Supporting Employee Success Again and Again with Mark Settle, Seven-time CIO

This episode features an interview with Mark Settle, seven-time CIO and author.Mark has served as CIO for companies like Okta, Arrow Electronics, and Visa.  He specializes in enterprise software, high-tech distribution, and financial services.  His most recent book, "Truth from the Valley, a Practical Primer on IT Management for the Next Decade," was released in 2020.  On this episode, Mark discusses the challenges of personalizing the employee experience at larger companies, streamlining IT operations at the service desk, and automating busy work.  He also shares tips on how to tell if initiatives are being effective, how to avoid the IT-ticket circus, and the importance of trying out new digital tools.3 TakeawaysThe larger and more dispersed a company is, the harder it becomes to create a personalized employee experience and communicate across time zones, cultures, and languages.Onboarding employees successfully and seamlessly is critical to ensuring workers trust the IT organization.If you have a personal interaction with an employee in a support capacity, look for some way to add value to the conversation.Key Quotes“We developed this process we called zero-day provisioning, ZDP. If we got a feed of employees coming on board, even at close-of-business, and even if they were remote workers, we would have a complete kit for them at their home or in their new office location first thing. So they could be processed and it was all pre-configured.  New employees would explicitly comment on what a great onboarding experience it was.”“You're the technology quartermaster for the army, and you're just trying to give everybody the kit that they need, both at a generic level and then at a more functional level that's responsive to the needs of individual departments and work teams.”“A company can have a nirvana-type set of IT-enabled experiences, but it also needs to meet employee expectations around pay, benefits, commuting times, satisfaction with a boss, relationships with coworkers and more to make a happy employee."This episode of Cruising Altitude is brought to you by SocialChorus. SocialChorus is the creator of FirstUp, the platform that makes the digital employee experience work for every worker. FirstUp brings personalized information and systems access to every employee, everywhere.No matter whether they're wired, distributed, or on the front line. That's how we help Amazon, AB InBev, GSK, and many others stay agile and keep transforming. Learn more at socialchorus.comMark Settle's LinkedIn