How To Build a Winning Digital Employee Experience Strategy

The quality of your employees’ interactions with technology directly shapes their engagement, productivity, and satisfaction. And your employees’ workplace satisfaction directly impacts your bottom line. 

That’s why Digital Employee Experience (DEX) has evolved from a peripheral concern to a strategic cornerstone of successful organizations. In fact, Gartner states that “By 2026, 50% of digital workplace leaders will have established a DEX strategy and tool, up from 30% in 2024.” Companies that prioritize exceptional digital experiences don’t just retain top talent—they unlock new levels of innovation and performance. 

Yet creating a modern digital environment requires more than implementing the latest tools; it demands a deliberate, data-driven strategy that aligns with your organizational goals. This comprehensive guide walks you through the essential elements of building a DEX strategy that transforms how your team works, collaborates, and contributes to your company’s success in the modern business era.

5 Key Components of a Modern Digital Employee Experience

A holistic DEX strategy encompasses the various touchpoints an employee interacts with digitally:

• Core digital tools: Business apps, productivity suites (like Microsoft 365), collaboration tools (Slack, Microsoft Teams), and specialized software required for specific roles.
• Workflows and processes: How easily employees can navigate digital business processes like expense reporting, requesting time off, or accessing information.
• IT support and self-service: The availability and effectiveness of the help desk, knowledge bases, and automation tools for resolving tech issues.
• Onboarding and training: How new technology is introduced and how employees are supported in learning to use technology effectively.
• Overall user experience (UX): The usability, performance, and reliability of the digital workplace technology. 

How to Create a Great Digital Employee Experience Strategy

Establish visibility and baseline metrics 

You can’t start down a path toward successful DEX without first understanding where your organization is today. There are a variety of different DEX solutions on the market today, which you should evaluate before getting started to ensure your success. 

Gartner has said that “Through 2027, 75% of organizations without a DEX strategy and tool will fail to successfully reduce digital friction.”  Using a DEX tool, you can collect comprehensive data about your current digital environment, including device performance, application usage patterns, and user sentiment to establish your baseline metrics.

Assemble a cross-functional DEX team

DEX is not just an IT issue. Create a dedicated team with representatives from IT teams, HR teams, procurement, and key business lines to ensure diverse perspectives and shared ownership. Ensure all stakeholders, team members, and departments understand the goals and importance of the DEX strategy. Foster buy-in across the organization.

Define your goals

Clearly articulate what you want to achieve. Align DEX initiatives with strategic business outcomes, such as cutting IT costs by 20%, reducing IT ticket volume through self-service, improving employee feedback, or boosting employee productivity in key departments.

Identify gaps

Analyze telemetry data collected from endpoints across your IT estate to pinpoint specific pain points, bottlenecks, and areas where the digital experience falls short of expectations. Are there certain endpoints or applications that regularly fail and that may be causing issues for the employees who use those? Are your IT ticket reporting tools user-friendly? Is your hardware refresh cycle done simply based on a calendar or are you evaluating the device lifecycle based on usage and health? Are there software applications going unused and contributing to software bloat and unnecessary cost?

Develop employee personas

Go beyond job titles. Recognize that different employee personas have different technology needs based on their roles, work styles, and locations. Create detailed personas representing these employee segments. Understand their specific employee needs, how they currently use technology, their common workflows, and recurring pain points or disruptions.

Focus on understanding how employees use technology at work to do their jobs. Work with human resources to gain insight into who your end-user groups are (including frontline workers), how they actually work (not just how business processes dictate they should work), and what tools and performance levels they need. Identify the issues and pain points that get in their way, rather than solely designing the experience around existing business processes.

Prioritize improvements based on impact 

Armed with data, your IT team can now identify the biggest opportunities for improvement. Data-driven decision-making is critical for a successful DEX strategy. Focus on addressing the issues that affect the most users or have the greatest impact on productivity and satisfaction. Often, some of the biggest ROI can be found with simple changes like hardware optimization and software rationalization. 

Implement proactive IT support 

Shift from reactive troubleshooting to a proactive approach that identifies and resolves issues before they impact employees. Keep in mind, not all employees will submit a ticket when something goes wrong so proactive IT allows you to identify issues based on endpoint data in order to help those silent sufferers. Lakeside Software hosted a webinar you can watch on-demand focused on the new era of IT support with proactive IT. 

Maintain balance between automation and human interaction

Leverage automation and self-service to streamline processes and provide quick answers, but ensure human support (help desk, managers, HR teams) is readily available for complex issues and personalized assistance. Effective collaboration tools and clear messaging channels are key.

Continuously iterate and improve 

Treat DEX as an ongoing journey rather than a one-time project, regularly reassessing and refining your approach. Continuously gathering telemetry data allows your IT team to monitor metrics, identify new pain points, and iterate on your strategy and technology stack. 

How to Measure the Success of Your DEX Strategy

There are four areas that are important to measure as you determine the successfulness of your DEX strategy: 

• System & Application Performance: Downtime, application crash rates, load times.
• IT Support Metrics: Help desk ticket volume, resolution times, first-contact resolution rates, self-service adoption rates.
• Productivity Indicators: Task completion times, workflow efficiency improvements.
• HR Metrics: Employee retention rates, employee satisfaction scores (eNPS), employee feedback, onboarding time-to-productivity.

The key is to gather data that provides insight into the actual end-user experience and allows IT teams to move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive optimization.

Get Real-Time Visibility Across Your IT Estate with Lakeside Dex Software

Understanding and improving your Digital Employee Experience requires deep visibility into how technology performs from the employee’s perspective. Traditional monitoring often misses the mark, focusing on infrastructure health rather than the actual end-user experience.

Lakeside’s AI-driven Digital Employee Experience management platform provides the real-time visibility you need. Our software was recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and collects thousands of data points directly from the end-user workspace. We give IT teams unparalleled insight into system performance, application usage, digital technology adoption, and sources of employee frustration. 

With Lakeside, you can:

• Quantify the employee experience with comprehensive metrics.
• Proactively identify issues to resolve before they impact employee productivity, often before users even notice.
• Optimize your IT estate for cost savings and improved performance.
• Make data-driven decisions about technology investments and DEX initiatives.
• Support remote work and hybrid work models effectively by understanding endpoint performance anywhere.
• Improve employee satisfaction and retention by reducing tech friction.

FAQs

How are leaders defining digital employee experience?

Digital Employee Experience (DEX) refers to the sum total of interactions an employee has with the workplace technology and the digital touchpoints they use to do their job. It encompasses the quality, usability, performance, and effectiveness of the digital tools, apps, workflows, and IT support provided by an organization.

What are some examples of a great digital employee experience?

• Seamless onboarding where new hires have access to necessary apps and resources quickly.
• Fast, reliable performance of essential business apps with minimal downtime or disruptions.
• Intuitive, user-friendly self-service portals that allow employees to resolve common IT issues instantly.
• Effective collaboration tools (Slack, Microsoft Teams) that facilitate communication and teamwork seamlessly across locations (remote work, hybrid work).
• Proactive IT support that identifies and fixes potential problems before they impact users.

Why do organizations need a modern DEX strategy?

A strong DEX strategy is crucial for improving employee engagement, increasing employee productivity, reducing frustration, and boosting employee retention. It directly impacts job satisfaction, helps attract top talent, contributes positively to company culture, and can even influence the customer experience.

How does digital transformation impact the overall employee experience?

Digital transformation has fundamentally altered the work environment. Fueled further by events like the pandemic, digital tools are now central to how most employees perform their jobs, whether fully remote, hybrid, or in the office.

• Positive impacts: Effective digital technology can streamline workflows, enhance collaboration (especially with remote work and hybrid work models), provide flexibility, and empower employees with self-service options.
• Negative impacts: Conversely, poorly performing apps, frequent downtime, frustrating business processes, inadequate digital tools, or technology disruptions lead to significant pain points. This negatively affects employee satisfaction, hinders employee productivity, and can even impact well-being.

How does DEX impact employee retention?

A poor DEX, characterized by frustrating technology, frequent disruptions, and inadequate support, is a major source of employee dissatisfaction. This frustration can lead to decreased job satisfaction and contribute to employees seeking opportunities elsewhere. Conversely, a great digital employee experience makes employees feel supported and productive, enhancing employee retention.

What role do IT teams play in DEX?

IT teams play a central role in DEX. They are responsible for selecting, implementing, managing, and supporting the vast majority of workplace technology. Their ability to ensure system reliability, provide effective support, manage digital tools, and proactively address performance issues is fundamental to creating a positive DEX. Digital employee experience management tools empower IT departments to fulfill this role more effectively.