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Faisal Masud is not a fan of friction.
This antipathy is a through line in his career.
Case in point: While working at office supply giant Staples in 2016, Masud’s team introduced the Staples Easy System, an IBM Watson-fueled on-demand shopping experience to simplify the ordering process for businesses.
Fast forward to today. In his role as president of HP Digital Services, Masud views the company’s digital employee experience platform, HP Workforce Experience Platform, as a means to reduce friction for employees — and CIOs — by anticipating and resolving issues with company technology before the employee is aware of an issue.
HP Workforce Experience Platform's Differentiators
That hardware foundation is a home team advantage for the platform in Masud’s eyes. “We collect telemetry from 10s of millions, close to 50 million devices. We have great competitors, but I think all of them combined don't collect that much data. So we have a natural advantage,” he said.
The platform is also device agnostic, meaning companies can use the software with any device they want — no HP computer lock-in.
“It's the first time we're going out to the market as a hardware company to sell software without the hardware,” said Masud.
The AI-foundations of the platform, when combined with the quantities of unique proprietary data available through telemetry, means the platform can deliver services at a more granular level, including in the areas of:
- Personalized employee experience.
- Proactive issue identification and resolution.
- Automated remediation.
While Masud is understandably enthusiastic about the platform, he’s not alone in seeing its potential. Gartner recognized HP’s Proactive Insights (HP Workforce Experience’s predecessor) as a “Visionary” in its DEX Management Magic Quadrant in August. While the analyst firm noted its vision and innovation, it is withholding the Leader title until it sees the company’s growth under the new iteration.
Related Article: Digital Employee Experience Transformation Isn’t Just About Efficiency
The CIO Employee Experience Opportunity
The HP role came after a long career in ecommerce at companies like Amazon, eBay and Alphabet for Masud and he plans to use lessons from the commerce side to improve the employee experience.
He held up the customer experiences he worked on during his time at Amazon, where the object was to make it as simple as possible for a customer to go from a product search to a purchase, to the current state of employee experience.
“In traditional IT, there's just too many hoops to jump through for employees,” Masud said.
He places the responsibility for removing these hoops on the CIO, naming it one of their three key goals: security, reducing cost and employee experience. But the responsibility is also an opportunity.
“Having been a CIO in the past, I can tell you it is a lose-lose proposition, because no one is happy with you. But there's a huge opportunity for CIOs right now,” he said.
To capitalize on that opportunity, CIOs should focus on a few areas:
Reduce Digital Friction
Masud points to a few areas where friction enters the employee experience. There’s the friction involved when technology issues eat into an employee’s workday. “Filing tickets all day on ServiceNow is not high-quality work,” he said.
Compounding the tech issues is the increasing number of apps employees now juggle to work, a byproduct of the pandemic remote work spending spree — “application creep is not helpful.” He believes less is more when it comes to enterprise applications and urges IT to ask the question, “How can we reduce the footprint needed to get the work done?”
Unify the Digital Workplace
A complement to the above task, Masud advocates for consolidating the number of single-use applications and standalone solutions onto one platform that integrates the tools employees need, which is where HP Workforce Experience comes in. AI and telemetry play a part here.
Provide Better Tools — and Training
Do the tools you provide help employees do their jobs? Do they know the best ways to use them? Masud again sees AI’s potential to help in this area. Part of the equation is shifting IT’s focus from technology management to adopting a more employee-centric approach to technology provision. He, like many technology leaders we’ve spoken to, points to the onboarding experience as a spot needing particular remediation.
One final area he believes IT can help with is in extending the life cycle of devices, which supports their goal of reducing costs while also helping the environment.
Outside of the IT realm, Masud advocates for providing employees autonomy over where and when they work, as long as they deliver results and have the support they need to be productive.
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AI as a Force Multiplier
Which brings us to another thread in Masud’s career: he is a big proponent of AI as a tool to reduce the task creep which characterizes so many of our jobs — and lives.
He envisions a future where everyone has a personalized AI sidekick to act as their admin, to follow up on refunds if your Uber is canceled or to flag meetings where another member of your team would be better suited to attend. Masud draws the line at sending the sidekick into the meeting for you, calling the proposition “not serious.”
In this future, our work computers and devices would recognize our work habits and patterns well enough that they would anticipate our needs and proactively provide recommendations. He calls this future HP Workforce Experience’s North Star, although it’s not one he sees happening in the immediate future. “We’ve got a really long roadmap right now, but the future state would be: how do we take our core competency, our hardware, and really make the AI PC be in lockstep with our platform, where … your device is accelerating your productivity by a non-trivial amount.”
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The Future Is Employee-Centric
At a time when efficiency is replacing employee experience in C-Suite discussions, vendor marketing materials and internal communications, Masud is doubling down on EX.
He returns again to how customer-centricity was non-negotiable at his previous employers. When asked if employees would ever score the same level of attention, he said: “I don’t think employers have a choice. Because if you want the best employees, they’re going to want the best experience. If you don’t want the best employees, then why care about the experience? So it’s not a want; employee experience is a need.”
