Global Head, Digital Workplace & Employee Technology Experience - Auburn Hills

About the role

The Global Head, End-User Experience & Digital Support is a senior leadership role defined first and foremost by a deep, genuine commitment to the people it serves. This leader is the voice of the end user within the technology organization — an empathetic champion who ensures that every interaction with technology feels intuitive, human, and empowering.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the organization's primary advocate for the end-user — embedding voice of the customer (VoC) listening throughout every phase of service delivery and technology rollout.
• Establish and own a formal End-User Experience (EUX) framework: define satisfaction metrics, build feedback loops, and translate user insights into actionable roadmap priorities.
• Champion a "user-first" design philosophy across all technology decisions — ensuring that usability, accessibility, and simplicity are non-negotiable criteria alongside security and compliance.
• Proactively identify friction points in the employee technology experience and drive rapid resolution, using both quantitative data and qualitative listening.
• Report end-user experience trends and voice of the customer insights to the CIO and executive stakeholders, making the invisible experience visible through storytelling and data.
• Partner with HR and business leaders to understand workforce personas, needs, and pain points — ensuring technology support is designed around how real people work, not just how systems are configured.
• Mentor, inspire, and actively mentor a globally distributed support team that includes student employees and early-career professionals; model exemplary leadership behaviors including empathy, accountability, positivity, and a growth mindset.
• Create a psychologically safe environment where student workers feel valued, develop professionally, and experience firsthand what outstanding customer service and technical excellence look like.
• Design structured onboarding, coaching, and recognition programs specifically tailored to student support staff — investing in their development as future IT and business leaders.
• Foster inclusion and diverse perspectives as a foundation for innovation and team effectiveness across all geographies and levels.
• Own global ITSM strategy, governance, and operations, including incident, problem, change, and service request management aligned to ITIL v4 principles.
• Drive the evolution from reactive helpdesk to proactive, experience-led service delivery — leveraging AI-assisted automation, intelligent self-service, and anticipatory support to reduce user effort.
• Establish KPIs and dashboards (SLA compliance, MTTR, CSAT, first-contact resolution, user effort scores) that keep the team accountable to meaningful user outcomes — not just ticket counts.
• Run regular voice of the customer review cycles, ensuring feedback from support interactions directly informs service improvements and training priorities.
• Champion continuous improvement programs across all support tiers globally, with clear ownership, metrics, and recognition for progress.
• Serve as the executive product owner and internal subject matter authority for the full Microsoft 365 suite — Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Viva, Intune, Entra ID, Defender for Endpoint, Copilot for M365, and Power Platform — with deep, hands-on expertise in how each product shapes the day-to-day employee experience.
• Lead Microsoft licensing strategy with commercial expertise: manage Enterprise Agreements, optimize license allocation against actual usage, advise on SKU selection, and ensure cost-effective compliance across the organization.
• Drive M365 Copilot and AI-powered productivity initiatives, ensuring adoption strategies are grounded in genuine user need and supported by robust enablement, training, and feedback loops.
• Govern Microsoft 365 platform adoption, change management, and governance — ensuring policies protect the organization while never creating unnecessary friction for users.
• Maintain current, expert-level knowledge of Microsoft roadmap and commercial licensing changes; advise leadership on strategic implications and opportunities.
• Partner with IT security to enforce data governance, information protection, and compliance policies within the M365 ecosystem in a user-friendly way.
• Lead global EUC strategy encompassing device lifecycle management, modern provisioning (Autopilot/Zero-Touch) — always evaluating decisions through the lens of user experience first.
• Act as “voice-of-the-customer” for the EUC image ensuring image is user-friendly in coordination with the cyber team who owns the image.
• Oversee hardware refresh programs and vendor partnerships, optimizing TCO while continuously improving the physical and digital quality of the employee workspace.
• Collaborate with cybersecurity teams to enforce zero-trust endpoint security in ways that are transparent and minimally disruptive to end users and ensure standardization of device management through Microsoft Intune/Endpoint Manager, ensuring compliance and security representing the employee computing experience.
• Define and execute a multi-year roadmap for the global digital workplace and end-user support function, aligned to enterprise strategy and informed by user experience data.
• Manage strategic relationships with Microsoft and key EUC/ITSM vendors, negotiating contracts and holding partners accountable to user experience outcomes, not just uptime SLAs.
• Present strategy, VoC insights, program progress, and investment proposals to the CIO and executive leadership in compelling, business-outcome-oriented narratives.
• Anticipate emerging workplace technologies and build investment cases grounded in demonstrated user need.
• Monitor and evaluate emerging AI-assisted work paradigms — including agentic “vibe working” environments where employees co-create, automate, and orchestrate tasks alongside AI companions — and assess their applicability to Nexteer’s workforce and manufacturing context in partnership with the Nexteer AI and Enterprise Architecture Leader.
• Evaluate and pilot voice-first interaction models — including conversational AI interfaces, voice-activated support (e.g., Microsoft Copilot Voice, Teams voice channels, intelligent IVR/virtual agents) — that enable hands-free, natural language access to IT support and productivity tools, particularly relevant for plant-floor and operational environments.
• Stay current on the latest device and hardware innovations — including AI PCs (Copilot+ PCs with on-device NPUs), thin and ultra-light form factors, smart displays, rugged industrial devices, AR/MR headsets (Microsoft HoloLens, Meta Quest for enterprise), and next-generation peripherals — and develop a forward-looking hardware strategy that matches device capabilities to employee personas.
• Track the evolution of ambient and spatial computing experiences — including immersive collaboration spaces, digital whiteboards, and mixed-reality workflows — and identify early-adoption opportunities that could meaningfully improve engineering, design, or operational collaboration at Nexteer.
• Monitor consumer and enterprise UX trends — including hyper-personalized interfaces, proactive AI nudges, zero-UI interactions, and emotion-aware computing — and translate relevant patterns into practical improvements for internal support portals, self-service tools, and the overall Nexteer employee digital experience.
• Build a structured external intelligence practice: maintain an active network of industry peers, attend leading digital experience and workplace technology conferences (e.g., Microsoft Ignite, Gartner DEX Summit, Enterprise Connect), and deliver a regular “What’s Next” briefing to the CIO and senior leadership team on emerging trends and Nexteer’s preparedness.
• Partner with the student support workforce as a built-in innovation lens: create a formal “Student Innovation Panel” that surfaces emerging technology behaviors and preferences from the next generation of workers, informing Nexteer’s digital experience roadmap with insights that older enterprise frameworks often miss.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Business, or related field required.
• Master's degree (MBA or MS in IT/Technology Management) preferred.
• Experience 10+ years of progressive IT experience, with preferred 5 years managing global end-user support, digital workplace, EUC, or ITSM functions.
• Demonstrated track record of building and scaling customer/user experience programs — including VoC frameworks, satisfaction measurement, and experience-driven service improvement.
• Proven success mentoring early-career professionals and student employees; experience creating structured development programs for junior team members strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated success leading large-scale Microsoft 365 deployments, transformations, or Copilot/AI productivity programs.
• Deep experience with Microsoft commercial licensing: Enterprise Agreement management, SKU optimization, license compliance, and cost governance.
• Experience in a global manufacturing, industrial, or automotive environment strongly preferred.
• Proven track record managing multi-million-dollar budgets, vendor contracts, and geographically distributed teams across multiple time zones and cultures.
• Preferred Certifications:
  • Microsoft Certified: Modern Desktop Administrator Associate or Microsoft 365 Certified: Enterprise Administrator Expert.
  • Microsoft Certified: Teams Administrator Associate or additional M365 workload certifications.
  • ITIL v4 Foundation certification required; ITIL v4 Managing Professional or Strategic Leader designation.
• Technical Expertise:
  • Expert-level knowledge of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem: Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Viva, Intune, Entra ID, Defender for Endpoint, Copilot for M365, and Power Platform.