Reworked TV
In Brief
- Foundations first. As the first digital workplace leader at The Campbell's Company, Kristy Litchford started with the idea that a robust digital infrastructure — such as ensuring consistent device health and uniform software deployments — is critical for seamless operations, even if these foundational tasks may seem mundane. She argues that until employees are comfortable with these foundations, they will never be ready to adopt more advanced capabilities.
- Active listening before decision-making. Kristy established a deep understanding of current systems before making any choices by engaging with users, business executives and internal teams, to ensure initiatives aligned with both past achievements and future aspirations.
- Data-driven and proactive maintenance. Monitoring device performance and user experience with digital experience monitoring tools allows for early problem detection and automation, preventing disruptions before they impact productivity.
Kristy Litchford, VP of Digital Workplace and Cloud Solutions at The Campbell's Company joins Reworked editor in chief Siobhan Fagan to discuss her experiences as the first digital workplace leader at the company. Over the last four years, Kristy has strived to ensure the foundational requirements of employees were met before moving into explorations of more advanced functionality.
She discusses what it takes to integrate disparate systems after acquisitions, why she thinks digital workplace leaders should work cross-functionally to broaden their awareness of other aspects of the employee experience, and suggests a stalwart of the digital workplace might not have a place in employees' hearts. Tune in for more.
Table of Contents
- The First Digital Workplace Leader at The Campbell's Company
- The Foundations of a Strong Digital Workplace
- Device Health and the Problem With the Service Desk
- Keeping the Digital Employee Experience Up to Date and Running Well
- You've Got to Walk Before You Can Run
The First Digital Workplace Leader at The Campbell's Company
Siobhan Fagan: Hi and welcome to Three Dots. My name is Siobhan Fagan. I'm editor in chief in Reworked and I am so happy to be here today. My guest today is Kristy Litchford. She is the vice president of Digital Workplace Corporate Solutions and Cloud at the Campbell's Company and I am happy to welcome you here today, Kristy.
Kristy Litchford: Thanks so much for having me. I think it's going to be a great conversation.
Siobhan: You have a fun position that you can talk about because you were brought into Campbell's Company in the fall of 2020, am I right?
Kristy: That's right, I was a COVID hire.
Siobhan: So you came in at that time as their first digital workplace lead. So what was that like? I mean, is being "the first" kind of freeing? Is it a little anxiety making? How was that for you?
Kristy: I think it was a great commitment that they made. It really said a lot that they had created this position and it showed their commitment to improving the digital workplace across the board. And so there was a team in place that were doing digital workplace things, but I think to actually say, 'Hey, we have a leader that is gonna lead this space' just spoke volumes to everyone.
The Foundations of a Strong Digital Workplace
Siobhan: That's definitely a sign of commitment. And so you're coming in, and obviously the company is functioning quite well before you come in, but this is just sort of we're going to take it to the next level. How do you choose where to focus? Where do you start with this not quite blank slate, but sort of blank slate?
Kristy: Yeah, I think you always start a new job with a bunch of assumptions that quickly are proven wrong, right? And so I think it's the most important thing anytime I take a new job or pick up a new accountability. The first thing I want to do is just understand where things are at, right? And I have a pretty repeatable process of just talking to people. I like to listen more than I talk.
There are three different sets of stakeholders. It’s always important to understand what the customers or the users of your systems think about it, what’s going well, what’s not going well. But then I think it’s equally important to talk to business executives, just to understand what their strategy has been and where their strategy is going.
And then third, I like to talk to the team, right? And just understand what their position is. I love, you know, not only forward looking, but backward looking. So in many of these cases, you know, I think the two most powerful questions that you can ask are, “What are you most proud of delivering over the last 12 months?” and then “What do you think you'll be most proud of delivering over the next 12 months?”
Both for the team and the business executives, it’s very telling. Not only what their crowning achievements have been, but it also makes them think, hey, where am I going to be a year from now? And that helps you hopefully pave a way to make it easier for them to get there.
Device Health and the Problem With the Service Desk
Siobhan: I love that idea. And when we spoke before, you brought up the concept of foundational work. Could you touch on some of those areas that businesses really need to get right first before moving on to bigger things?
Kristy: Yeah, I think one of the biggest things that should be focused on is device health. I know that's really boring, and it's not talked about that much. But if you don’t have a solid deployment of devices — laptops, computers — if there’s something going wrong systemically in that ecosystem, nothing else is going to work well on top of it. It doesn’t matter what applications you deploy, what capabilities you roll out. It’s almost like death by a thousand cuts.
And a lot of times when I talk to people in other companies, they always point to the fact that maybe their call volumes are extremely low. Like, 'We don't get a lot of people calling into the service desk and complaining, so our devices must be good.'
Well ... I hate calling the service desk. I own the service desk! I want to do everything in my power to make sure that somebody doesn't have to call the service desk because by the time they do that, you've already lost them. You've lost the battle because they've probably been cut time and time and time again and now they're at the point that they're no longer productive and they have to stop their day.
So taking a look at things like what is the experience when you're pushing out patches? Is everybody on the same version? You know, when you think about the productivity suite, especially when it comes to say, the Microsoft ecosystem, which I think a lot of corporations are within that ecosystem. Is everyone on the same version? That's foundational.
Because things are changing so quickly. How do you do digital training or digital marketing or digital adoption if you have 15 different versions of say Outlook out there? You can't show people the cool new stuff that's coming if they're six versions behind. So I think just foundationally, I like to call it the device fleet, it has to be in just perfect condition.
Siobhan: I love that idea of like you holding a training and people being in the middle of the training and having to update their software in the middle of it. It's like, yeah, that's good use of time. So you actually gave me an option for a segue here because you're talking about having to get everybody on this same device. And one of the things about the Campbell's Company, which is not uncommon particularly among consumer packaged good companies, is that it has grown through acquisitions.
When you are bringing in these new teams, when you are bringing in these new people from these companies, what's the process of kind of normalizing the software across the teams so that you are dealing with a level playing field?
Kristy: I'll go back to my opening statement: It's understanding where they're at, right? And if you're lucky, if any company acquires another company, if their technology portfolio, business capability portfolio has a good synergy, it's a lot easier.
Conference
Sep
16
HR Tech Conference Las Vegas 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
But where things diverge and you may not be on the same platforms, I think it's always important to consider best of breed.
I think acquiring companies sometimes can be too quick to say, 'Ours is the best.' And I'm happy to say that Campbell's doesn't take that position. We do go through the process of understanding what that company may have, how it may give them a competitive advantage and then choose either to replace that with what we have or adopt it and replace what we have. And I think that openness to change is important. And I think to any acquiring company, it's important for the acquired company to feel welcome and have a seat at the table.
Keeping the Digital Employee Experience Up to Date and Running Well
Siobhan: When you look at sort of keeping everybody functioning well, keeping those IT tickets down low, how do you and your team make sure that everything not only is working well, but that you are upgrading as is necessary with a lot of these software suites?
Kristy: Monitoring and data. We are always looking at data. One of the fun projects, and I say it's fun because I'm kind of a nerd, is we were able to deploy our digital experience monitoring software. And its sole purpose is to measure the health of your devices, but then also measure the experience that people are having with devices and applications and networks. And what that does is it's kind of the canary in the coal mine: We can see when things are starting to go wrong well before somebody might pick up that phone and tell us that something's going wrong.
On top of that, many of these different products give you the ability to be proactive, right? So you can start to deploy automations that start to fix problems that you know are coming. You know, there's a signal that you can get from your device that tells you that the hard drive is about to fail, and it's pretty accurate.
But even if it's not 100% accurate, I'm okay with 70% accuracy. If I can get a trigger that tells me that my device is about to go down, I would rather replace that device and make sure that that person has a seamless experience than let that device crash, and replace it after the fact. So I think that proactiveness is just awesome. And never underestimate the importance of continuing to look at that data and understand it and ask questions on why things may be changing.
Siobhan: The closer relationships that you have with different business partners — HR, IT, Legal — did that give you new potential ideas for integrations that you hadn't necessarily seen before or new ideas for how you could further improve the employee experience?
Kristy: Being able to work much more closely with those departments is you see other problems that I wouldn't typically see. Or you see other business strategies coming to the table that I necessarily wouldn't have thought of in my day to day.
And so, when you think about the holistic employee experience, you start thinking about parts of the total experience around wellness and the total experience around rewards and benefits. And those were new learnings for me! And I continue to learn in that space. I definitely would say that it has brought more awareness on the different areas that we definitely need to continue to pay attention to.
Siobhan: You think that there's maybe, I'll call it a blind spot. I don't mean it to be harsh, but potentially where people don't necessarily see that sort of alignment that is required between all these different departments, like what they're missing out on delivering when they want to deliver this fantastic digital workplace experience. And then they're kind of just going in with blinders with certain areas. Can you speak to that?
Kristy: I just don't know how they would be successful. Honestly, I think it's critical. Especially when you think about the digital workplace at its core, you're talking about employee experience. Now, you can try to put your blinders on, as you said, and define the digital workplace as a very narrow scope. I've seen a lot of companies do that. It's not incorrect, it's just maybe where the maturity of the company is at the time, right?
Five, six years ago, digital workplace was nothing more than an intranet, right? And we all know that no matter how important you want the intranet to be in employees' day-to-day lives, it's really not that important — and sometimes it's even hated. And so I think it depends on really what your charge is, what your scope of accountability is and where the company is in its maturity level and thinking about that holistic digital experience.
Siobhan: I'm actually going to turn your own question back on you that you started with at the Campbell's Company: Is there a specific initiative that makes you proudest?
Kristy: A specific one is hard. We've done a lot of great stuff and what I would say is, overall, I'm proud of two metrics.
So over the past four years, and even it was probably much earlier in the first two years, we were able to show through the employee engagement survey that we had improved the digital employee experience by 42 points in 18 months. And there wasn't a single initiative, I would say, that was responsible for that, but a whole series of initiatives.
The second piece is we do external benchmarks for the digital workplace. And over the course of two years, we were able to increase our maturity level by 9%, which is huge! We had a very, very focused strategy over the first three years that I was with The Campbell's Company. And thinking back to where every company was, we were talking about making sure that there was equality and productivity. We were deep into COVID. We wanted to make sure that people were productive anywhere, anytime and that they were efficient. And so all of our initiatives were focused on those outcomes.
I think now coming out of that, we just refreshed what our focus is. Of course, our focus has changed. We went through return to office. We're still supporting that hybrid work model. We feel very confident that people are well-equipped and well-equipped to be productive.
Now we're focusing more on transformation. With things changing as quickly as it is, we want people to be productive and learning. We're really thinking about things like digital dexterity and how comfortable are people in their ability and how much do they desire to learn and adopt not only existing technologies, but new technologies and capabilities. Right?
You've Got to Walk Before You Can Run
Siobhan: I think you're opening the window here, so I'm going to be the first to bring it up. Are we talking about AI?
Kristy: That's definitely part of it, but I will tell you that the biggest learning that I had in some of the work that we've done over the past years when it comes to AI and generative AI is the fact that when you start looking at some of the commercialized products out there, if people aren't comfortable using foundational capabilities, they're not going to get the perceived benefit from the investment in the new shining capabilities, which I would call generative AI. Going back to just foundational pieces — are they comfortable using cloud collaboration? If not, those solutions aren't going to really do anything for them, right?
Siobhan: What percentage, not that you have to have a specific number, but would you say that the education and getting people more comfortable with these foundational elements, how big a part of your work does that up?
Kristy: It's hard for me to put a percentage on it, but it's big and we do have a dedicated team that does that. We have a user experience team that is accountable for our communications, our marketing, our adoption. They also do things like host our communities of practice. So we've got — just like many companies do — what we call our champions network. Those are kind of the cutting-edge people from across the business who want the new stuff, want to give the feedback on the new stuff, all the way to hosting special sessions for our admins. When the admins are happy, we're happy, right? And so we definitely have dedicated resources focused on that.
Siobhan: You are the second person who I've spoken to on this show who particularly called out getting the admins on your side as this linchpin to making everything work. So I think we should start calling this an admin stan account.
Kristy: Yes!
Siobhan: Is there anything that we didn't cover that you'd like to raise, any final words of advice that you'd like to share?
Kristy: I think keeping things simple and listening to your customers is the most important thing. And don't overlook the small stuff, because the small stuff becomes the big stuff really fast.
Siobhan: Kristy, I really appreciate you joining me today and I wish you well with your new focus this year.
Kristy: Thank you, I appreciate it.
Siobhan: Thank you so much for joining us today. If you enjoyed today's show, please share it with a friend. Word of mouth marketing is the best marketing that anyone can ask for. Until next time!
