Toni Vanwinkle

Sr Director, Digital Workplace Experience, Adobe

Supernova Award Category: 

Future of Work - Employee Experience

The Organization: 

Digital Workplace Experience (DWx) is a team within the Adobe Technology Services business unit at Adobe. DWx enables the global Adobe workforce to collaborate, innovate and be productive from anywhere. ​When implementing new products at Adobe, DWx acts as customer zero, a team that provides quality insights on product experience and implementation and provides real world use case examples of how Adobe products can improve the employee experience and drive operational excellence.

The Problem: 

Adobe conducts constant human centered design research and visioning sessions to ensure our employees have the tools they need in order to stay productive anywhere. We have had rapid employee growth and a over 40% of our employees are new, having been with the company less than two years. They are digital natives (Gen Y+Z) and are accustomed to consumer mobile experiences. These new employees are still getting accustomed to the workplace and often struggle with navigating our large offices. Our research indicated they wanted simple, real time information regarding the amenities on our campus as well as wayfinding and booking conference rooms. So, we created Adobe Life, a mobile app and platform that provides an all-inclusive consumer experience that simplifies and moderinizes the employee experience and our landscape in one location. The Adobe Life app pilot was released right before Adobe shifted all global employees to work from home due to COVID. As office closures extended, employees were clamoring for work from home content, wellbeing information, micro-learning and podcasts as a way to stay connected to the Adobe corporate culture. As a result, the Adobe Life platform also shifted from a campus focus to a work from anywhere app providing a wide variety of content and serving as a one-stop shop for critical return-to-office tools and resources.

The Solution: 

We are providing an exceptional digital employee experience, regardless of location with our new smart campus app – Adobe Life, designed with Adobe products, as a solution to power our new hybrid workforce. Adobe Life was created with our people in mind - drawing insights from employees’ workstyles, workflows and workspaces – and is ripe with functionality to help employees stay productive, connected, informed, and well. Adobe Life goes with you wherever you are and serves as a critical function to our office re-entry plans. Each office will have its own digital campus in the app, serving as a hub of curated news and information catered to their location. In the office, employees will be able to use wayfinding, book conference rooms on the go and even order food from the cafes.  Outside of the office, employees will be able to stay connected to colleagues with personalized community engagement and custom notifications powered by artificial intelligence.

The Results: 

Adobe has celebrated over 20 years of being listed as best companies to work for by multiple different media outlets. Adobe takes enormous pride in our strong and celebrated corporate culture and embodies the Adobe core values of being genuine, exceptional, innovative, and involved. The most celebrated impact of the Adobe Life app was that employees were able to stay engaged with their colleagues and that it extend the corporate culture to our home campuses with these features:

-Podcasts – our most poppular portion of the Adobe Life app.

-Take 5 with Adobe: a video series highlighting what employees need to know each week

- Talent Development Team: a learning series that helps employees grow skills in less than 30 seconds

-Adobe Nutrition: quick insights and lifestyle editorials that are cultivated in partnership with the food services team at Adobe

-New Employee Spotlights: a fast, fun way to introduce team members to the growing Adobe workforce

-Intern Campus – Launched Adobe Life Intern Campus to help drive intern engagement while they are working virtually and to start collecting feedback geared towards improving the Adobe Life & intern experience

Metrics: 

The Adobe Life app officially launched March 24,2021 and has had over 9,000 unique visitors. The app  achieved an average of 4.8/5 customer satisfaction rating across Apple/Android stores. Additional campuses released at go-live in support of office re-entry for Sydney, Singapore & Tokyo. Delivered Intern Campus Beta for our North America interns. The Intern Campus offers specific content for news, events, wellbeing, an Intern FAQ and a specific Intern directory.

Over 9,000 unique visitors

27,000 visits

Over 330,000 page views

3.31 Average Session Length

The Technology: 

The Adobe Life platform includes integrations from the following Adobe products:

• Adobe Photoshop for app design and user-interface

• Adobe XD for prototyping and envisioning the employee experience journey

• Adobe Analytics for audience intelligence across platform users

• Adobe Sign for management of secure document authorization

External Partners:

• Custom Development on top of CXApp

• Aruba Networks

Disruptive Factor: 

At Adobe, we believe the future of work will be flexible and hybrid, enabled by a digital-first mindset. That means that whether employees are working from home, an Adobe office, or somewhere in between, we’re innovating to help employees and our business thrive. The Adobe Life app is geared toward the digital nomad and is in keeping with the Adobe Technology Services business goal to keep employees productive anywhere. We give employees the flexibility to choose the best place for them to get their work done whether it’s on-site or at home or a coffee shop – to inspire quality, creativity, and productivity. The Adobe Life platform helps us improve workplace readiness by layering in COVID-critical infrastructure features and incorporating omni-channel experiences that support our emerging agile workplace. And best of all, Adobe Life keeps employees connect culturally via video storytelling and podcasts. Most flattering, the Adobe Life Team has been sharing this solution with multiple Fortune 500 companies who are Adobe customers. These companies have similar employee engagement dillemas and Adobe is proud to be a leader in the area of cultural adapability who gets to share the Adobe Life story with our customers.

Shining Moment: 

The Adobe Life app had a long pilot process and many shifts in focus. We launched during a company meeting with a fun sizzle reel and the chat tool of our meeting room to explode! Comments like “YaYY!”, “Installing it now” and “Oh man that’ll be so useful” coupled with clapping, happy faces and heart emoticons. The overwhelmingly positive comments followed by instant downloads reinforced the Adobe employees’ desire to stay connected.

About Adobe

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. Creativity is in our DNA. Our game-changing innovations are redefining the possibilities of digital experiences. We connect content and data and introduce new technologies that democratize creativity, shape the next generation of storytelling, and inspire entirely new categories of business. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.