On the air: Celebrating 50 Deep Dive Digital Workplace podcast episodes

Time flies when you’re having fun. As the Deep Dive podcast celebrates its 50th episode, host Weston Morris reflects on a whirlwind tour through digital workplace discussions – a journey that's been as engaging as it has been informative.

As the senior director of global strategy for Digital Workplace Solutions, Weston is intrigued by strategies and tools for improving the digital workplace. He also loves learning from others who share his passion. In January 2020, he started the Unisys podcast to bring these conversations to a format that could benefit professionals like you.

To celebrate 50 episodes of the Deep Dive podcast, Weston reflected on his most memorable experiences during Episode 51. Unisys Senior Vice President and General Manager of Digital Workplace Solutions Patrycja Sobera asked him about the highlights of those 50 episodes. In this candid conversation, Weston shares how he entered the digital workplace field and recounts compelling stories from the podcast's history. Here are some of the standout moments from Weston’s reflections.

Most impactful lockdown lesson

Digital workplace conversations used to focus on the selection of digital tools, how to reduce their cost and the support users needed to do their best work. Robotic process automation was a popular subject.

This evolved beginning in 2020. Lockdowns, the explosion in the remote workforce and the Great Resignation happened. Suddenly, organizations began prioritizing employee experience and asking: How do we keep employees happy and productive at home?

This necessitated a shift to experience-level agreements (XLAs), which let you measure the difference between the desired experience level and the actual experience you deliver. XLAs were a topic during the popular Episode 20, “Two amazing things happen when you measure experience.”

“Using XLAs and focusing on employee experience is key to making employees happy and optimizing productivity,” Weston said. “If you think about it, anytime you’d had a bad experience as a consumer, the reason is often because of employees, so there’s a strong connection between customer experience and employee experience.”

Favorite behind-the-scenes secret

Listeners often ask Weston about the Deep Dive podcast theme music. It was composed by Barry Tannebaum, a former colleague who has a blues band.

“I said, ‘Hey, would you mind composing and recording a riff for me?’ and he did,” Weston said. “So, Barry, if you’re listening, thank you very much for making this a better podcast.”

Most memorable moment

Some of Weston’s most cherished moments involve guests sharing unexpected insights. Such a moment occurred during Episode 27, “The top 5 stories from the digital workplace,” when he spoke with Ned Miller, who hosts podcasts The Digital Workplace and Work Minus.

Ned described seven types of meetings ranging from those where you want attendees to silently listen and absorb to brainstorming sessions where you want attendees to collaborate.

Tailoring your approach based on meeting type can yield better results. For instance, meetings that require collaboration could benefit from an icebreaker that gets people interacting and comfortable with each other before they start problem-solving.

“I thought I knew how to run a meeting,” Weston said, “but then I realized there really should be a very different structure for the different types of meetings.”

Favorite Deep Dive chart-toppers

The service desk and generative AI are topics of particular interest to podcast listeners. Besides Episode 20 about XLAs, listeners’ favorite episodes include:

• Episode 2: “Analytics engines inside your help desk”
• Episode 47: “Two steps for creating an award-winning service desk”
• Episode 43: “From hype to reality: Generative AI in the digital workplace”

During Episode 43, Weston spoke with Unisys AI Portfolio Vice President Suzanne Taylor, PhD, about the differences between traditional and generative AI (gen AI) and the latter’s applications. In a nutshell, traditional AI is about pattern recognition and gen AI is about content creation.

“Suzanne boiled it down so simply. For example, if you had a bunch of photos of graffiti, I might use traditional AI to identify all the Banksy street art and then talk to gen AI and say, ‘I want to make a graphic for a presentation that’s about how bots are taking over the world and make it look like Banksy,’ ” Weston explained.

Weston found Suzanne’s explanation so helpful that he encouraged everyone on his Unisys team to listen to the podcast.

Most surprising takeaway

Weston has a philosophy about what will interest podcast listeners: “If I have an ‘Aha’ moment, then likely my listeners will too,” Weston explains.

Weston experienced such a moment while recording Episode 44, “The secret to using frontline worker experience data to boost productivity.” When speaking with Unisys experts Stacy Harder and Stephen Tong, a crucial insight from 2020 surfaced: while office workers had the technologies and tools necessary to adapt to the changed work environment, frontline workers were left behind. This disparity highlighted a tremendous need for tools and strategies to support employees who couldn’t work remotely.

“Frontline workers are the people who stayed in the factories, stayed in the hospitals. Frontline workers’ work environment got worse during the pandemic while office workers’ work environment got better,” Weston said. “I did Episode 44, where we said, ‘How do we improve the frontline worker experience?’ and it’s just brilliant listening to Stacy and Stephen on how they are finding ways to make it possible for frontline workers to collaborate better and have tools to access AI to make their jobs better.”

Explore Deep Dive podcast insights

Find your favorite moment from the Deep Dive podcast. Be inspired by conversations about every aspect of the digital workplace, giving you insights on how to work more productively, streamline processes and collaborate more effectively.

Look for future episodes on how to get a return on investment from generative AI and what the future of XLAs looks like. And in the meantime, listen to Episode 51 for more of Weston’s perspective and check out the podcasts mentioned in this blog post.

Explore all episodes for insights that can help you optimize your digital workplace.