A guide to enhance digital employee experience for better business outcomes.
According to a recent Forbes report, “nearly 67% of workers feel that digital experiences in their personal lives far outweigh the digital experience at work.” Another Gartner report said that “Only 13% of employees are fully satisfied with their digital experience.” Is it any wonder that organizations acknowledge that positive digital employee experiences have a direct link with business success?
To put things into perspective, Digital Employee Experience is the concept of leveraging modern digital IT workspace with the right set of business and collaboration tools to create a frictionless, productive, and engaging workplace for employees. It is an increasingly important element of business success, directly impacting employee engagement, productivity, retention, and customer growth.
Digital Employee Experience, or DEX, refers to employees' overall experience as they interact with digital tools, systems, and processes in their work environment. It encompasses the design, functionality, and accessibility of digital tools, as well as the ease of use and overall satisfaction of employees.
It includes the employee's experience with internal and external technology platforms, such as IT systems, HR tools, and several other automated workflows.
Employees say technology is
essential to their work
Employees say
that poor technology
affects their productivity
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technology frustrates or
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Improve employee productivity and performance
Enhance employee engagement and satisfaction
Reduce turnover and increase employee retention
Providing user-friendly and intuitive technology
Ensuring that technology is reliable and available when needed
Offering personalized experiences that meet the needs of individual employees
Digital Employee Experience (DEX) began gaining traction in the early 2010s as companies began to recognize the importance of providing a positive and seamless experience for their employees using digital tools and platforms.
It included not only the technology itself but also the design, accessibility, and overall user experience of the digital tools and systems that employees use daily.
Soon, DEX began to evolve as a discipline, and companies started to invest in DEX programs to improve employee engagement and productivity. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to remote work, DEX became increasingly critical for companies to ensure that employees remain engaged, motivated, and productive while working remotely.
In recent years, DEX has grown in importance and become the focus for many organizations, with companies investing in technology, design, and research to improve the employee experience with digital tools and platforms.
Gartner
As a result, DEX is now considered a critical component of overall employee engagement and productivity and is seen as a key driver of business performance. However, there are a few top priorities in implementing DEX.
The top DEX priorities focus on creating a frictionless IT, positive and engaging work environment for employees. These priorities include:
CPID
Creating a roadmap to modernization is essential for any organization looking to improve its DEX. A successful roadmap involves the following steps:
SMG’s State of the Digital Workplace Report
A digital workplace is a virtual environment that employees use to access tools, resources, and information. It enables employees to collaborate and work effectively, regardless of location or device.
To build a successful digital workplace, organizations must first identify their DEX objectives and prioritize critical features and capabilities. Organizations must focus on scalability and flexibility, i.e., ensuring that employees have access to the same resources, regardless of location or device.
Additionally, organizations should aim for solutions that can be:
By building a scalable and flexible digital workplace, organizations have a digital workplace tailored to their employees' needs and ensure a positive digital employee experience.
Automation starts with understanding the data flow, decision criteria, and automation rules. Once these processes are understood, the organization can identify the automation tools to create the process. These tools range from sophisticated software platforms to simple scripts, so organizations should consider their automation processes' complexity and performance needs.
Once the automation tools are selected, organizations should develop strategies based on where they will be most effective. These strategies also include how automation affects existing employees.
So, actionable DEX-focused automation is essential:
While this helps create leaner teams, it becomes possible to create new jobs and roles for employees - allowing them to use their skills and knowledge in new ways.
Digital friction can inhibit a successful DEX and can have a significant impact on employee productivity and satisfaction. Unfortunately, many of these issues go undetected and unresolved.
Digital friction can be tracked by discovering unreported cases by proactively investigating and gathering employee feedback. Organizations may find issues like:
Gartner
Once issues are identified, organizations can prioritize resolving them to ensure a smooth DEX for employees. It can involve making changes to hardware, software, and processes to create a more user-friendly experience.
By taking the time to discover and address any issues that could be causing digital friction, organizations can ensure a more successful DEX for their employees.
IBM
As businesses increasingly rely on digital services to support their employees, it is essential to have a comprehensive incident management process to resolve any issues quickly and efficiently. Proactive incident management consists of several vital components, such as:
Organizations can identify potential issues before they become major problems and take steps to prevent or mitigate any potential disruptions by having a proactive incident management system. It can be done by monitoring system performance and user feedback and setting up an incident response team to quickly address any issues that arise.
Another part of proactive action is maintaining, updating, and testing digital systems to ensure they are always ready to handle potential problems. It is typically accomplished through regular system audits before they are released to employees.
Forbs
Organizations use analytical data to measure their digital experiences' performance and identify areas for improvement. This data is collected from device performance, ITSM data, user surveys, focus groups, interviews, etc. It can be used to identify areas of improvement, such as:
The data also helps measure the effectiveness of their digital experiences by tracking the number of users using the similar application, app frictions, device load time etc.
Now, there are several use cases where DEX has been found extremely effective. However, it’s an ongoing list. Forward-thinking organizations and solution providers continue to work closely together to unearth new impact areas.
After all, DEX describes how employees interact with digital tools and services in the workplace. In a digital world, the employee experience has become an integral part of an organization's success. As a result, organizations have no other options but to turn to digital experience solutions to strengthen employee relationships.
So, let’s look at the use cases that are prevalent today.
One of the fundamental pillars of DEX is that it should be based on persona segments of employees - accurately understanding and representing their preferred digital working styles. It is achieved by analyzing technical and sentiment IT-related data about employee needs, values, and behaviors so that the end-user experience can be personalized. This includes device preferences, software usage, work timings, data security, etc. – all of which contribute to the success of digital employee experiences.
Hence, by building clusters of employee persona insights, forward-thinking organizations can:
Proactive IT Service Management focuses on improving the quality and availability of IT services, allowing organizations to anticipate, prevent and resolve IT service issues before they become a problem for their employees. The goal is to improve the employee experience by reducing the time and frustration associated with ITSM issues.
Therefore, creating a DEX-focused ITSM approach can empower organizations to:
Digital Experience Observability (DXO) involves monitoring and analyzing employees' digital interactions and behaviors in real time. This data provides insights into how employees interact with digital systems/applications/tools.
So, DXO can enable organizations to:
It improves employee satisfaction and productivity by ensuring that digital systems are accessible, intuitive, and perform well. By analyzing the digital interactions of employees, organizations can identify areas for improvement, such as the need for new features or better training materials.
DXO is also helpful in tracking the success of DEX initiatives, such as adopting new tools or implementing new workflows. By monitoring employee interactions, organizations can track progress and determine the effectiveness of these initiatives.
Workflow automation and remediation help streamline the process of completing tasks and resolving issues. Automation involves using computer programs and algorithms to perform operations and functions, while remediation involves identifying potential errors and rectifying them.
Hence, automating workflows to improve DEX can help employers to:
For employees, automation and remediation help reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks and improve the overall working experience. This further helps reduce the amount of time spent on tasks and helps increase employees' job satisfaction.
Employee sentiment analysis helps organizations better understand their employees' attitudes, opinions, and emotions. It provides valuable insights into the following:
So, companies can identify areas where improvement is needed by analyzing employee sentiment and developing strategies to improve the overall employee experience. Employee sentiment analysis also helps organizations assess the following:
By understanding the sentiment of their employees, organizations can better understand their employees' needs and expectations and make changes that will improve workplace satisfaction and performance. Furthermore, it helps organizations monitor the effectiveness of their efforts in creating a positive work environment.
Collaboration experience helps foster a sense of connectedness among employees and teams through digital tools like:
These tools and integrations help employees to stay connected, communicate effectively, and work in real time. By utilizing digital tools and applications, companies can create an engaging environment where employees can work together - fostering a sense of team spirit, increasing productivity, and creating better overall digital experiences.
DEX provides a more efficient and seamless way for the IT team to manage the endpoints, applications and employees' requests. The main benefit of the digital employee experience is that it reduces the time and resources required to keep IT and processes up to date. In addition, it is easier for employees to stay informed and updated with the latest changes.
Furthermore, DEX workflows like automated actions and notifications help ensure employees don't miss important information and can quickly get up to speed with new processes or changes. This reduces the disruption caused by changes, as employees can quickly adapt to new systems and processes.
With DEX, the IT team can proactively identify issues and schedule resolutions without impacting the employees' regular work. As a result, it helps reduce time wasted on unexpected issues, allowing employees to focus on their work and increase productivity.
The improved communication between departments also helps efficient IT collaboration, eliminating the need to manually transfer data between departments and improving productivity.
The right DEX strategy will help create perfect remote alignment between the digital workplace and the digital workforce. It assesses business-critical devices and applications to make sure that the infrastructure is remote-ready – evaluating which devices may still require IT intervention in the process.
So, in the end, employees can get access to swift, secure, and convenient workflows to log in and work remotely. DEX also ensures remote infrastructure compliance by offering advanced user access, password renewal verification, BitLocker encryption, and more.
DEX, a technology-driven approach to improving the end-user experience in the workplace, focuses on providing employees with the tools and resources they need to be productive, engaged, and successful in their roles.
A good digital employee experience results in more accessible information, streamlined processes, and automated tasks freeing employees' time to focus on high-value work, leading to increased productivity, improved job satisfaction, and reduced turnover.
Employee retention is a major challenge for organizations, both large and small. Organizations strive to remain competitive and must ensure they can attract and retain top talent.
By providing employees with easy-to-use and intuitive experiences, organizations can reduce employee turnover and increase retention. But with the right DEX strategy, they can maintain and improve employee engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty, as it helps employees enjoy their work.
“Only 26% of organizations regard their digital workplace as mature.”
DEX reduces end-user IT costs by streamlining the employee experience from start to finish. With DEX, the manual tasks associated with onboarding, training, and performance management are automated, eliminating the need for expensive manual labour and allowing employees to get up to speed.
DEX also optimizes software licenses and costly IT support, as the system is self-service and user-friendly. Plus, DEX enables companies to quickly and easily track employee performance for more accurate and up-to-date performance data to make informed decisions and streamline processes, resulting in increased efficiency and cost savings.
DEX not only helps to improve workflows and increase efficiency but has the potential to create significant business value. Most importantly, it can help organizations rapidly adopt and deploy new technologies, enabling faster digital transformation.
Furthermore, it helps reduce cost and time while allowing organizations to capitalize on emerging technologies and digital opportunities. DEX also simplifies the transition process, reducing the learning curve and allowing employees to become more comfortable with new technologies.
DEX helps organizations create a more efficient, effective, and compliant workplace. Digital solutions help streamline processes, automate mundane tasks, and provide real-time access to data, leading to increased compliance.
Additionally, digital solutions offer analytics to help organizations identify areas of non-compliance and take corrective actions before they become an issue.
Organizations offer better customer experience by ensuring their workplace is armed with the tools and technologies integral to digital employee experience. Employees are more efficient and productive because they have access to tools, applications, and processes that are frictionless and easy to use. They work in a personalized IT environment, leading to better coordination and better service to customers.
Employees get real-time access to customer feedback and insights, enabling them to make informed decisions and take immediate action to address customer needs and issues.
Digital employee experience (DX) is an approach to managing the digital workplace that focuses on optimizing employee user experience. Unlike traditional IT service management (ITSM), which focuses on improving the performance of technology and the delivery of services, DEX is concerned with the experience that employees have when using technology at work.
The primary difference between DEX and ITSM is that DEX focuses on the user experience, while ITSM focuses on the performance of technology and the delivery of services. With DEX, the goal is to create a workplace tailored to the user's needs, making the most of the technology available to them. It includes:
ITSM, on the other hand, is concerned with ensuring that technology and services are available to users when needed and that they are reliable, secure, and cost-effective. ITSM is focused on improving the performance of IT systems and ensuring that they are up-to-date and meet the needs of the business.
DEX is a complementary approach to ITSM for managing the digital workplace. DEX focuses on improving the user experience, while ITSM focuses on enhancing the performance and delivery of services.
By taking a holistic approach to managing the digital workplace, organizations can ensure that their employees have the tools and resources they need to be successful.
Digital employee experience and customer experience are connected in more ways than one. As customer experience becomes increasingly digital, companies need to have a well-designed digital employee experience to ensure a seamless customer experience.
DEX is the sum of all interactions employees have with digital tools and technology in the workplace. It includes everything from onboarding to collaboration tools to training and development. By providing employees with a positive digital experience, companies can ensure that employees are better equipped to deliver a great customer experience.
Customer experience is the sum of all customer interactions with a company, i.e., everything from how they interact with a website or app to how they interact with customer service. A positive digital employee experience helps ensure a better customer experience.
Employees better trained and equipped to handle customer issues can and will provide a smoother customer experience.
Ultimately, digital employee experience and customer experience are connected in that the former can help to ensure the latter.
Infraon has a proven track record of helping enterprises of all sizes tap into the power of an integrated digital mindset. We treat employee experiences as journeys – not one-off interactions, offering a broad range of DEX solutions to help users coexist and thrive effortlessly in digital workplaces.
We believe that DEX should be tailored to an individual organization's needs and goals. So, we specialize in developing innovative DEX solutions to help organizations create a collaborative, efficient, and enjoyable working environment for their employees.
Infraon works closely with our clients to ensure that our solutions are designed to meet their specific needs. These include: