, hey, just wanted to talk.
I love the podcast, love love talking to the individually.
So shout out to everybody who came up and said.
Speaker 5 (23:30):
Oh, thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, it's so nice to meet listeners and hear with
people enjoy the show. We deeply appreciate that, so thank
you so much. Good shout good, Shout out Tim. Shout
out to everybody who did that, and we'll see you
all soon. Thanks Tim, Thanks, and take care everybody to make.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Sure that you never miss an episode. Subscribe to the
show in Apple podcasts, Spotify your favorite podcast player, and
if you're listening on Apple podcasts, make sure to leave
a rating of the show. Just have the number of
stars you think the podcast deserves. If you'd like to
learn more about how next Think can help me improve
your digital employee experience, head over to nextthink dot com.
(24:08):
Thank you so much for listening. Until next time,
Welcome it, change Makers to the deck show with Tim
Flower and Tom McGraw. Let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello change makers, and what a week of change has been,
not just the next thinkers, but for the whole digital
employee experience industry. I'm Tom McGraw, joined us ever by
Tim Flower. How are you doing today?
Speaker 3 (00:22):
Tim? Good? Tom? Just back from a little bit of
a trip. Was out on the road for four weeks,
multiple experience events, a quick little PTO overseas trip out
to California. But feeling feeling good today in light of
some changes, we can talk about.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Why didn't we?
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Why don't we?
Speaker 2 (00:41):
You know, in case somebody is tuning into the show
and it hasn't seen the buzz on social media or
the industry news don't Why don't you lay it out him?
What has taken place this week? That's a momentous for
the organization we work for and for the wider industry.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yeah. I put something out on LinkedIn too, So it's
interesting timing for me having just hit a birthday with
a zero in. It crept up on me, but it
happens to all of us. But also on Sunday was
my official ten year anniversary. October twenty six was my
ten year anniversary at the company.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
This was it, Tim I was talking about and I'm
taking it.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Very coincidentally that on Monday we announced a majority stake
investment in Next Thing. And I think it's you know,
we're we're now valued at a three billion dollar company.
We still have our sites on a public position down
(01:39):
the road, but this sets us up to be even more,
even more invested in innovation, in technology and growth of
our business. It shows the faith and interest in this
market and seeing it grow. So I think it's a
(02:00):
I think it's a huge sign for what's to come
for us.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
That's really what put And you know, look, Tim, you
know you've got the birthday with a zero and it
relatively recently. You've got your your ten year anniversary. We've
got the v the the news of this new valuation,
it's new investor, the next Thing, and then and then,
as if that isn't enough anniversaries, we we are basically
slap bang on the two hundred anniversary of The Deck Show.
(02:27):
Can you believe it? Two hundred episode? You're a two
hundred year old podcast? You know, not yet?
Speaker 4 (02:35):
Yeah, everybody longer than some democracies out there to wow.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yes, if you if we were to equate it in
that way in episode per year two two are crazy, right,
and we're gonna we're gonna be celebrating everybody. We got
it kind of crept up on us too, I should stress.
And we're going to be celebrating it next week hopefully,
hopefully a very special guest is in the pipal for
(03:00):
next week. And you know, even if it falls through,
we'll do something. We'll have a you know, we'll have
a little episode party, So do tune in for that.
But we have you just heard in the background. You
just heard Chip in there our special guest today. Regular
listeners to this show will know him only too well
as a as A as a regular reality bites valued
(03:22):
it was a panelist panelist, and he's a senior editor
and content manager and editor in chief at the beloved
Dex Hub. Sean Malby, how are you doing, Sean, Welcome
to the other version of the Dex Show.
Speaker 5 (03:36):
Once again, thanks a lot, thanks for having me.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
I would like to be referred to as senior panelists
from now on as well.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Senior panelist quite as quite. I think you've probably been
in like fifty sixty episodes of a texture yourself a
good slice of the pie, I believe.
Speaker 6 (03:52):
Yeah, you're you're a vet here and we're here to
talk about a report you recently wrote, and you've recently
written and helped spearhead along with David Adelman from our team,
who couldn't be with us today to discuss it because
he's so busy helping with the comms.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Around all of this this next thing investment news. So
you're flying solo to talk about this research report which
is cracking the Deck's equation for first annual Workplace Productivity Report.
Speaker 5 (04:26):
It is a big deal.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
We do a lot of fantastic studies and research and
we cover a lot of from here on the Deck Show.
But I kind of feel Sun if you tell me
if you disagree with this might be the most significant
research project you've ever been a part of we've been
a part of as a team before.
Speaker 5 (04:44):
Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
And definitely shout out to David for all the work
he did behind this. So I know he's not here
right now, but he helped a lot with this project.
The difference of this report so and first off, anyone
who wants to download it just go to our website
next thing, dot com, slash resources just the show notes
as well, right, And so we've done surveys in the past.
(05:06):
Obviously there's two types of data reports. One are surveys
like external surveys where we go to IT professionals and
sometimes employees to get their opinions and feedback about their
workplace and their issues. And then the other type of
survey we've done only a few times in the past,
is looking at our own anonymized data sets, usually just
for like specific niche topics like Windows eleven we've done
(05:30):
in the past, and things that impact startup food time,
what variables might impact that. And this this round we
decided to take a much bigger cut. Now, we didn't
grab all twenty five million end points that you know
we work with for our customers, but we have a
pretty large subset of nine.
Speaker 5 (05:49):
Million end points where we looked at our own data.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
And tried to really trace and articulate the relationship between
one's deck score or the digital employees sperience, what's felt,
and productivity gains or losses. And I won't jump in
too far ahead, but basically we've seen this over the
years with our customers. At a customer level how they've
(06:12):
been able to kind of trace this relationship and see
reap the benefits from understanding it. But we wanted to
kind of take a bigger cut of the data across
the market and see what we could find.
Speaker 5 (06:25):
Well, let's take it.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Let's take it further because this kind of drills into
the question as the report's caul film the decks equation
and what I guess we're asserting here we have the
data to make this assertion is that we've cracked it.
Speaker 5 (06:40):
We've cracked that dex equation you alluded to it.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Just then we've put hard numbers next to the kind
of productivity gains that the DECKS can facilitate and create.
So tell us what the main findings were and why
it matters.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
Sure, yeah, and definitely to underline this, you know, this
is our best guess as that we can from our data,
and it's only going to get better. We're hoping to
do another report next year and individual reports throughout the quarter.
So if anybody does have like research topics that they
would like to see, you can also contact us and
submit those queries. But we're essentially able to figure out
(07:17):
like the estimated time loss caused by a poor digital
employee experience and conversely a positive one. So one of
the biggest stats that we were able to kind of
extrapolate is that the average enterprise of say thirteen thousand,
five hundred employees loses about four hundred and seventy thousand
hours a year due to poor digital employee experience. Now
(07:37):
that might be very shocking as a headline, we also
view this as a number that a lot of people
didn't even know existed prior to working with us.
Speaker 5 (07:47):
So these are.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
Tickets and issues that would have gone under the radar
if it wasn't for our software. And actually, when we
looked at a separate survey earlier this year, when we
spoke to IT leaders, it was about a thousand of
them that responded that what they believe their organizations lose
per year to poor decks is around one hundred and
ninety eight thousand hours or just under two hundred thousand
(08:11):
hours excuse me, So there's a huge they've obviously underrated
that estimate massively, So that's one thing to look at
that figure. It's also to kind of identify issues that
many of which can be automated away for certain remediations
that our software can deal with. There's also stuff that
has nothing to do with the technology that I think
(08:32):
Tim will get into later that can impact that time loss.
But I'll stop for now because there's some other good
points that we can get to.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
So Sean, I'm sure you know and folks know, I've
done a ton of work here on ROI, and it
can be very complicated when you look at it savings
versus business savings and avoiding issues. The report shows this
is one of the benefits of the deck score. But
(09:03):
the report shows a ten point increase and a DEX
score can recover twenty two minutes of productivity per employee
per week. So how should employees interpret that in terms
of ROI? Is it hard savings? Is it soft savings?
Is it an employee benefit, a company benefit, an it benefit?
(09:24):
Whatt's talk a bit about the increase in the DEX
score and it's linkage to ROI.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
Sure, and it's so short answer a little bit of everything.
What that means is you're recovering like software asset management costs,
hardware costs, reallocating and us your support headcount. But we
have specific examples. So when we looked at that estimate,
we said, all right, that's a pretty good figure. I'm
(09:48):
certain there's a more conservative estimate that can be done though,
and just luckily in parallel with us, if you go
to the next Think Experience site in the replay section,
we have a great cut customer talk from BDO, which
is an advisory firm out of the UK that has
done this exact thing that we've done, but with a
(10:09):
more conservative estimate. They found out that if you increase
the deck's score by one point, you can recover about
five minutes of productivity. Now what does this all mean
in individual customers and industries Those numbers have different impact
depending on where you are. So for this particular customer, BDO,
they found that by tracking the deck score and making
(10:30):
improvements and watching it improve by the number of productivity recovered,
they were able to actually gain back an estimate of
three hundred thousand pounds just in value from after one
year of doing all this work and kind of tracking
the score.
Speaker 5 (10:45):
So that's just one example, but.
Speaker 4 (10:49):
I believe it was a study a couple of years
ago by the Forester. They did a total economic impact
study on next Thing customers across the board, and they
found that there was almost a three hundred percent ROI
within the first three years.
Speaker 5 (11:01):
Just now, this is a bit old. This is a
couple of years ago.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
So we have some new fresh products that have been
in play for just the past two three years. So
I'm sure we'll do studies like that in the future
to keep looking at it. But that should give listeners
a sense of the type of ROI they can expect.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Yeah, like I said, OROI has always been a bit
of an art as well as a science, determining what
the formula is, trusting the data, trusting the calculation, and
elevating the conversation. I think it is a good point
to make there. But the analysis also shows and this
we've gotten kind of a bit of customed to this set.
(11:41):
Next think over the past few years with Infinity, but
with twenty five million end points in the cloud, I
know we didn't use them all for this. We wanted
to kind of pull our most mature customers. But the
analysis shows workplace productivity loss by industry. So as a customer, myself,
as an IT the enterprise IT guy, we were always
(12:03):
pushed to be top quartile. Our CTO, our CFO wanted
our operation to be in the top quartile for our
market segment, and the question always was, well, how do
you know, how do you know when you got there?
How do you know you're measuring the same things that
the analysts come in and tell you, we'll get you
to the top quartile. How long did it take? What
do you do after you get there? There's lots of
(12:25):
conversation you could have about getting to that, But some
of the industries reported more loss than others. So walk
us through the data and what it means for it
leaders in terms of comparison across industries.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
Yeah, and I think this is one of the most
interesting parts of the report. So first off, stepping back
from time loss even across all industries, we found it
was pretty much the same, where the average employee would
face off to fourteen technology disruptions per week regardless of
your industry. But when you get into the actual time
loss of those individual events, it does vary greatly. So
(13:04):
digital workers like in retail, healthcare, and financial services suffer
delays about one point seven times longer than their peers
in the tech industry. So if you're working in the
tech industry, you're doing pretty good compared to other industries,
which I think is kind of that makes sense. I'm
hoping if we do this again, which we will next year,
(13:24):
but I want to dive more into the things that
were impacting those top three industries, for example, with retail, healthcare,
and financial services and how they stack.
Speaker 5 (13:34):
Up year over year. I can take a wild guess.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
You can probably articulate it better, Tim, but my guess is,
you know, in healthcare and financial services, you probably have
more custom applications and stuff that's built in house that
could be impacting time loss, whereas you know, other stuff
that's sold on the commercial market, it might be a
little bit easier to get tech support and troubleshoot and
things like that. But that was really eye opening to
(13:59):
see the the discrepancy between the different industries.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
The other thing I think that would be interesting to
look at but more difficult to assess, is and I
think we'll talk about it here in a bit, but
the maturity of those industries. So the tech industry obviously
has more technical people in their company to be able
to find and fix things more quickly, whereas in healthcare,
some of the evidence tells us that a medical professional,
(14:26):
a nurse, a doctor, a practitioner will just push a
windows on works, a windows on wheels machine into the corner.
I've heard stories about them pushing it into the elevator
and hitting floor seven just to get the device off
their floor. So those kinds of frustrations, those kinds of
delays are inherent in the response to issues and not
just the issue itself. So I think there's a lot
(14:48):
to be explored there for sure.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
I mean, Tim, you've actually a couple of questions for
you to round us LF. Maybe you've obviously worked closely
with organizations at different stages in their deckhops of maturity.
What is the significance and what does it tell us
about that level of maturity for an IT department that
(15:12):
is able to correlate productivity wins or losses with the
DEX score or with the DEX investment.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
I think the ugly truth in IT and business in
general is that IT leaders frequently focus on the losses
because they're more visible, right, or they're focusing on the
fear of loss. There's a lot of pressure in IT
to make that next change, to make that next deployment
(15:40):
without impacting employees. So there's this focus and fear of
failure or of losses. Why we have end of quarter
and end of year moratoriums. The change moratorium is there
because the business is so confident that you're going to
break them, they don't allow you to change anything. So
there's a lot of focus on failure are celebrated very quickly,
(16:02):
but just in the context of thank god, that didn't fail, right.
We pushed out the patch, we pushed out the upgrade.
We only got three percent tickets, let's move on to
the next one. But the score and the ability to
see where you are in your maturity journey elevates that
conversation even in failure. So for example, you can take
(16:23):
a look at that score and communicate your improvements over time.
We went from a six point nine to a seven
point three over the course of a month, and here
are the specific things we did to improve that or
those big changes where there's a fear of failure, you
can show the massive amount of change you made with
(16:45):
no breakage and our score state flat. We didn't impact anybody,
we didn't degrade. So you've got a different conversation with
the business, you've got a different focus in it. And
each of the stages of maturity, whether it's getting better
at reactive or proactive or preventive or strategic. You've got
different different things to plan and to celebrate along those
(17:07):
along those milestones.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Hmmm, that's interesting, and I think anybody listening to the
shows and some of the podcasts we've been making, well, no,
the dexops has been something you know that it's hotly
discussed at the moment among sort of next Think customers
and dex influencers. Maybe you could just epitomize, however, what
exactly dexops maturity specifically means, and how next Think is
(17:34):
able to approach different customers at different stages, with an
emphasis on what it's able to do within full customers
who have already developed quite far.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
I like to look at that maturity on a very
basic human level, right, go from a human maturity. You
start out as a as a child, as a toddler,
you learn to walk, you learn to talk, you learn
to run, you learn to ride a bike. All of
those things you learn at the very early stages of
your maturity are fundamental for building the next level. As
(18:08):
a teenager or as a young adult, you're in college,
you're learning, you're planning your profession, you're putting a career
plan together. You're getting a degree, and then middle of
your career you're planning your next move, you're building a family,
and then later stage planning the retirement and joining the
rest of your life. So if you look at the
maturity in dex and in dex ops, it's very similar.
(18:33):
Everyone's on a different journey and everyone's in a different
place on that journey. Ticket reduction may be a win
for some people, but it could be ancient history for others.
We tackled that years ago. We're stable, we're solid. What's
the next thing we're going to do in our maturity
to become a strategic partner with the business. The customer
success plan and an internal roadmap help identify what the
(18:57):
next win will be and not just chance, but plan
the wins by design. It's not just as they occur.
So designing your next win, for example, we're going to
gather employee sentiment and then map that into our next transformation.
Make sure we're accommodating what the business needs. Fix the
problem of what it is typically criticized for in that
(19:23):
they don't understand the business. So plan and include the
celebration and the communications around those wins, just to kind
of lay out that that maturity model. Again, Reactive is
fixing things faster. Things are going to break and they
may not even be in your control. And it's not
just technology fixes, its adoption fixes and process fixes. Proactive
(19:48):
is finding those issues without tickets, find the process bottlenecks,
find the failures, don't rely on employees to call you
the next level of maturity. And a lot of people
get proactive and preventative confused. They'll say, well, if you're
breaking things and fixing them, you're really not proactive. Well
you are because you're breaking your dependency on employees having
to tell you about it. You're proactively fixing things that
(20:10):
are broken. Preventative is knowing that something will break and
not breaking it in advance, or finding it early in
a pilot stage and stopping your rollout until you can
come up with a remediation and a workaround and prevent
issues from spreading. And it's not just those kind of phases,
it's the operational rigor that goes along with those that's important.
(20:33):
How do I collaborate across my teams, how do I
spur innovation? How do I go find new problems to
solve versus just going and finding things that are broken
and bringing new AI and especially with automation and coupled
with AI today, how do I find those old age
old problems that I can now not just remediate but
(20:55):
improve and automate and bring to the business to solidify
my my strategic position with them. So dex up maturity
is different for everybody because of our age, are our position,
how long we've been at it. But I love the
maturity model because it gives a very defined stage of
(21:16):
how you move up, the move up the ladder.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
But I was concerned him to hear you miss so
many important milestones. You know, the first fist fight, you know,
the appearance in in Oliver Twist, you know it was.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
I think we covered those experiences.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
But anyone too, For anyone who.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Wants to hear more about those milestones. Do you listen
to our I think last published episode recorded live experience Boston.
It was good fun and that's there's some really good
closing reflections there. Thank you Tim, Thank you Sean so much,
not just the coming on the show, but for spearheading
along with David Edelman. This this amazing report. Last time Sean,
(21:59):
give us give us a plug. The people can download
anything else you wanted to do any you know, they
can reach out as you mentioned about future topics, how
would they do that?
Speaker 5 (22:09):
Yeah, please do.
Speaker 4 (22:10):
You can actually just go to contact us button anywhere
on the website and when you submit your query, just
reference a report. If you have a research topic an idea,
submit it. We'll get back to you. We definitely want
to go after interesting questions that we think are interesting
on our side, but of course we're open to feedback
(22:30):
from other people outside of Next Thing, so please do so.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Thank you so much, Sean. And you know, look, just
before we sign off, for everybody out there listening, who's
part of the Next Thing community, not only a Next thinker,
but a customer or a partner, an analyst perhaps who
supported Next Think and help get the word out there.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
In terms of shout out to Diana Gardner, shout out
to Dana Gartner.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
People who have you know, who have been behind decks
for so many years making a difference to it it. Congratulations.
I think this is a huge week for everybody and
reflective of the incredible strength for culture if it's been
built around X and that we've all of us built together, Tim,
Isn't that right?
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Absolutely? Yeah, and another shout out to uh and I'm sure,
I'm sure you get it to Tom when we were
at experience. The number of people is growing that come
up to you and say, hey, just wanted to talk.
I love the podcast, love love talking to the individually.
So shout out to everybody who came up and said.
Speaker 5 (23:30):
Oh, thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, it's so nice to meet listeners and hear with
people enjoy the show. We deeply appreciate that, so thank
you so much. Good shout good, Shout out Tim. Shout
out to everybody who did that, and we'll see you
all soon. Thanks Tim, Thanks, and take care everybody to make.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Sure that you never miss an episode. Subscribe to the
show in Apple podcasts, Spotify your favorite podcast player, and
if you're listening on Apple podcasts, make sure to leave
a rating of the show. Just have the number of
stars you think the podcast deserves. If you'd like to
learn more about how next Think can help me improve
your digital employee experience, head over to nextthink dot com.
(24:08):
Thank you so much for listening. Until next time,
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