As my company’s Chief Technology Officer, Elise Carmichael, recently pointed out, the chief employee experience officer is one of the fastest growing roles in the U.S., according to LinkedIn. Carmichael argues that the digital employee experience is “inextricable from the employee experience.” But what is the digital employee experience, or “DEX,” as the market calls it? More importantly, why does DEX matter?
DEX and digital workplace strategy
In short, DEX is the line between your employees happily working on their smooth-running computers versus throwing up their hands in frustration when a glitchy computer or app, slow load times or other IT issues get in their way of doing their job. Digital employee experiences, both good and bad, cover the full gamut of this spectrum.
One thing is true for every enterprise creating a digital workplace strategy: Today, DEX matters more than ever. According to McKinsey’s The State of Organizations 2023 report, “Since the pandemic, about 90% of organizations have embraced a range of hybrid work models that allow employees to work remotely from off-site locations (including home) for some or much of the time.”
So how do you make sure the digital employee experience at your company is a great one — one that never reaches the point at which your employees are so frustrated that they want to quit? That is a legitimate concern. In an independent study on productivity in the digital workplace, my company discovered that “about 36% of employees admit that they’ve considered leaving their employer because of poor digital experience — and 14% actually have.”
Complete IT visibility is key
The key to ensuring strong digital experiences across your workforce is having complete visibility of your IT estate, regardless of whether your workers are remote, hybrid or on-site. After all, you can’t fix what you can’t see, and you can’t see what you can’t measure.
That’s why building this full picture starts with capturing endpoint device data. By that I don’t mean “Big Brother” data; instead, I mean performance metrics that can give your IT team or managed service provider an objective understanding of whether digital tools are empowering or hindering employees in their jobs. This endpoint device data includes issues such as hanging apps, slow performance, end-of-life batteries or poor sizing of devices for what end users actually need for their specific roles.
The ultimate goal of arming your IT experts with both breadth and depth of DEX data is to help your desk agents scale up the data hierarchy of needs — where actionable insights sit at the top of the pyramid. These data insights empower IT to respond quickly to real-time performance issues before the employee even notices there’s a problem brewing. It’s especially crucial for level 1 and level 2 service desk agents to extract pre-packaged insights and automated playbooks from this data to empower them to shift from being reactive (traditional, “take a number” IT) to proactive (consultative, business-centric IT).
Why is this proactive IT posture so important for building a strong digital workplace strategy? It’s simple: Your employees are your most important resource, so their digital employee experience must be a strategic business priority — not an afterthought.
Finally, a way to measure — and improve — the digital employee experience
Where do you begin? It goes without saying that the most important tool for most enterprise employees is their computer or other digital device (e.g., tablets or hand-held devices in retail, carts in healthcare settings). These devices allow employees to communicate, conduct their work, interface and collaborate with co-workers, engage with internal systems (such as HR, finance and procurement) and play a part in growing your enterprise. Yet historically, companies have not strategically managed the impact of device performance on the employee — their productivity, job satisfaction and even well-being or happiness. Not to mention the trickle-down effect of poor digital employee experiences on customers (or patients).
Before the influx of remote and hybrid work environments, most enterprises focused attention and investment on managing and monitoring their on-site data center infrastructure. Servers, power, cooling, network devices, security, storage, and so on. All facets demanded constant attention from IT, whose biggest fear was any downtime of this underlying infrastructure. For decades, however, a major piece of the puzzle was missing: managing and supporting employees’ interactions with all the systems that kept IT up at night.
Even though all that network and data center infrastructure existed to support the people working on their desktop computers, the one thing that mattered the most — the user and their engagement with workplace technology — was overlooked completely.
Fortunately, that legacy approach has changed. Now, the rise of remote and hybrid work environments, coupled with cloud-based applications and software-as-a-service, has paved the way for long-overdue attention on how employees engage with the technology at their fingertips. Indeed, I believe DEX represents a natural evolution of how IT manages the digital foundation of work.
DEX as the next stage in IT evolution
Because employee computers are now highly distributed across multiple networks anywhere and everywhere, IT must be able to enable and empower employees to work anywhere, seamlessly and productively. What’s more, given the growing number of Gen-Z employees entering the workforce, enterprises can no longer afford to overlook the importance of trying to make the workplace mirror consumer experiences with technology. That’s really all the emerging workforce — digital natives — has ever known.
The catch is that IT service reps can’t be everywhere at once. Comprehensive DEX data, which can provide complete visibility of the IT estate from a single dashboard, can save the day, if you let it. Are you heeding its insights?