Unite 2024: Top takeaways for IT leaders

5 key take aways for EX-focused IT leaders

In today’s competitive landscape, the organizations that thrive are those that maximize the IT opportunities that truly drive employee experience (EX) improvements. At this year’s Unite, industry-leading speakers unpicked the importance of this trend.

We heard from Jed Griffiths, Chief Digital Officer at Microsoft, and Cheryl McKinnon, Principal Analyst at Forrester, on the power of an interconnected tech stack for Organizational Velocity. We had Unily’s own Chief Technology Officer, Sam Hassani, and WorkGrid’s Chief Technology Officer, speak on a panel about unleashing the value of AI-powered work. Unily’s Head of Product Marketing, Matthew Boyd, explored how we can cut through the digital noise to demystify even the most complex digital landscapes.

The role of IT has evolved from purely functional to strategic powerhouse, essential for both customer and employee engagement. While Forrester reports that 66% of technology leaders plan to invest in EX or human capital management software in the coming year, these investments may fall short. Too often, the focus will be on efficiency rather than genuinely enhancing the employee experience.

Read on for a digest of the key takeaways for IT leaders looking to transform the digital workplace 2025 and beyond.

1. Organizational Velocity is the new imperative

During last year’s Unite we predicted that this decade would be defined by a laser-focus on employee experience, and a year later, we’re more confident than ever in that statement.

Unily’s CEO, Chris Ciauri noted in his opening keynote that we’re starting to see the momentum play out. Exceptional results are being generated from EX investments, with organizations that are paving the way demonstrating 3x more revenue growth and 11x the profit margin of their less frontier-facing peers.

During ‘Unily: The Future,’ Chris set out 5 principles for increasing Organizational Velocity. A definitive shift away from the often nebulous conversation around EX value, Organizational Velocity evolves that thinking – bringing return on employee-driven investment into sharp focus.

IT leaders should prioritize building deeper engagement and connections across the ‘new’ hybrid office. They should also drive alignment and simplify everyone’s digital experience through the employee experience tech stack. Governed AI should be leveraged across the digital estate to elevate human performance, and finally, CIOs or IT leaders should foster a velocity culture through workplace tooling.

Setting apart good enterprises from great ones, this strategic focus for employee experience allows IT leaders to break down silos, drive frictionless operations, spark decision-making speed with sharper pivots, and stay one step ahead of their competition. With Organizational Velocity, we now have a better way to describe the imperative of EX investment. A world-class tech stack, with a world-class EXP (Employee Experience Platform) at its core is how you get there.

2. Intentional design is key to demystifying the complex digital employee experience

In the modern era of work, tech stacks have become synonymous with complexity. This was made even more pervasive during the global pandemic whereby enterprises plugged gaps in digital capability overnight with little time for strategic thinking or forethought about the tech debt they may accumulate. During a key ‘Deep Dive’ session, Matt Boyd, Head of Product Marketing at Unily, took us through the impact of complex DEX (Digital Employee Experience).

There are grave impacts on productivity, burnout, engagement, and elusive focus in the working day to the swell of available applications. This not only generates friction as employees try to get stuff done, but frequently irrelevant notifications are causing digital noise – and ultimately, costly distraction. Unily’s recent research on this topic found that 59% of workers believe that digital noise is contributing to workplace stress, increasing to 71% for managers.

As IT leaders, you can combat this through intentional design across your digital estate. Targeting and personalization, connected execution across the enterprise, truly actionable workstyle analytics, and optimization with automation could unlock the door to clarity, demystifying your DEX for good. When taking this approach, CIOs can streamline their tech stack and holistically assess the tools and integrations available to employees, and crucially the overlap between them.

We learned that comprehensive analytics are vital for this clear-eyed comprehension. IT leaders could also look to intuitive tooling like Employee Journeys to automate and coalesce many touchpoints into a single flow that will efficiently guide employee attention. Matt also pointed out the imperative for cross-functional collaboration – success can only be achieved with diverse stakeholder investment, with a legion from IC, HR, and IT working as allies to lead the charge.

3. Ten years of intranet innovation can pack a mighty punch

An EXP at the heart of your digital estate should constantly evolve to supercharge connection and culture, power AI assisted work, and simplify your IT landscape. During Unite 2024, we heard from Cheryl McKinnon, Principal Analyst at Forrester, who brought us a remarkable statistic – intranet satisfaction rates are at an all-time high; 84% to be precise. This satisfaction increase has been underpinned by a decisive move to Cloud/Software as a Service delivery.

During the conference, we also heard from, dormakaba, one of our longest-standing customers in Europe, who are a shining example of this progression. A brave and early-adopter of this shift to the Cloud, they’ve been able to combine agility of tooling with a focus on employee needs to progress over time.

We took the opportunity to reflect on ten years of iteration, considering how the technology has evolved, how it has adapted to emerging employee preferences and business needs, and what the team behind the platform has learned along the way.

The team at dormakaba highlighted that constant analysis of performance and analytics across the platform has been key to its continued success. Although they’ve been leveraging the same platform, they feel they’ve unearthed thousands of opportunities, taking an agile approach with the ability to react fast to new trends and shape their platform for a workforce in flux.

In addition to leaning into the tooling, dormakaba invested in their culture, in their audiences, and their individuals across the decade since their intranet’s launch – with interaction and engagement across the platform proving crucial for the enterprise to engage in this cultural shift. From HR to IT operations, the team also focused on training ‘inside heroes’ whom they credit for a great deal of their success.

Put simply, investing in shaping and evolving your EXP in the long term can uncover remarkable benefits. Digital workplace innovation with a strategic eye on the horizon will help CIOs lead their enterprise effectively. With the right tooling IT leaders will have the flexibility to read the room, safe in the knowledge that they can respond for success.

4. Surprisingly, happiness at work in the age of AI is possible

We were lucky enough to kick off the second day of Unite 2024 with a keynote from Mo Gawdat, Former Chief Business Officer at Google X and bestselling author on topics of happiness and AI. Mo helped us ponder whether happiness at work could be the catalyst for productivity and innovation, and how we could cultivate this in the age of AI.

Although it’s the new frontier of technology, trust in AI is still the biggest barrier to adoption, and when 88% expect to increase that adoption (Forrester), thoughtfully governed AI is the solution. As Mo outlined, we also know that one of the biggest barriers to employee happiness is stress; but what if governed AI tooling held the key to dissipating much of it?

Challenging us to redefine the formula for success, Mo explained that stress equates to the sum of problems employees face, divided by the sum of their abilities and the tools they have available to channel those abilities through. It follows that IT leaders have incredible power to minimize employee stress through the digital tooling they make available in the workforce.

If you can streamline or rationalize these tools you’ll knock stress levels right down, and if you make that tooling a joy for employees to use, you might just eviscerate stress levels across the enterprise. With thoughtful AI tooling, the opportunity is boundless. With governed AI employees can research and find information, synthesize information, and generate information – helping them better achieve their aims, and reduce stress across their day job.

Digital noise is the new enemy. As Mo set out, “The problem in the modern world? There are no tigers, only emails.” Burnout, worry, anxiety, fear – all of these feelings can have huge impact on your workforce. In a true AI utopia, where this future-ready tooling is used for good, it could have the single biggest impact on our happiness at work.

That said, Mo also highlighted the delicate balance we must strike between this tech and human connection – as in the age of AI, this will be the key differentiator. As an IT leader, as a leader of any sort, your most important asset is your people - and their number one motivator is happiness.

AI and automation promise to transform the future of work, but your people’s happiness is fundamental to any and all progress – and we must not lose sight of that.

5. An EX solution should be the digital fabric for the modern workforce

Unily made a few big announcements at Unite 2024, and as an IT leader – you should be in the know on how they could deliver value towards your goals. During Unily: The Future, we heard from Unily’s Head of Product, Leslie Bagala, on how Unily is constantly innovating and focusing on delivering value for IT leaders.

With all signs pointing toward the fragmented and confusing digital workplace being enterprise enemy #1 in the modern world of work, Unily’s roadmap announcements center around the need to reduce friction and bring powerful tooling together into a seamless ecosystem.

The Insight Center responds to the emerging problem posed by the rapid adoption of digital assistants and copilots in the enterprise: how to efficiently manage and interact with these new technologies in a climate of growing digital complexity?

Unlike other vendors, Unily brings to the table a fully-agnostic Bring-Your-Own-Assistant (BYOA) and Bring-Your-Own Large Language Model (BYOLLM) approach with its Insight Center. By combining powerful search with digital assistant solutions, the world’s largest enterprises can now embrace new opportunities to accelerate governed AI adoption across the workforce.

Other product announcements included:

• Direct messaging: This feature provides secure, real-time peer-to-peer communication for frontline and mobile workers, addressing gaps currently filled by unofficial solutions like WhatsApp.
• Sentiment Analysis: An AI-powered dashboard that lets you gauge employee sentiment in real-time, increasing your ability to connect with ever-changing organizational morale and needs.
• UnilyGo: The latest addition to Unily’s already market-leading mobile app offering. In comparison to Unily Mobile, UnilyGo answers the need for a streamlined mobile solution that is laser-focused on providing consumer-grade communications and community-building experiences to frontline workers.

Employee experience excellence is the new imperative for IT leaders

In the future of work, CIOs and IT leaders will play an even more pivotal role in shaping digital workplaces, curating experiences to drive organizational velocity, and even elevating happiness across the enterprise. They have the power to drive digital transformation across integrated, collaborative tools, reducing digital friction as they streamline DEX, and enabling seamless work with governed AI at its core.

CIOs must ensure that employees have access to an intuitive, scalable, and secure digital estate that boosts productivity and communication. We hope you’ve found this round-up useful in your role revolutionizing the employee experience with tech tooling, and we can’t wait to see you at next year’s Unite.

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