Leaders recognized in Digital Workplace Leader of the Year 2020 awards

As we all face a challenging year, it’s never been more important to acknowledge the importance of great digital workplace leaders who can keep the team motivated, take tough decisions, and get creative when it matters.

At DWG, we love to hear about the work of these passionate leaders in our industry. The Digital Workplace Leader of the Year award, now in its fourth year, is our way of sharing this excitement with our community and ensuring that those people get the acknowledgement they deserve.

In 2020, Digital Workplace Leader of the Year was awarded to Priya Thummalapalli, Vice President, HR Digital Strategy at Prudential Financial, for leading work to revolutionize the HR digital experience at the organization. A number of other individuals from the short list were also recognized in this year’s awards for specific areas of achievement, such as leading during a crisis, employee experience, and accelerating the digital journey.

Presenting the awards live on air at DWG24, DWG CEO Paul Miller commented: “We have seen some really inspirational leaders this year, who have excelled in some particularly demanding times. It is such a pleasure to be able to present these awards for 2020.”

So, in no particular order, here are the additional 2020 Digital Workplace Leader of the Year awards:

Martha Brown of Duke Energy wins an award for Employee Experience

Martha is Portal Product Owner at Duke Energy, where she’s led the team to deliver an award-winning new portal that is underpinned by strong content governance. She’s passionate about the power of user-centred design to enable engagement, inspire innovation and improve the employee experience. Martha has successfully cultivated a team that works well together, has a shared vision and responds swiftly to user needs and feedback. The result? A consistently high-performing modern intranet that makes the lives of employees easier and enables them to work more effectively. Martha is a valued member of the wider digital workplace community where she freely shares her knowledge with peers.

Susan Quain of Fidelity International wins an award for Digital Acceleration

Susan is Head of Digital Internal Channels at Fidelity International, where she’s accelerating the company’s journey towards new ways of working via digital enablement. As a leader, Susan thinks strategically and has excellent planning, organizational and influence management skills – all of which are complemented by a proven ability to leverage new technologies and existing use cases to leapfrog the associate experience. She’s passionate about how digital technology can be used as a driver for making people’s lives easier. Specific achievements include: highlighting the role and importance of the digital workplace at Fidelity International, delivering a new intranet platform and Yammer implementation, introduction of agile ways of working, as well as championing the need for a user-centric digital team to cater better for employees. Susan has spoken at industry events such as Intranet Now and DWG24.

Graham Kennedy wins an award for being a Game Changer

Graham is Head of Digital Workplace at Fidelity Investments, where, in just under a year, he has built a 40-person digital workplace team and established a holistic strategy and roadmap. As a leader, he’s been described as “a visionary with velocity” and has quickly garnered strong executive support for the digital workplace as a key enabler for associates. Work so far has included switching on governance, rationalizing the current portfolio of tools and sites, and enabling new ways of connecting and collaborating during the global pandemic. With a strong foundation built for scale, the future of the digital workplace is bright under Graham’s leadership.

Chelsey Louzeiro wins an award for Connected Workforce

Chelsey is Global Communications Senior Specialist at Heifer International, where she’s led work to connect a global team spanning 21 countries and multiple languages. Under her leadership, a new intranet known as the “The Corral” forms a centrepiece to a culture of collaboration and innovation. Her creative approaches to fostering adoption and use (including a gamification mechanism linked to the organization’s 75th birthday) have led to impressive levels of engagement. Chelsey has shared her knowledge at industry events, such as the KMWorld conference, and recently won a Community Roundtable Award for her gamification programme. During the pandemic, she has supported content creators to produce a COVID-19 hub of information and resources. Colleagues acknowledge the creativity, passion, insight and humour she brings to her leadership role.

Ana Jauregui wins an award for Crisis Leadership

Ana is Senior Product Group Manager, Collaboration, Content and Portal Services at Nestlé, where she’s built a team of curious, open-minded and innovative people who share her passion for helping Nestlé’s workforce to be more collaborative and productive. A powerful example of this in action was delivering, in record time, a simplified version of the company intranet (that does not require VPN), accessible from any location, on any device, allowing people to be informed on latest updates and to access their most important applications. Behind the scenes, this was guided by her strong product management approach, performance measurement discipline and employee-centred focus. As a leader, Ana is known for inspiring her global team, always keeping the user in mind and getting senior management support early.

The Digital Workplace of the Year Awards, produced by DWG, celebrate those organizations and practitioners who have excelled at creating well-executed, high-performing digital workplace environments.

The Awards provide the perfect opportunity for you and your organization to share your digital workplace achievements with peers and to gain global, industry recognition!

In 2021, perhaps you know someone you could be a 2021 winner? Look out on our website for entries, opening early 2021.

Take the next step…

Categorised in: Digital Workplace of the Year Awards, DWG24