Digital Employee Experience Management (DEX) Implementation Guide

What Is Digital Employee Experience (DEX)?

Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is the quality of users’ interactions with technology in their work environment.

Digital Employee Experience (DEX) refers to the quality of users’ interactions with technology in their work environment. According to Gartner, “DEX tools help IT leaders improve the digital employee experience and empower IT workers to shift focus from technology management to more business-value-added work.”¹ 

And Forrester adds, “A great digital employee experience (DEX) is essential to productivity, employee engagement, and talent retention.”²

From onboarding new hires to managing flexible work schedules, every aspect of the workplace affects what employees think and feel about an organization. DEX examines how well the digital technology employees rely on functions and how it impacts their ability to do their jobs effectively. 

Poor system performance, frequent downtime, or usability issues can create disruptions that hinder productivity and employee satisfaction.

Related: From Digital Experience Monitoring to Digital Employee Experience: An Evolution in Workplace Technology

Common Obstacles in Digital Employee Experience Management

Common issues that negatively affect the digital employee experience include:

• Slow computer or program startups
• Apps that crash unexpectedly
• Network connection issues
• Outdated hardware and software

With the rise of mobile devices, cloud-based apps, and remote work, accelerated by the pandemic, DEX is becoming even more critical for IT departments to manage effectively. In fact, a proactive digital employee experience strategy is becoming table stakes for enterprises across all sectors, including healthcare, finance, and retail.

Examples of a Great Digital Employee Experience

Creating a positive digital employee experience involves more than just fixing technical glitches. It’s about designing a workspace where technology facilitates productivity and satisfaction. 

Here are some concrete examples of how organizations can enhance the overall employee experience:  

• Personalize digital experiences based on roles, departments, and individual preferences. IT persona planning can cause less stress for the employee, greater productivity and reduced downtime, higher job satisfaction and retention, better onboarding and lower costs. 
• Understand employee sentiment by analyzing how your employees interact with their devices. Sure, traditional sentiment analysis tools – like surveys, online reviews, live chats, and social media monitoring – give you good insights, but they don’t tell you the full story. Use telemetry data coming directly from the end-users device to get an objective view of how they feel based on how they use their device. 

• Embrace automation to “shift left”, or move IT issue resolution to earlier in the service desk process. If simple fixes to common issues are automated, many can be addressed before reaching the help desk. This then empowers first-level support teams to spend time solving more complex problems. Lakeside’s founder refers to this as “getting your IT team off the hamster wheel.”
• Create a unified digital workplace strategy that aligns technology investments with both business objectives and employee needs. Enterprises often implement new technology solutions in silos, resulting in a fragmented digital environment where employees navigate multiple disconnected systems. To really deliver a great digital employee experience, organizations must use IT and employee experience data and insights to drive strategic business decisions, and realize significant ROI in the process.

Benefits of a Modern Digital Employee Experience

Understanding how DEX impacts your organization is crucial but knowing the tangible benefits it can bring is even more important.

According to Gartner, “Benefits include:

• Fewer IT issues that disrupt and impede employee productivity
• Reduced IT overhead through automation
• Improved IT support with faster incident resolution and improved problem management
• Improved endpoint configuration and patch compliance
• Better balance of objective and subjective success measures, including technology adoption, performance and employee sentiment
• Increased workforce engagement and digital dexterity
• IT becoming more proactive and human-centric
• Increased ability to attract and retain talent” 

Beyond these core benefits, a strong DEX strategy can lead to:

• Enhanced troubleshooting and remediation. By providing employees with real-time access to information, self-service tools, and intuitive systems, organizations can empower them to resolve common IT issues independently. This reduces the burden on the IT service desk, facilitates faster remediation, and minimizes disruptions to productivity.
• Improved data-driven decision making. DEX tools often include comprehensive dashboards and analytics capabilities, providing valuable insights into technology usage patterns, employee sentiment, and potential areas for improvement. These data-driven insights enable IT teams and business leaders to make informed decisions about technology investments and optimization strategies.
• Increased agility and adaptability. A well-designed DEX strategy equips organizations with the flexibility to adapt to evolving work models, such as remote or hybrid work arrangements and the increasing use of mobile devices. By providing employees with seamless access to resources and collaboration tools regardless of their location or device, companies can foster a more agile and productive workforce.
• Streamlined onboarding and training: DEX can significantly improve the employee lifecycle by providing new hires with a smooth and efficient onboarding experience. Automated account setup, access to digital learning resources, and personalized support can help new team members quickly integrate into the organization and become productive.
• Sustainable IT initiatives: Implementing a DEX solution can significantly reduce your organization’s environmental impact by providing comprehensive visibility across your IT estate. In-depth endpoint data can offer actionable insights into energy consumption, printing habits, and power usage patterns. This level of granular detail allows organizations to identify opportunities to improve sustainability while differentiating carbon footprint across personas, geographies, and device types. With these data-driven insights, IT teams can develop effective green IT initiatives and DEX strategies that minimize waste, extend hardware lifecycles, and empower employees to adopt more environmentally responsible digital practices.

Lakeside has seen benefits across even more DEX use cases, including cost savings through hardware and software optimization, decreased mean time to resolution through IT self-help and helpdesk ticket avoidance, change performance benefits in digital transformation projects, and proactive monitoring of consumer-facing devices such as kiosks and displays.

ROI of Digital Employee Experience

When it comes to building or maturing a DEX strategy, Forrester states that enterprises should look for providers that “Translate data into actionable insights to speed time to value.” Continuing to add, “Every vendor in this evaluation collects data, but the leaders help buyers make use of it as quickly as possible.” 

In fact, many of the benefits of DEX translate directly into rapid returns. Lakeside created value blueprints with this time-to-value in mind. In the first half of last year, Lakeside completed more than 70 blueprints with 35 customers, enabling them to uncover savings opportunities of an estimated $84 million.

Enterprises can quickly calculate what returns they may see with a leading DEX tool, like Lakeside SysTrack. For example, a company with 20,000 employees may realize more than $3M in potential savings after one year through ticket reduction, hardware and software optimization, and proactive IT.

Tips for Implementing a Successful DEX Strategy

Understand Your Employees’ Needs and Pain Points

A successful DEX strategy begins with a deep understanding of your employees’ daily workflows, challenges, and preferences. Conduct surveys, interviews, and focus groups to gather employee feedback on their experiences with existing digital tools. Analyze usage data to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement. This user-centric approach ensures that your DEX initiatives address real needs and deliver tangible benefits.

Define Clear Objectives and Metrics

Establish specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for your DEX strategy. What do you want to achieve? Examples might include increased productivity, reduced IT support tickets, decreased MTTR, and measurable IT cost savings. Define KPIs and metrics to track progress and measure the impact of your initiatives.

Prioritize Data-Driven Insights

Your decisions can only be as good as the data they are based on. Select a DEX tool that gives you breadth, depth, and quality of real-time and historic data. Especially with the acceleration of AI, ML, and automations to enhance DEX, high-quality data is critical.

Provide Proactive and Personalized Support

Implement proactive IT support measures to identify and resolve potential issues before they impact employees. Offer personalized support based on individual needs and preferences. This could include self-service knowledge bases, chatbots, and responsive help desk services.

Focus on XLAs, instead of SLAs

Experience level agreements (XLAs) focus on value outcomes instead of the traditional technical outputs of service level agreements (SLAs). By shifting focus from technical metrics to user-centric outcomes, XLAs enable organizations to measure DEX more effectively, identifying pain points and areas for improvement. Companies can then create a more engaging and productive digital workplace.

Integrate and Streamline Digital Workflows

Eliminate silos between different digital tools and platforms. Integrate applications and data to create seamless workflows. Automate repetitive tasks and business processes to free up employees’ time for more strategic and creative work. This streamlined approach enhances productivity and reduces frustration.

Emphasize Security and Privacy

Ensure that your DEX strategy prioritizes data security and privacy. Implement robust security measures to protect sensitive information and comply with relevant regulations. Communicate clearly with employees about data privacy policies and practices.

Gain Executive Sponsorship and Cross-Functional Collaboration

Secure buy-in from senior leadership to champion your DEX strategy. Foster collaboration between IT, human resources, and other departments to ensure alignment and coordinated efforts in enhancing the overall workplace experience.

A successful DEX strategy requires a holistic approach that involves all stakeholders.

Digital Employee Experience as a Business Driver Beyond IT

These benefits and returns are not limited to the IT team. Gartner predicts, “Through 2027, 80% of DEX tool deployments that account for only IT-focused use cases will fail to achieve a sustainable ROI.” And adds that “Requirements will expand to include non-IT-focused, as well as mobile and frontline worker, use cases.”

No longer is the digital employee experience a concern only of the CIO or Director of IT. With the extensive, and growing, list of benefits of great DEX, executives from across the organization are leaning in to see how to improve DEX. From kiosks to point-of-sale devices to displays to frontline worker devices (e.g., rugged handhelds), organizations need to strategically meet consumer expectations by extending DEX to these digital touch points.

The Bottom Line: Digital Employee Experience Management Matters

A great digital employee experience isn’t just about minimizing technical issues; it’s about empowering employees to do their best work. By focusing on improving DEX, organizations can unlock higher levels of productivity, employee satisfaction, and innovation — all while driving better business outcomes and improving the bottom line.

With reports from both Gartner and Forrester underscoring the critical importance of DEX, now is the time for organizations to prioritize this often-overlooked aspect of the digital workplace.

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