Picture this. It’s your first day as a wealth manager at ABC Financials and you realize that the device you are allocated does not suit your role. You don’t have access to the right set of software, and you can’t figure out who you’re supposed to reach out to for support. Not only does this type of IT issue slow down productivity, but it creates a negative employee experience.
Every interaction that employees have with IT, or rather every touchpoint between employees and IT, like devices, tools, support calls, etc. – all these collectively contribute to the modern employee experience. While the IT teams do their best to ensure that employees have a positive experience overall, it can be challenging. With rapidly evolving technologies, a shift toward digitalization, and an increase in hybrid and remote workers, companies and especially the IT Teams need to work hard not just to keep up, but to stay ahead.
What is the Digital Employee Experience?
First, let’s understand what we mean by the digital employee experience.
The digital employee experience (DEX) encompasses every aspect of an employee's interaction with technology. This includes quality, convenience, performance, availability, reliability and many other aspects. But it also encompasses inclusivity, accessibility, and other aspects of the end-user experience.
Why positive digital employee experience (DEX) is important for organizations?
While addressing the gaps might sound overwhelming, there are several reasons why this is important for businesses of any size. Here are some of the key benefits of a healthy digital employee experience:
- Attracts and helps retain talent
- Boosts employee engagement and satisfaction which is important to deliver sustainable business advantage
- Increases productivity of the employees and so the business
- Encourages collaboration and creates synergies
How to improve the digital employee experience?
The question is how organizations and IT teams can improve the Digital Employee Experience (DEX). Here are some of the key ways which can help you do it:
- Take a holistic approach - I think the starting point of the problem is to look at delivering experience in siloes. Employee Experience must take a holistic approach and look at each phase of the user lifecycle starting from the day an employee joins an organization (onboarding) and have all set of right technologies, access, etc., to day-to-day interactions that they have and support that they need from IT (Day to day management) to movement and role change (move & change), through to their retirement (retire and exit).
- Put employees at the centre of your workplace strategy. - Great digital employee experience happens when digital tools make your employees’ lives easier. IT teams usually take a technology-up approach to define their strategy around tools and systems. While it might be necessary for a few places, the workplace strategy must be defined keeping the users at its core. If you’re exploring the latest tool available in the market without a specific purpose, it’ll only add up to more complexities, and frustration for employees. We must take our user’s viewpoints probably by organizing employee surveys, focus groups, and 1-on-1 chats to truly understand employee needs and determine the digital tools that will benefit them.
- Establish digital employee engagement goals - Once IT has visibility on what users need and their feedback, it’s important to establish concrete digital employee engagement goals. These will serve as benchmarks to help IT teams determine whether a newly introduced technology is satisfying employee needs or not.
- Measurement of digital employee experience – While setting up digital employee experience goals and KPIs, there should be a mechanism and methodology to continuously measure the quality of digital employee experience with the capability to identify the gaps. There are Digital Employee Experience Management solutions that touch almost every point that potentially impacts the Digital Employee Experience and enable IT with thorough visibility and actionable insights that can further be used to take preventive, proactive and corrective actions to increase the employee experience.
- Define/Redefine your change management approach – Successful digital implementation goes hand in hand with successful change management. To create an incredible digital employee experience, you need to make sure employees are ready for digital transformation and have all the information and resources they need.
In addition to the above, there are a few other areas as well that IT organizations should be looking at:
- Processes – Processes are meant to augment the business's ability to deliver consistent results than being an obstacle. We must ensure that we have clear, consistent and standardized processes in place that support us in this initiative.
- Employee training - Once your staff know the ins and outs of using a new technology, they’ll feel less intimidated and more motivated to use it.
