Today’s workplace is increasingly digital when it comes to how employees perform everyday tasks, collaborate with others, and drive their individual and collective productivity. Consequently, getting your digital employee experience (or DEX) right has never been more mission-critical for organizational success.
Detailed below are seven steps you can take to evaluate and improve your digital employee experience:
1. Know the What and Why of DEX
Let’s begin with the basics. The digital employee experience, or DEX, is defined as “an employee’s holistic experience with the digital workplace provided by IT. It is based on the performance of one’s device(s), applications, networks, and end-user sentiment.”
DEX is a concept that goes far beyond IT (hardware and software) to encompass the modern Employee Experience, connecting to a company’s culture, Employee Engagement, and an organization’s ability to innovate. Your DEX matters because enabling your people to do their best work matters.
2. Understand What Can Go Wrong With DEX
DEX supports the productivity, collaboration, and engagement of employees. IT teams support DEX by keeping digital tools and systems up and running efficiently. But as digital complexity increases in a business landscape marked by more devices (company-owned and otherwise), more working models (remote, hybrid, and on-site), and evolving cyberthreats, the job of IT teams in supporting DEX has never been harder.
What can go wrong to disrupt DEX? Many things, including:
1. IT teams lack visibility into the problems that users/employees face; you can’t fix problems you can’t see.
2. Problems take too long to resolve, causing frustration and productivity-killing downtime.
3. The same problems/issues recur over time and (yes) cause frustration and downtime.
3. Adopt a Process for Improving DEX
Improving your DEX is strongly correlated with increased productivity, reduced costs, improved agility, reduced attrition, and reduced time to market. That’s the “why” part, but the “how” part must be a carefully-considered process. Any DEX improvement initiative should begin with:
- understanding the DEX problems you confront,
- understanding the “costs” those problems are creating at the individual and organizational level, and
- taking appropriate (and iterative) actions based on evidence that moves your DEX towards “better.”
Understanding and accurately assessing the impact of digital employee experience is foundational. It allows IT leaders to get a sense of the “DEX maturity” of their organization, set achievable goals, consider realistic options, and then drive improvements based on clear evidence derived from organizational data (not hunches or copycat approaches that might work from other organizations, but not yours).
DEX improvement should be systemic and an ongoing, evidence-based process rather than ad hoc and reactive.
4. Know the Two Components of DEX
DEX isn’t just about technology, but includes how employees feel about the technology they’re using. The word “experience” sounds holistic and subjective because it is. DEX has two components: technology and employee sentiment. Let’s look at each:
Technology. Changes in technology driven by the IT team will inevitably impact DEX, such as changes pushed to production, VPN connection issues, or interactions through web applications. Any and all of these technology changes can have ripple effects on employee behavior and work habits. Some of the most common areas of technology change that can impact employees include:
- Endpoints: Endpoints impact the ability of employees to start and use their device on specific operating systems without interruption (i.e., reliability) and with good response times (i.e., device performance).
- Applications: Applications reflect the ability of employees to use their applications smoothly and with good response time.
- Collaboration tools: Collaboration tools reflect the ability of employees to use applications like Microsoft Teams and Zoom for collective endeavors.
Employee Sentiment. How do employees feel about what they’re getting from IT? While the “sentiment” aspect of DEX may be subjective, it’s no less important for understanding DEX and its impact on employee engagement, retention, and other HR KPIs.
How do you measure employee sentiment? You systematically, regularly ask employees through opinion surveys that are consistent over time.
5. Monitor Your DEX Score
Nexthink provides a helpful framework for combining your Technology score and your Sentiment score, both described above, into a DEX score that you can calculate and use as a basis for driving DEX improvement. Part of the value of this DEX score framework is its capacity to identify a baseline for internal improvement, as well as its ability to benchmark your DEX score against external organizations.
6. Know What DEX Success Looks Like
Earlier, we described what can go wrong with DEX, but it’s also essential to know what DEX success looks like. When your DEX is going right, here’s what happens:
- You have increased visibility into seen and unseen IT issues that can disrupt employees and cause downtime (issues like network connectivity, web requests, resource consumption, and software failures).
- You can proactively solve issues before they impact employee experience. Your IT team has the capacity to identify the root causes of IT issues, perform remediation, and automate solutions before incidents occur and diminish DEX.
- You can provide employees with the tools they need to be productive. Your IT team can achieve cost-effective technology deployment by equipping users with the tools they need to accomplish their unique goals and responsibilities.
- You have improved communication between employees and IT. Your IT team can collect employee sentiment feedback and correlate it with technical data for a more holistic understanding of DEX.
- Your IT initiatives are more sustainable. Your IT team can collect data on how software, hardware, and employees’ digital habits impact their carbon footprint and cultivate an effective sustainability strategy.
7. Drive Ongoing DEX Improvement
As the old business saying goes, “that which can be measured can be improved.” Setting up a process of monitoring your DEX enables you to create a virtuous feedback loop that supports continuous DEX improvement. With an eye on improving your DEX score, you can plan and execute short-term, mid-term, and long-term changes to move the needle on your DEX, leading to positive impacts on productivity and engagement at both the individual and organizational level.
Of course, your organization will need to combine the appropriate people, processes, and technology/platforms in order to monitor your DEX score, share the relevant data with stakeholders, discuss what to do about it (next steps), and take data-informed action.
DEX ultimately matters because your employees want and deserve support in doing their best work. When they succeed, and you approach your DEX within a framework of continuous improvement as detailed in this blog post, your organization succeeds too.