Kristy DeLeeuw (00:04):
So we have effectively turned on Google Workspace for 20,000 employees, so all of our frontline employees now have Google Workspace. When I say Google Workspace, I mean the typical email, calendar, chat meets, productivity suite, all of that, but when you start to go down this journey, you realize that there are other things that you have to consider as well.
John Veltri (00:35):
You’re listening to another episode of Cloud and Clear, SADA’s cloud transformation podcast. I’m your host, John Veltri, and today we’re pleased to welcome Kristy DeLeeuw, Vice President of Enterprise Transformation at Plexus to our show. Kristy, welcome to the show.
Kristy DeLeeuw (00:51):
Thank you for having me, John. I’m excited to be here.
John Veltri (00:54):
Before we get started and before we jump into today’s show, Kristy, give us an overview of Plexus and what you do. I don’t know if that’s necessarily the most well-recognized brand name out there, but I think once you describe it to people, they’ll realize there’s a lot to it.
Kristy DeLeeuw (01:10):
Yeah, absolutely. So, at Plexus we’re driven by a really powerful vision. We help to create products that build a better world, and we partner with leading companies across industries like aerospace and defense, healthcare, life sciences and industrial companies to design, manufacture and service some of the world’s most transformative products. So, it’s pretty exciting stuff.
John Veltri (01:33):
Like I said, it’s a lot.
Kristy DeLeeuw (01:35):
It is a lot, and a little bit about me. So, I lead enterprise transformation and my focus is on those talented workforce, those talented team members. So, what I love doing at Plexus is I have the privilege of bringing digital transformation initiatives to 20,000 people, ensuring that they’re enabled with modern technology to support their efforts to create products that build a better world. So, it’s just really exciting stuff.
John Veltri (02:06):
Yeah, and to echo that piece, I was directly and deeply involved with the relationship that SADA has with Plexus, and can’t find a more engaged, nice, hardworking, dedicated and talented group of people than you find at Plexus.
(02:25):
So to that end, we recently launched Google Workspace transformation for Plexus. Can you share a little bit why Plexus chose to think about Google Workspace and Google Cloud for its digital transformation needs and what brought you to that point?
Kristy DeLeeuw (02:40):
Yeah, so Plexus is on a really exciting journey to accelerate our growth, but along the way we’ve realized that we have legacy platforms that were just holding us back. As I said before, just talented team members, but if you’re stuck with technology, you can’t move, you can’t push the boundaries like you really want to be pushing them, so we needed technology to enable a global workforce, break down barriers, provide a greater sense of community and allow for more dynamic innovation.
(03:16):
I mean, that was one of the biggest factors around our journey to just really head to Google Workspace. There’s a few things, I’m going say two significant factors that really were a part of our decision. One is the way that Google continuously improves upon the features of their platform. So kind of like we are with our Plexus customers, we’re continuously improving to deliver excellence. We saw that pretty quickly throughout that assessment journey with what Google provides.
(03:50):
Then the second one is really around that change journey. So, we really needed a partner who was willing to go through the change journey with us recognizing that our frontline team members were going to be impacted with a transformation like this, and we really needed somebody who is willing to take that people first approach with the transformation. So, that led us to the journey that, John, you talked about with that Google Workspace implementation and selecting that.
John Veltri (04:22):
So with that, can you give us some overview of what’s transpired so far, some of the accomplishments that have been put on paper and where this transformation is at this point?
Kristy DeLeeuw (04:35):
Yes. So, I’m going to start with the technology side of it. So we have effectively turned on Google Workspace for 20,000 employees, so all of our frontline employees now have Google Workspace. When I say Google Workspace, I mean the typical email, calendar, chat meets, productivity suite, all of that, but when you start to go down this journey, you realize that there are other things that you have to consider as well, like browsers and mobile device management, and any digital transformation just sort of grows and ours did as well. So that is a lot of change, so we ended up changing quite a bit in a very short amount of time. It took us I’d say about nine months from planning to execution across those things. So, not insignificant.
(05:32):
So that was really the technology side, but on the change side is probably where we have more of our most proud accomplishments I’m going to say, because I was reading a stat the other day in one of the big consulting journals around the change statistics. Around 70% to 90% of digital transformation’s failing. I think that’s a stat that’s commonly used, but because it fails because of the people engagement or lack thereof, leadership engagement enablement. I mean, that concept of if you build it they will come doesn’t necessarily apply to technology, so you have to put a lot of focus into it. That’s what I would say I’m most proud of what we did over the last nine to 12 months is really around that people journey.
John Veltri (06:27):
Yeah, it’s different than building a grocery store, right?
Kristy DeLeeuw (06:30):
Yeah.
John Veltri (06:31):
I think one of the things that strikes me about these conversations, whether it’s the one we’re having about Plexus and yourself or any other organizations and why at SADA we call it this part of our business, why we call it enterprise transformation, it is not purchasing technology for the sake of replacing one technology with another.
(06:51):
In a lot of ways it is, but like you so clearly identified or articulated, it has so much sprawl, it connects to so many different aspects of the business. The employees touch it so regularly throughout a given day, let alone a longer period of time, and it’s how everybody engages with how they “go to work,” and that way they go to work is individualized.
(07:17):
When you start to peel the onion back of all the different ways that businesses truly transform by buying this technology, which just seems like a technology purchase, it can create that impetus of change that organizations oftentimes are looking for, but don’t know how to actually do it, right? They want to transform, but they don’t know how. For those companies that are listening to this and wondering, sometimes leading with changing the way people go to work every day by the technology that enables them to work changes the culture and transforms the way the business runs. It’s not counterintuitive, but it happens.
Kristy DeLeeuw (07:58):
Yeah, absolutely it does. I mean, if you think about on a workforce, you’ve got a large majority of your workforce that have only used the tools that they’re currently using and they’ve been using them forever. Now, you have this emerging workforce coming that’s really using these tools and have used these tools from college, from maybe high school, from early on, and you start to see this shift in how the companies can blend together there, and I would say that’s some of the really exciting stuff that we are seeing right now.
(08:33):
We’re not that far into the journey, I feel like it just happened yesterday. It did not, but it feels like it may have just happened yesterday. So we’re pretty early in the journey, but we’re already seeing the spark and the excitement, and that’s so fun to watch.
John Veltri (08:49):
So with that, in terms of your progression in the journey, where are you in that transformation process and what do you see coming next in terms of your next steps of development?
Kristy DeLeeuw (09:00):
Yeah, so like I said before, we turned it on. I’m going to say we flipped the switch and that probably sounds easier than it actually was. My global technology friends would probably be frowning by me saying we flipped a switch, ’cause we probably flipped a lot of switches there. But that’s in some regards the easier part, we now have to start to transform the way we work.
(09:25):
We started a leadership engagement series. So, it was a monthly series where … it is a monthly series where we ask our leaders to join for an hour a month to talk about this transformation. We didn’t take this decision lightly, actually SADA was a really big driving force towards this. But we didn’t take it lightly, because we’re asking, I don’t know, 1,000 of our leaders within our organization, our people leaders, to join a call once a month and we know time is money, but to help them understand the journey, to help them get the information to support their teams, to give them literal references that they could walk away with that they could use to flow down information to their teams, giving them an opportunity for question and answer. We tried to give them and arm them with everything they might need.
(10:20):
So we’re taking that and we’re going to continue that through into the next part of the journey, but it’s going to look and feel a little bit different, because now we want to start bringing in some spotlight into there. So, we want to take where pockets of the organization are doing really fun, innovative things with the tools that we have, which we have a lot of those, and we want to bring them to this forum, so that the leaders across the organization can start to see what other team members are doing and what our other teams are doing, and hopefully that sparks that innovative spirit and curiosity that we’re expecting there. So I mean, that’s one big thing that we’re moving forward with in the next phase here.
John Veltri (11:01):
Yeah, and I think along with how you’re engaging the population of the company, the leaders, and showing that thought leadership, there’s a lot of change coming. You mentioned this in the beginning of your talk track as well, there’s a lot coming from Google in terms of product changes and enablement that we can help provide, whether it’s around just general generative AI or some of the feature releases that Google has brought, more specifically giving everybody Gemini, giving everyone NotebookLM, adding Google Vids.
(11:32):
These are significant changes that Google is adding into its platform, and this is a person who’s been doing this with Google for over a decade, the first time we’re seeing this kind of transformative product being given to customers outright. Now we have to think about, okay, well, now how do we add this to the transformation and how do we help customers adopt these capabilities, and how do we put this into the adoption strategy? That how do I go to work, phrase I like to use, and how do we augment that and make people excited and find new innovation? It’s a transformative process end-to-end.
Kristy DeLeeuw (12:15):
It sure is. What you said right there, that whole increasing scope. At the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is enable our workforce. Our team, we have to enable our front line. Bottom line that’s what we need to do. It’s great, ’cause when you see all these new things come in, Google Vids and the tabs in Google Docs was sort of a game changer in our world. So some of the small things, but yet some other really big things, Google Vids, Gemini, NotebookLM. Every time we bring those in, once again, we have to think about how are we enabling them.
(12:48):
It’s great to have them in the environment. How do we teach people how to use them? More importantly maybe, not me teaching anyone how to do it, but how can they teach each other how to do it? How do you start to lay the seeds in the foundation, maybe building some small videos and training, but then growing this ambassador type of a network in order to have people learning from each other? Which is ultimately where I think all that magic happens, and that’s really what we’re trying to create.
John Veltri (13:20):
Related to that last question, can you share what we can expect from Plexus overall?
Kristy DeLeeuw (13:29):
Yeah, we’re at a pivotal point right now where our efforts to modernize our collaboration and productivity technology is complementing other areas and other initiatives that we have specifically around AI and decision technologies, and so all of that’s kind of coming together in this really interesting space and time.
(13:53):
Again, we’re trying to enable our frontline employees, and at the end of the day, we want to give them the tools to innovate, problem solve, and continuously improve on what we’re delivering to our customers. Driving that change and making sure that it’s seen, it’s used, it’s giving our teams what they deserve in terms of tools and technologies, and so that’s where I get passionate each day.
John Veltri (14:24):
Not to be hokey about it, but that’s what we’re passionate about too, right? We want to be seamless and quiet in the background and make the product just work, so that the transformation comes from the employees after the technology gives them the tools to do so. We want to make the biggest technological transformations seem like non-events, so that the magical moments that come from the employees seem to and do happen organically, right?
Kristy DeLeeuw (14:52):
Yeah, earlier when I talked about some of those keys to success, another really big one is the Google Ambassador Network that we started last year. It’s certainly not rocket science, but when you think about how change is implemented in any organization, you have change that can be top-down, which works-ish, but then you also have change of creating that dynamic environment across colleagues.
(15:19):
When we started that Google Ambassador Network, I mean, we basically said, you don’t need to know anything about technology, you just need to be curious and you need to want to help each other. So we wanted 5% of the organization to raise their hand, and they certainly did. They showed up and were really, really engaged. They were excited. Our Google Go Live, people are painting their fingernails Google colors, and the energy that was created in that week of where we turned everything on was pretty fun, really magical, but we’re going to take that now, because it’s been really successful.
(16:01):
My favorite is when you are on a call and an individual asked a question, and it was a Google-related question, how do I do this? My favorite was, I didn’t have to answer it. Our CEO, he answered it. It can’t get any better than that when you have people around you or a few people went in the chat and they were answering the question via chat. I mean, nobody wants to hear me talk about it, it’s so much better when they’re talking about it together.
(16:30):
So we’re expanding that, and in this next phase of transformation we’re really asking people to think about doing things differently with our new tools, which is not an easy ask, but we’re expanding that. So we’re creating a Google innovator group, and so it’s the innovators that are stepping up. This time we are saying, well, we would love for you to actually have technology experience. Not in a global technology group, but playing with the tools enough where you feel like you can lean forward to start to get creative with solving the problems as people look at how do I take these things that I used to do, and if we want to remove some of those legacy tools, we got to really rethink about how we do them in the Google Workspace tools.
John Veltri (17:14):
Yeah, doing the same exact job, just doing it in a different way. Well, Kristy, thank you again for joining us today. Where can we learn more about Plexus?
Kristy DeLeeuw (17:24):
Yeah, you can always visit us online at plexus.com or follow us on LinkedIn. So, a few different ways to learn and happy to answer questions to anybody who reaches out to me as well.
John Veltri (17:37):
Kristy, thank you again, and thanks to everyone who took the time to listen to our Cloud and Clear Podcast today. You won’t want to miss exclusive insights from leaders like Kristy at Plexus, so please like and subscribe and we will see you next time on Cloud and Clear.
