Matching the Employee Experience to the Customer Experience

with Shaelyn Otikor, SVP & Head of Global Digital Workplace Strategy at Northern Trust Asset Servicing

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Shaelyn Otikor

Episode 39

”My goal is always to match the internal employee experience to their external experience. They have all the cool apps, social media, they know how to fly. But then they come into the office and we’re on old, archaic systems. So it’s nice to have this space that we can expand it to anyone who wants to learn the skill or develop it and give them these opportunities to grow their career at Northern Trust.”

This episode features an interview with Shaelyn Otikor, Senior Vice President and Head of Global Digital Workplace Strategy at Northern Trust in the Asset Servicing business unit. The Asset Servicing business unit contains 15,000 of the company’s 25,000 employees across 20 countries. Shaelyn has been with Northern Trust for over 28 years. And today, our host Nicole Alvino is talking with Shaelyn about re-engineering digital employee processes for greater efficiency, empowering employees to drive their own career at Northern Trust. and not being afraid to get in the weeds. 

”As a financial services firm, we’re not exactly sexy out there. It’s not something everyone’s really trying to get into in this day and era. So, we definitely want to show employees that we are on the cusp of FinTech – we are both financial and technology – and that there are places at our company, capabilities and tools where they can hone that skill set, and they don’t need to leave to go to a technology company. So when we onboard new employees, we want to introduce them to the freshest, the coolest, the savviest tools we have out there.”

Listen in to hear

  • The challenges and successes of re-engineering digital processes to enhance efficiency and employee empowerment
  • About the implementation of the Client Employee Interconnectivity Model, which has significantly reduced case queries by 50% and improved overall client satisfaction
  • How Shaelyn creates an irresistible employee experience to drive performance, engagement, and long-term retention

”As we think about digital employee experience, we have to build out various personas based on the regions, the roles, and the groups, and then try to address digital employee experience based on those personas and what the group of individual employees are working on.”

 

Shaelyn Otikor

Shaelyn Otikor

SVP & Head of Global Digital Workplace Strategy | Northern Trust Asset Servicing

Shaelyn is a Senior Vice President and Head of Global Digital Workplace Strategy at Northern Trust in the Asset Servicing business unit, which contains 15K of the company’s 25K+ employees across 20 countries. She is responsible for enabling capabilities to strengthen the employee-client interconnectivity model related to digital workplace, productivity, communication, and collaboration tools. She leads the business unit’s Microsoft relationship which includes implementing Dynamics 365 and Power Platform to enable omnichannel features for global contact centers, E2E client engagement and workflow, integrated collaboration platforms, process automation, artificial intelligence, and data integration to advance a metrics-driven approach for business decision making. She has been with Northern Trust for over 28 years.



Episode Transcript

Narrator: Does your digital employee experience feel a little clunky, maybe a little archaic? You might even know exactly what you want to change about it. Maybe it’s slow. Maybe it takes way too many steps to get one thing done or to find information. but making a change to the digital employee experience, re-engineering some of your processes, especially at a big company, feels super daunting. And we get that. So today, we’re proving to you that not only is that change possible, it has real business benefits. That’s what we’re talking about today with Shaelyn 

Shaelyn Otikor: We call it the Client Employee Interconnectivity Model. So knowing what a client needs, what issues they’re having, responding in real time, reduces risk. It drives the client satisfaction. And then also having it in a new digital platform increases our partner’s ability to produce more results. for the clients.  some of the teams have already, highlighted that they’ve had a 50 percent reduction in their, case queries that are coming through, which has then increased their ability to handle more within the same time period.

Narrator: Otikor. Shaelyn is Senior Vice President and Head of Global Digital Workplace Strategy at Northern Trust Asset Servicing. Shaelyn has been with Northern Trust for over 28 years. and in her current role, she’s heading 15, 000 of Northern Trust, 25, 000 plus employees across 20 countries. And today our host, Nicole Alvino is talking with Shaelyne about re engineering digital employee processes for greater efficiency, empowering employees to drive their own career at Northern Trust and not being afraid. To get in the weeds. 

Narrator: On Cruising Altitude, we talk about employee experience lessons from leaders at companies with over 30, 000 employees. A lot like reaching cruising altitude at 30, 000 feet, things look a little different when you’re managing 30, 000 people. On this podcast, we bring you insights from the leaders who inhabit that rarefied air. today’s episode features an interview with Shaelyn Otikor. But first, let’s hear a word from our sponsor. 

Nicole Alvino: Hello everyone. And thank you for joining us for Cruising Altitude. I am thrilled to be your host for Season 3. As a CEO and founder of… Firstup, I’m proud of companies like Amazon, Tesco, Ford, and Hilton, actually 40 of the Fortune 100, who use us to connect more deeply with their people, design and deliver personalized campaigns and gain engagement insights throughout that employee journey. So our mission is to really create an irresistible. So I have a perfect guest to help me unpack some of this today. I want to welcome Shaelyn Otikor Miller, who is Senior Vice President, Head of Global Digital Workplace Strategy at Northern Trust. Welcome.

Shaelyn Otikor: Thank you, Nicole. Thank you so much for having me today. I am excited to have this discussion with you.

Nicole Alvino: Great. Me too. So when we have new employees start at Firstup, we have them introduce themselves with three fun facts. So I’m going to ask you to do the same, please.

Shaelyn Otikor: Sure. I will start with the fun fact. I have two chow chows. They are my fur babies. You can see them on LinkedIn that’s the only thing personal I post on LinkedIn are the fur babies, of course. so I love them. they’re fun. Cairo and Aoki, so I spend most of my time with them. I call them my emotional support. so most people don’t know this, but at home when I’m relaxing and trying to stop thinking about work, I love watching fiction about and vampires. All the time. To the point, my husband walks into the living room. He’s like, what are you watching today? The Originals, Vampires, Dracula. What are you watching? That’s just my small vice to help myself relax and have my subconscious mind think about conscious work items. a third fun fact. one time I was living in London and when I left, I did a month long sabbatical around Europe. I say I backpacked around Europe, but I actually had my small little rolly luggage and did it a little bit more on the diva side, but I toured 10 countries in 30 days.

Nicole Alvino: Oh my goodness. That’s a lot. I love that. I hope you didn’t bring your two dogs with you though.

Shaelyn Otikor: No, no, I didn’t have them yet. they actually are my COVID puppies. I was one of the people to get COVID dogs.

Nicole Alvino: Got it, got it, got it. Those are good. I spent some time living and working in London too, and that’s the, one of the best things about it is just easy

Shaelyn Otikor: It is.

Nicole Alvino: travel in Europe. So, that, that is great. Well, can you share a little bit about Northern Trust for people who aren’t quite as familiar and then your current role?

Shaelyn Otikor: Yeah, sure. Well, Northern Trust is a financial services institution. We, service, High net worth wealth management clients and institutional clients across a variety of products and services. So within Northern Trust, we have three main business units, then wealth management for the high net worth clients. We have our asset management arm, and then we have the asset servicing business unit, which I function in as the head of global digital workplace strategy. So within asset servicing, we have about 15, 000 employees across 20 countries. so quite a lot of digital work. Place initiatives going on right now.

Nicole Alvino: 20 different countries, the type of people who are working across those countries?

Shaelyn Otikor: Yes. So within asset servicing, we have a large amount of operation and service delivery, partners. We call our employees partners because it is a strong partnership at Northern Trust in collaborating and getting work done. So across the business unit, we give our clients anything from custody, transfer agency, fund accounting. middle office, back office, capital markets, trade, brokerage, basically anything you can find in the financial services industry that you want to outsource to a provider like Northern Trust, to make your life easier. So you could just focus on making the decisions as opposed to scaling up your entire operations to execute on the decisions. \So within our, asset servicing group, then we become a part of our clients. So they make the tough decisions on the market. They pass it over to us and we make sure all of those decisions are executed regardless of the country or region. So our partner base, our employee base is extremely diverse. I would say about. 65, 70 percent would be Millennials. You know, we have definitely seen the uptake that everyone else has in the industry. we still have a healthy group of Gen Xers, some baby boomers worldwide. I would say most individuals have a strong financial background, technical background, have been in the industry for decades and consultative kind of technology and subject matter expertise.

Nicole Alvino: Yeah, that’s super helpful. So then when you’re thinking about that diverse base, there’s the geographic, there’s different, just maybe backgrounds and perspectives. How do you think about delivering that type of employee experience, that digital workplace that can really work for each one of those hmm.

Shaelyn Otikor: It is because it’s very difficult with 15, 000 people. They are split across 15 unique business groups and like I said, three world regions, 20 countries. Everything we build has to be scalable, right? We’re high volume. We don’t want to have high costs like no one. So we want something that’s scalable, flexible, and Easy to customize for each of the different groups, segments, or regions based on whatever regulation, fund, industry requirements, policies, or procedures. So there’s no such thing as consistency across our business unit. The only consistent thing is the president we report up to. everybody has their own models and processes. So as we think about digital employee experience, we have to build out various personas. Based on the regions, the roles, and the groups, and then try to address digital employee experience based on those personas and what the group of individual employees are working on.

Nicole Alvino: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So it’s the function, the location, even tenure, I would imagine. Are you a people leader or not? All of those sorts of things. And then are you tailoring those types of experiences, whether it’s access tools, different types of communication, all of that.

Shaelyn Otikor: Yeah, like our sales organization, that’s the sales group. They’re out there hitting the pavement, they’re prospecting, they’re networking. They need a completely different set of digital capabilities than say our operational partners in Chicago may need who are largely internal, may have some facing with the clients, but not as robust as a sales organization. We have our relationship manager community that sits kind of in between operations. So they need different sets of capabilities based on their needs. We have our executive management team that needs things at their fingertips, mobile devices, go, go, go travel, plane capabilities. so we definitely have to address all of these needs and a broad portfolio of digital workplace tools.

Nicole Alvino: Yeah, definitely. And it sounds like. If you need data to connect the dots, first of all, you need to know who these people are. So can you talk about how you’re leveraging data and the strategy that you’re leading?

Shaelyn Otikor: Yeah. So one of the things that kicked off our strategy was the fact that we did an assessment across our organization. As I said, we are a part of our clients offices, so we need to be able to communicate, resolve client queries, issues quickly, efficiently, and have analytics and trends to reflect back on the historical issues or queries that came through. So we did an assessment of our communication tools and the queries that clients were sending in, and they were largely via email. Like most organizations and financial services, we did a deep dive and found out we had 12, 000 Outlook shared mailboxes being used by 15, 000 partners. and that in one month, we looked at the month of November and I’ll never forget it. They said, well, there’s 17 million emails. They came through these mailboxes in one month, and I said, no, no, no, not all year, just one month. And I said, that was one month, and it was 8 million external emails from clients, 9 million internal, and the emails are just flying around. And when you think about your data, when every discussion, every issue, everything is in an email, how do you harness All of that data in email in an organized, structured fashion to then develop analytics, insights, metrics, let alone to apply AI capabilities on that data as well. So with that, we decided to implement Microsoft Dynamics as a workflow tool and CRM because it allowed us to connect all of those Outlook shared mailboxes ingested in an organized fashion into a workflow queue and then have more transparency and oversight. To the millions of emails that are circling the globe, and it’s been phenomenal what we’ve discovered just going live with the first couple of hundred.

Nicole Alvino: Oh, that’s so great. And then how are you taking, I would have to imagine, some of data that’s coming up, and you can use that to say, how else can I go ahead and answer this question even before the next million come in asking the same type of thing?

Shaelyn Otikor: Right, so we look at it as a client feedback model loop, right? So our clients are onboarding, they get an operational and service delivery team. That is one of our competitive advantages. We are known for our exceptional client service and delivery. with that and the back and forth between the operational teams, one global client could potentially face off with 50 individuals in a service delivery team, right? So they may have 30 or 40 on their side. We have 30 and 40 on the side and the emails are just flying, right? So now that we’re able to ingest it, organize it and analyze it, we’re able to have more. Proactive, consultative discussions with our clients about the behavior of our team, their team, issues, challenges, trends, and then give them feedback on the products and services, how we see them using it, other things that could benefit their business model, and they’re able to also talk to us about challenges that they’ve seen, and we’re able to pull up tangible data to resolve them.

Nicole Alvino: So it sounds like you’re connecting the investments that you’re making in the digital partner experience, digital workplace to the outcomes with your clients and being able to see whether it’s client satisfaction or increased sales, kind of, how are you connecting those dots?

Shaelyn Otikor: Absolutely. We call it the Client Employee Interconnectivity Model. You know, I can’t, take the credit for coining that, but it is called the Client Interconnectivity Model. So as a financial services firm, we’re highly regulated. We have very strong deadlines, regulatory goals, things like that. If we miss a communication from a client, For example, or if we do not respond within a small window of time, there could be significant impacts to either ourselves or our clients. So knowing what a client needs, what issues they’re having, responding in real time, reduces risk. It drives the client satisfaction. And then also having it in a new digital platform increases our partner’s ability to produce more results. for the clients. So productivity has increased. capacity of each employee has increased. So where an employee was only able to respond to say 10 queries an hour. Now that we’re ingesting them, we’re organizing, we’re analyzing and optimizing the traffic, the business processes, we realize, Hey, this doesn’t need to be an email. This could be an automated straight through process. This could sit over here. Or maybe we need to remodel the whole business team so that they’re working more efficiently. And some of the teams have already, highlighted that they’ve had a 50 percent reduction in their, case queries that are coming through, which has then increased their ability to handle more within the same time period.

Nicole Alvino: And I have to imagine that you’re taking these learnings, and as you’re onboarding new folks into these roles, that you’re taking those learnings, and have you seen any, whether it’s better onboarding or faster time to productivity? It just, it seems like that would be part of your, the transformation that you’re leading. 

Shaelyn Otikor: well, before this role, I was head of our global workforce strategy, which was more on the pure employee experience and digital technology was a part of that. And so I’m a big proponent of cultural, diversity, global diversity, free. Engaging our employees and making sure that they have opportunities to develop their technical skill set to adapt to the new technology. So, as a financial services firm, we’re not exactly sexy out there. It’s not something everyone’s, you know, really trying to get into in this day and era. So, we definitely want to show employees that we are on the cusp. of FinTech. We are both financial and technology. and that there are places at our company, capabilities and tools where they can home that skill set, and they don’t need to leave to go to a technology company. So when we onboard new employees, we definitely want to introduce them to the freshest, the coolest, the savviest tools we have out there. some employees are fresh out of college. So, of course, they’re ahead of us. So my goal is always to match the internal employee experience to their external experience. They have all the cool apps, social media, they know how to fly. but then they come into the office and we’re still kind of highly regulated. We’re on old archaic systems, legacy and infrastructure, and it can be a bit frustrating to new employees. So it’s nice to have this space that we can expand it to anyone interested, anyone who wants to learn the skill or develop it and give them these opportunities to grow their career at Northern Trust.

Nicole Alvino: Yeah. No, I love that. And that’s been a core tenet of ours too. we see this consumer, beautiful technology across, Everything from shopping to our banking to even, you know, a mortgage broker. And then we go to work and people are still sending kind of stodgy old emails and sending us to outdated systems.

Shaelyn Otikor: I know. My favorite is when I hear, well, there’s too many tools. I can’t track all the communication channels. And I always ask this question. I say, well, pull out your mobile phone. Do you have one app or 30?

Nicole Alvino: mm hmm.

Shaelyn Otikor: How many communications and notifications are you getting on your mobile phone? But you keep up with all of those. You can do the same at work because we only have about two.

Nicole Alvino: Yeah, exactly. It sounds like you’ve done a good job. We use this term of kind of signal through the noise and just making sure that it’s that, right information or communication to the right person in the right place at the right time to drive the outcome that you want. And so obviously using automation and AI to really help get that intelligent delivery is key to making sure that we can help people. 

Shaelyn Otikor: Absolutely, because when you think, the example I gave you, you know, bulk emails going all over the place, game of hot potato, you come in in the morning, who has it, who’s holding it. Now we’ve ingested them, we’ve organized them, we can pull analytics. Now we’re putting the AI capabilities on top of them that automatically can give you any information on large sets of data within minutes. It’s phenomenal. Now we’ve moved from having the technical skills to pull it together to having the quality assurance and quality checking skills to validate the results and that moves a little bit quicker.

Nicole Alvino: Yeah, and it’s almost like you have the insights that took longer, now it’s shorter. You have the validation, and then it seems like then the action plan can also come much more quickly you know, you can actually take what you learn. And sometimes I say it’s the data is the what, and then you need to do the so what is the insight and then the now what, how are you going to drive change with it?

Shaelyn Otikor: absolutely. You know, when we went live, we have a list of opportunities, for re engineering or reprocess, process remodeling. And as we look at some of those processes, you know, any organization, you get so accustomed to a process, you forget how outdated it is or how archaic. And as we were looking at some of the opportunities and things that were popping to the top, for example, a process that was triggering an email to 186 partners. weekly, couple times a week and these partners are just drowning in this email and we look deeper into it and we, you know, we thought, well, it’s regulation. We must send that out. And then we said, well, no, the regulation. It’s actually a little bit differently interpreted. We don’t have to send it. We have to make the data available. So instead of emailing 186 partners several times a week with the data, let’s reroute that data to another place and change the model where they can go and pick it up instead of having it pushed to them. So we’re doing a lot of reengineering of processes like that.

Nicole Alvino: Yeah, no, that just makes so much sense. And now to step back to think about your own partner experience. So it’s been 28 years, if that is correct. So I guess, can you just share a little bit about that experience for you, obviously how it’s changed and then from your vantage point, you know, how that continues to evolve now that you’re owning it too.

Shaelyn Otikor: Yes. Well, let’s let the record start. I started when I was five. So at 28, for anyone who’s calculating out there. So, yeah, I started out of high school. I was a high school intern. Northern Trust has lots of internship 

Nicole Alvino: Mm hmm. 

Shaelyn Otikor: I grew up at Northern Trust since high school, college and so on and so forth and literally worked my way up through a dozen or so roles, a couple of international stints. I have really enjoyed my time. The one thing I love about Northern Trust is that you can drive your career.

Nicole Alvino: Mm hmm. Mm

Shaelyn Otikor: My conversations with my managers over the years has never been, Hey, this is what you’re going to do. It’s more so this is where we see your strengths. What do you think? What do you want to do? So we love to tell people you do drive your careers. You know, my current line manager said, Hey, I see you doing a lot of things, but what do you want to do next? What’s your interest? And they help model your career based on the career path you have chosen. So I love that part of it. I love the security of the company. You know, we have been through economic crisises. you know, every so many years we have been through a lot of other bad economic down periods and still we remain strong as a company, still organic growth. So that says a lot, you know, individuals at Northern Trust, you think I’m, I’m the old one. I’m actually the young one. you know, the people at the 35, 40 year mark are the true veterans of the company. But it’s good because we have solid relationships that have been built over time on core topics that we share, right? there’s great work life balance. You never hear it from your managers that, hey, you know, You know, when your child is sick, or there’s never that type of tension or toxic culture that may drive, others to, you know, look for other opportunities outside.

Nicole Alvino: Yeah. I love it. I think I’ve always done just a core part of that longevity in the employee life cycle is the constant, what do you want to do and help guiding in the career and figuring out how, and I’m curious if you’re doing this kind of using some additional data, kind of what you’ve done from a digital workplace side to say, how can we help? Guide people along or pull people into potential management opportunities and just make sure that, we’re continuing develop that part of the partner experience.

Shaelyn Otikor: Yeah, we have a pretty robust, professional development process at Northern Trust. So we do have, you know. By annual sit downs with your direct report. Some do it more than often. It’s always a consideration of where they’re looking to go. We do use the data from either diversity metrics, workflow metrics, staff transitions and movements. We do candidate surveys, anonymous surveys. we used to hold town halls where partners could just call in and anonymously. And we pulled all of that data and very robust matrices to say, this is a trend we’re seeing in this region. because it’s never the same, right? Our employee engagement survey score, no matter what the percentage is, is never consistent. 1 region. Maybe lower, another region is higher. So we will go out there and talk to that region and say, what are you guys doing locally that has such a high score? We’ll share that with the regions that may be struggling to get that same type of employee engagement. So we do like to share data like that. We also find the data that’s across generational gaps fascinating, right? We love to hear how millennials say, Oh no. The digital tools aren’t moving fast enough. Implement more. Go, go, go. Where some of the baby boomers and Gen Xers are like, Oh my God, stop. I can’t keep up.

Nicole Alvino: Right, right,

Shaelyn Otikor: So it has helped us hone and consolidate our digital workplace technology and also make decisions that are, like I said, more flexible and usable by different partners around the world.

Nicole Alvino: Yeah, really, it’s back to how do we continue to kind of meet people where they are with what they need and help guide them along. I’m obviously very passionate about this. There’s so much opportunity. 

Shaelyn Otikor: I am too. I love it. about everyone’s motivating factor. You have to understand. So number one, everyone is focused on servicing our clients and it’s fascinating and I love it. When I first started in this space, I was taken back at how passionate our employees were of getting it right. Like, all I hear all day is the client asks for this. We didn’t do this right. We have to fix this. Everyone is really working extremely hard to service our clients. And as you sit back, you’re like, well, what can I give them to make your life easier? And I like to sit down with the individual teams, and there’s a lot of meetings, because you’ve got to get in the weeds when you’re dealing with this. This isn’t the type of service. space or technology where you could do 000 feet in the air. You have to get on the ground and roll in the mud and the trees. You know, every time someone reaches out and says they have an issue and I get an email or chat, I say, I want to call, show it to me. I want to see it live. I want to see what you’re doing. I want to see your issue. I want to understand it from your perspective. So I know the best solutions to suggest to you. On what’s going on and regardless if it’s a training issue or a system limitation or an op model issue, it helps to really get down on the ground with all the employee base regardless of their level or their region or their role.

Nicole Alvino: It’s the product manager in you getting to the root cause and

Shaelyn Otikor: I am.

Nicole Alvino: your user behavior. I love it.

Shaelyn Otikor: Absolutely.

Nicole Alvino: I love it. So what do you think? So you’ve obviously, been, you talked about how people have been great leaders to you. What is your leadership style, philosophy for your own team? And then you’re obviously leading a large organizational transformation and change as well.

Shaelyn Otikor: Yeah, I say my number one philosophy is I like to get in the weeds, I have found it challenging to move into this space because you are. Expected to function at an executive level and deal with more corporate level, risk compliance issues, but also want to keep your pulse on what you’re implementing . I am responsible for my strategy, my vision, and if it’s not going well, I want to know what’s going on. I want to have my hands on the pulse, not in a micromanagement way, but so I know what to change in the strategy and the vision, the discussion at the corporate level. So step one, I always get in the weeds. No matter what I’m doing, no matter how busy I am, I will always take time out to jump on a phone call, talk to someone about an issue, get a demo. Number two, I love having a sense of humor. people will tell me they hear my laughter down the hall. I’m always laughing. I’m joking because, you know, it’s work, but it’s not the end all be all of your life. Right. You got to have a life. You got to have a good life. I always tell people, you know, how’s your personal life going? You know, are you happy with just yourself internally? Because the company should not make or break your happiness. Right. So I love to have a good time at work. I love to joke and laugh with my team and on the calls. And it does make. The work a bit more digestible. It makes people want to join in, engage and collaborate. And then the third thing, like I just said, I always engage my staff on what’s going on in your personal life. And I always make sure they put that first. If they say my child is sick, go take care of your child. When we have a milestone or a deadline next week, that can wait. it can be a day or two delay. Your child being sick and you missing that moment, and God forbid something happens, it’s not something you want to look back on, right? If they have to go look after their mother or their father, there’s a lot of aging parents right now. So I’m very adamant about my employees first taking care of themselves, their mental health, and their family.

Nicole Alvino: hmm.

Shaelyn Otikor: They have to be happy in their personal life for them to come into work and give me the best and to deliver results for our clients.

Nicole Alvino: Yeah, no, that’s so true. If you step back, think through that employee experience, the partner experience, so much of it is what’s happening in your own personal life. And those moments, whether it is a sick child or a maternity leave or a parent or a bereavement, those things and how they’re cared for by their manager, by their employer, the services that they’re provided that, you know, it draws them either closer to the company or pushes them further away ,

Shaelyn Otikor: It does. You have to create a psychologically safe space where they feel comfortable sharing those personal details on their own without prying, you know, I’m not asking, but in a way where they know that if they share it, they will be supported as much as I possibly can within my realm. Absolutely.

Nicole Alvino: right. And then back to kind of the personalization and things that you’re giving them, then there are other services or things that you could potentially unlock for them, or they could find that they wouldn’t know about without sharing that or getting that data about themselves some other way.

Shaelyn Otikor: Yeah, I love supporting their passions too. I have someone who said, can we hire college interns? I said, that’s a great idea. Let’s go for it. they come with all sorts of great ideas and strategy and visions, and I’m always supportive and I love helping them develop. Like, yeah, go for it.

Nicole Alvino: Yeah.

Shaelyn Otikor: You go for it and come back and let’s talk about it. Absolutely.

Nicole Alvino: I love it. I love it. That’s great. Okay. Well, that’s a good segue. So we call this podcast Cruising Altitude because it’s kind of things look a little bit different at 30, 000 employees, 30, 000 feet. With me personally, I do a ton of travel. I do have this moment of clarity, heightened perspective at 30, 000 feet. So my question to you is what is that place or space for you when you have that moment of clarity or do your 

Shaelyn Otikor: Yeah, so besides the COVID puppy, I also started a COVID garden, so I have this very nice backyard full of flowers and container gardens, and I’m such a city girl, so when my friends come over, they just laugh because we bought our house right before COVID and then COVID hit. I said, well, I don’t know what else to do around here. I guess I’ll learn how to garden. So it’s been an experience. I’ve now accepted all the bees and spiders and insects, so I’m doing pretty good right now. So I love to go out in my garden. If I’m having a hard day, if I need to think, to contemplate, sometimes you just need to step away and let your mind relax. I love going out in my backyard, walking around barefoot, looking at my rose bushes, trimming my peach trees. I love doing things like that. They bring me back to nature, kind of release the stress, come back in and then do better work. And then the fact that my emotional support pets are running around with very fluffy and furry, it helps too.

Nicole Alvino: I love that. Do you have a good example of something when you either couldn’t solve or something on your mind and you went out and had that peach tree experience and had an aha moment?

Shaelyn Otikor: I will say, it definitely helped me as we were transitioning from the implementation of our new digital partner platform to BAU. So standing up an entire brand new team in a space that had never existed at Northern Trust. That took a lot of thinking and assessing and researching of what should this model look like once our contractors roll off. Or, and we’re hiring new staff, you know, do we go internal or external? And so it did help me think of that. And I’m a big proponent of promoting from within. I love the fact that employees who know the culture, know the stakeholders, know the people. And it’s just giving them a bit more technical training. a win win for everybody.

Nicole Alvino: Okay, and I always end with things so our listeners can take some of your wisdom with them. So I end with the ones, the one thing you never do and the one thing you always do.

Shaelyn Otikor: So, yeah, I thought about that. I’m going to be humble and say never and always are big words for me. I hate to be a hypocrite. So the only thing I can say I never do is drink cold coffee.

Nicole Alvino: Okay. Take it.

Shaelyn Otikor: I never drink cold coffee when it comes to work. I’ve done it. I’ve not done it. So I just can’t even say that. What do I always do? I always laugh. Every day I find a good moment. I am laughing and joking on a work call. No matter how bad the last call was or the last three or the last three hours. Before the day is over with, I find a way to bounce back, be resilient, be optimistic and have a good laugh with someone at work to end my day on a high note.

Nicole Alvino: I love it. Well, I’ve loved your laugh here. And how can you be in a bad mood no matter what’s going on? It’s great. It’s great. Thank you so much. How can our listeners find you?

Shaelyn Otikor: They can find me on LinkedIn. Easy to locate. I do look at messages. I’m a little slow at responding because I am kind of drowning in digital workplace transformation worldwide, but LinkedIn would be the best way.

Nicole Alvino: Super. Okay. We will look for you there. And for everyone else, you can follow me on LinkedIn as well. Send us either any questions or follow up items. And we look forward to continuing the conversation both here and the next time on Cruising Altitude. So thank you.

Shaelyn Otikor: Thank you, Nicole, and thank you Cruising Altitude for having me today.

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Cruising Altitude

Lessons from companies over 30,000 employees

Conversations with leaders who are designing the best digital employee experiences in the world – from the front lines to the back office. Life is different over 30,000. Welcome to Cruising Altitude.

Hosted by Firstup Founder and CEO, Nicole Alvino.

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