Our guest on #WorkTrends today is Calvin Hsu, the VP of Product Marketing at Citrix. A self-described right-brain technologist, he’s passionate about aligning people, technology and business to deliver an amazing employee experience. The key is a digital work environment that’s streamlined, engaging and — behind the scenes — secure.
Listen to the full conversation or read the recap below. And don’t forget to subscribe, so you never miss an episode.
[04:15] We don’t need to fix the individual application’s relationship to the person, we need to fix the person’s relationship to all of their applications.
[07:38] There’s definitely this gap in the industry between the people who make the technology and the people who tell other people what it does and why they want it.
[15:39] You need to be able to have a broad system that’s collecting accurate information about your behavior and that really does understand you.
[20:55] The person is still the center of creativity and innovation and how the work gets done, but they could be leveraging technology in a more personal way.
Today, we’re talking to Calvin Hsu from Citrix about bringing together technology, people and business to fix a very expensive problem: $7 trillion in lost output. Hsu is the VP of Product Marketing at Citrix, and is part of an exciting new kind of digital workspace and a transformed employee experience. The company just announced they’ve added new features within the Citrix® Workspace™ — such as the intelligent feed and personalized workflows. So it’s a great time to have this conversation.
If you happened to catch Hsu’s presentation at the recent Citrix Synergy event, you know he’s deeply involved — you might even say obsessed — with providing organizations with a digital workspace that does away with the hyper-siloed, apps-by-the-dozen experience in favor of one that’s seamless, aligned with business objectives and more secure. Hsu is a technologist with a difference: he started out as an English major, of all things, and has never lost his love of story. And if there’s a story to his work at Citrix, it’s a through-line of creativity, but with a clear belief that if you’re not aligned with business objectives, the innovation isn’t doing what it should.
Application Overload
Hsu pointed out that spending $7 trillion on applications that actually thwart engagement experience and output is nobody’s fault. “When we drop a number like that, everyone covers their mouth and says, ‘Oh geez, did I do that?’’ But it’s more the natural outcome of how we’ve built technology for decades — application by application, upgrade by upgrade. This siloed thinking has resulted in employees using some 30 or 40 different applications and digital tools on any given day, and without question, that can be exhausting. On any given day, the average employee spends nearly 65% of their time on busy work and in meetings, 20% searching for information and just 15% doing what they want and are paid to do.
People Are the Center of Experience
Hsu discussed the need to shift from a jigsaw puzzle of applications to a cohesive workspace — and how a discussion with a customer made him think about how we use technology. “He was one of the earlier customers … deploying enterprise applications and really actively measuring people’s satisfaction and how much they would recommend it to their coworkers,” Hsu recalled. When the subject of metrics came up, the customer said he wouldn’t use them, as he knew his employees would hate it. Putting people and focusing on experience is vital — but it also changes the game in terms of tech.
Getting Security Right
Of course with countless users on a digital platform, security is tantamount. But security needs to smarten up, Hsu said. He brought up credit card fraud protection — in which the credit card company collects data about your habits and behaviors, and then mistakenly decides that if you’re in a new country or buying something different, something must be wrong. The company puts a hold on the card based on this false positive, and the customer is furious. It’s critical that security measures applied to digital workspaces be based on broader and smarter criteria. And that’s just as important in terms of delivering a seamless experience as the rest of the platform.
In my conversation with Hsu we covered so much ground, including his take on the future of work. The future of work needs less digital noise and no more meaningless tasks —and that’s what’s happening now, as he pointed out. This is an intelligent digital workspace that really provides employees with the personalized experience they need to be their most productive and do the work that matters. That’s what we all want, I’d say. I think you’ll find Hsu’s perspective just as interesting as I did.
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
Calvin Hsu on Linkedin and Twitter
This episode is sponsored by Citrix.
Photo by Florian Krumm on Unsplash
