Meet a Bright Mind: Ernst Décsey

 

In this series we talk to a ConnectMinds member somewhere in the world. This month it’s Ernst Décsey, who has more than 25 years’ experience in the field of digital workplace. Ernst is currently Digital Workplace Specialist at the Unicef in Geneva. He has been a member and a great contributor in the Leading the Employee Experience group in Geneva for a number of years .

 

Who is Ernst?

I currently work for UNICEF Private Fundraising and Partnerships Division in Geneva and have my main focus on improving the digital workplace experience of the organisation. While I graduated in international relations, my first job was as a freelance web consultant. At some point I had the opportunity to travel to Asia where I volunteered building websites for orphanages. When I got back to Europe, I applied for a job at the UN High Commission for Refugees as a web developer, but they got in touch with an offer of another job: building their intranet. At that time, I didn´t even know such a thing existed. After a few years, I was coordinating the entire intranet of the UNHCR, and that led me to UNICEF, where today I support digital workplace on a broader level.

The epidemic ate the strategy, but accelerated the digital transformation

Over the past two years, it has become abundantly clear, that strategies for organisational digital transformation have been accelerated enormously by COVID. Back in late 2019 it was hard to convince people to stop using shared drives in favour of online collaboration sites and their associated tools. Overnight we had to work from home and that accelerated our digital transformation intensely. Like so many others, we´re still trying to find the best way to combine the freedom and flexibility of working remotely with the organisational need to preserve the fabric and culture of the workplace. In this process, we [the digital workplace people] are working at identifying which digital workplace solutions and tools can best help us and how we can help our employees benefit from them in the best possible way.

How do you benefit from being a member of ConnectMinds?

I really loved it back when we got to meet each other face to face. I miss that. Luckily, ConnectMinds has been facilitating a series of insightful online courses during the lockdowns. I recently went to one about analytics and insights for employee facing channels with Cai Kjaer from SWOOP Analytics, which was really inspiring.

As good as the webinars have been, the glue has been a bit loose during the pandemic, but with the restrictions lifting, it is going to be so good to link up and connect minds at in person sessions again.

The key challenge for me right now is to keep the intranet on the agenda of our stakeholders. We need to make sure that the intranet is used to its full extent in support of our digital workplace. When an urgent crisis comes along, like the current war in Ukraine, a lot of employees in UNICEF need to drop everything else and focus on the crisis. This inevitably means that tasks such as maintaining the intranet are not necessarily a top priority anymore. To compensate for that, we will try to incorporate more useful governance. Hopefully I will be able to bring lessons from these processes and share them in the ConnecMinds network.

Meet other bright minds in the network

Remote Working, Employee Experience, COVID-19, Peer learningLau Andreasenremote working, meet a bright mind, employee experience