CIO Strategy: To Improve Employee Engagement, Buy Cupcakes

Around 200 employees from multiple lines of business attended IT Day, following three tracks:

• Expert talks that focused on the areas where IT is driving user productivity, cybersecurity, and innovation

• Expert booths where employees received immediate service and experienced cool new products

• Vendor booths, which provided special product offers to employees

To sweeten the deal and attract even more on-site employees, we also offered an afternoon snack of cupcakes, tea, and coffee. Employees were also eligible to participate in prize drawings.

Enabling productivity through IT On the IT team, our goal is to enable SAP to transform into a digital enterprise using the best-in-class solutions, products, and services available in the market. Especially in the current era, IT can have a tremendous positive impact across the entire company by enabling the right technology for the organization.

From a strategic perspective, this meant focusing on two key aspects of the enterprise:

1. Digitalization of enterprise business processes for efficiency –simplifying, automating, and massively scaling out existing business processes to meet the new demands of the digital economy. This meant upgrading our existing processes to support new business models such as volume business and subscription- and consumption-based billing. At the same time, the IT team is constantly thinking about how new technology can make a difference – for instance, using machine learning to significantly increase automation levels at our shared services organization.

2. Digitalization of personal workspaces for higher productivity: Another key goal of the IT organization is rapidly enabling the SAP workforce to be agile, efficient, and productive so that the value each employee brings to the company multiplies exponentially. Starting from a “Mobile first” strategy, to enabling efficient virtual collaboration platforms, knowledge management tools and a very friendly end user experience are key to a successful modern personal workspace. In our company, we are inclusive by nature, and that means providing the best user experience across diverse groups within the organization are key to IT’s success.

At the IT Day, employees learnt how collaboration tools can help them be more productive working in virtual teams. In the demonstration sessions, employees learnt how machine learning technology is being used to automate areas such as incoming payments.

By actively engaging with our customers, the IT services organization took steps toward increasing employees’ understanding of how we support their efficiency, productivity, and satisfaction. As the research shows, a strong IT-business partnership with engaged employees is a competitive advantage – so those cupcakes were definitely a worthwhile investment.