A digital employee experience is more vital than ever with the rise of remote and hybrid employment. Employees can now work from kitchen islands, dining room tables, and corner coffee shops thanks to technological advancements. Organizations must invest in providing a positive digital experience (DEX) in order to recruit and retain top personnel.
HR and IT experts understand that a well-designed digital workspace is critical to the employee experience. Employees require technology that allows them to be productive and engaged at work, regardless of where they work.
Simultaneously, workplace technology must be safe, secure, and inclusive. Employee engagement and employee happiness are influenced by your organization’s DEX strategy.
However, it is sometimes easier said than done. We’ll look at what the digital employee experience is like and how to improve it. We’ll also discuss the position digital employee experience DEX plays in your future work strategy, as well as how to overcome certain frequent problems.
How Does the Digital Employee Experience Strategy Differ?
The quality of employees’ touchpoints with the technology they utilize to conduct their tasks is referred to as the digital employee experience.
We could investigate various aspects of the digital employee experience, such as:
- Device and program performance: How quick are they? Are they set up in a way that allows staff to execute their jobs?
- Device and program dependability: Do programs crash? Do computers slow down to the point where they must be restarted on a regular basis? Do company-issued mobile devices smoothly connect to the company VPN?
- Mobility: Do job-related tools allow employees to operate efficiently from anywhere?
- Collaboration: Do programs help employees to collaborate effectively with their team members? Do they increase productivity? Do they contribute to business success?
Remember that a digital employee experience encompasses not only how employees interact with technology (the applications and devices to which they have access), but also how the IT department collaborates with the business and individual employees to address issues and service requests, deploy new technologies, train employees, and collaborate with employees to understand and deliver on requirements.
What are the Benefits of Investing in a Digital Employee Experience DEX Strategy?
The business value aspect, as with most major or company-wide changes, will be important.
However, providing your staff with a good digital employee experience DEX strategy has other benefits.
#1. It assists you in creating a work environment that is (post) pandemic prepared.
Companies around the world can now work more efficiently at home and in remote areas thanks to digital tools. A major cause for this? Employees want flexible and remote work choices that keep them engaged even when they’re not in the office. Most businesses will require a robust DEX plan to make this a reality.
#2. It can improve your client experience.
Many contact center teams use digital tools to manage both phone and digital customer experiences. However, having a good DEX becomes even more critical if you have agents working remotely.
Can your agents and managers monitor service levels and ensure that customers’ questions are promptly answered? What happens if they work from home?
This is where a cloud contact center solution comes in handy because it allows your agents to work on their cell phones as well as their laptops, allows managers to monitor active calls, and much more.
For example, Dialpad’s contact center platform not only transcribes calls in real-time so that supervisors can monitor how conversations are progressing as they happen, but it also performs live sentiment analysis:
#3. It keeps employees satisfied.
On a related topic, we must not overlook employee satisfaction. Giving your team the tools they need to make their work easier will almost always result in happier and more engaged employees.
#4. It increases your profits.
And, guess what? A high level of employee satisfaction can enhance retention rates—which not only sounds pleasant but also reflects long-term cost benefits for the organization.
When you consider the lifecycle of your workforce and the expenses of turnover (such as hiring, onboarding, and so on), it becomes evident that keeping employees happy can have a direct influence on profitability in a variety of ways.
Not only that but when IT teams don’t have to spend all of their time addressing problems and resolving tickets, they can focus on higher-value duties like coming up with new business solutions, whether that’s finding automation opportunities or designing a transformation project.
Three Critical Tasks that Can Contribute to a Great Digital Employee Experience DEX
Every department in a corporation, from Human Resources to Legal, has a responsibility to play in developing and maintaining a cohesive digital employee experience DEX strategy.
However, there are three absolutely necessary groups that must buy in and commit to making any digital transformation or transition plan a success.
#1. Team leaders
A great digital employee experience is impossible to achieve without effective internal communications. And managers are critical in spreading knowledge and holding their employees accountable. If you expect everyone to utilize the same communication platform and not download their own tools, for example, managers are the ones who must enforce those standards.
#2. Executives and CEOs
Top management, including senior executives and the C-suite, may not have direct responsibility, but they are required to maintain the overall “experience management” of your DEX. They must be the figureheads and representatives—if everyone is texting each other on the same platform but your CEO refuses to utilize it, getting buy-in from the rest of the company will be even more difficult.
#3. IT Departments
Of course, IT personnel will be crucial in all things digital. CIOs and IT managers will collaborate closely with business executives to construct a number of initiatives ranging from onboarding to endpoint security in order to deliver a fantastic digital employee experience.
How Can You Begin Building an Excellent Digital Employee Experience?
An excellent place to start in building a strong digital employee experience, as with all employee experiences, is to ask workers their perspectives on what’s working and what isn’t within their organization. Then put those findings into action.
Here are seven steps to get you started:
Step #1: Create personas and journeys for the digital employee experience.
A new employee; a technophile; a technophobe. Different sectors will interact with technology in different ways. That is why it is critical to understand employee personalities and how they learn and utilize technology in order to design an exceptional digital employee experience.
Step #2: Develop a methodical, repeatable strategy to change management.
Change brings uncertainty, and uncertainty brings stress. Establishing a consistent strategy to change management will assist employees in adopting technological changes and supporting digital transformation efforts.
Step #3: Form cross-functional teams to improve workflows.
Consider putting in place a procurement system. Without adequate input from many areas, such as purchasing, legal, and the business, the system may end up with workflows that rely too heavily on a single function, resulting in bottlenecks, onerous processes, and a poor digital employee experience.
Step #4: Create the best platforms for your target audience.
Design platforms and/or systems with the experience that people want in mind, rather than the processes that will be supported. A design-thinking approach, in which employee pain points are discovered and the focus is on the task at hand rather than the steps in an existing process, is an excellent method to keep humans at the core of the digital employee experience.
Step #5: Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to track your progress.
When it comes to providing an exceptional digital employee experience, operational metrics such as downtime, time to deploy, and ticket response time are unquestionably important. However, it’s equally crucial to consider the digital experiences you’re attempting to drive with these operational KPIs.
You want consumers to see digital technology as dependable, to experience minimum disruption during significant deployments, and to be satisfied with the time it takes to resolve tickets. Operational metrics assess whether operations are carried out as planned, whereas experience metrics assess whether employees feel empowered by the services they receive.
Step #6: Encourage decentralized ideation with centralized concept screening and prioritizing.
According to an Accenture survey of over 800 firms, great innovators used the potential of individuals working in the business to produce and work on ideas, while also employing a consistent architecture in how those ideas were eventually transferred to projects and products.
On one occasion, staff at Bosch Group created 1,800 ideas in just six days. The organization consolidated and standardized the development of selected ideas, immediately assembling global, cross-functional teams of personnel who had been relieved of their regular jobs to work on the ideas.
Step #7: Manage IT investments as if they were a venture capital portfolio.
A good balance of blue-chip investments (high feasibility, high impact, long implementation time), quick wins (lower impact but high feasibility and quick implementation time), and moon shots (low feasibility but very high impact).
What Impact Does Digitization Have on Employee Experience?
Digitalization, or the act of improving corporate functions through the use of digital technologies, has a wide-ranging impact on the employee experience.
Here are a few examples:
- Automating time-consuming manual business operations, such as switching from a legal assistant transcribing phone calls for an attorney to speech recognition technology.
- Using a combination of videoconferencing tools, digital or online whiteboards, and collaborative office productivity tools, the need to travel to in-person meetings is reduced.
- Customer and employee feedback is collected and delivered to the firm online. There is no longer a need to coordinate around a single data-gathering effort; instead, the utilization of digital intercepts and automated lifecycle pulsing can quickly get data into the hands of the leaders who require it.
Great Examples of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Strategy
Now that you understand the significance of creating an excellent digital employee experience, consider the following examples to help you imagine how you may apply what you’ve learned above to your firm.
The following are examples of excellent digital employee experiences:
- Single sign-on that is fully implemented eliminates the need to log in to various sites.
- A walk-up (virtual or in-person) IT help desk that reacts and resolves issues quickly.
- A frontline feedback platform that allows employees to make and vote on feature proposals.
- A well-planned phishing protection program in which employees are periodically sent “test” phishing emails.
- A CRM solution that appears to be tailor-made for the particular user.
You don’t have to nail your complete digital employee experience the first time. The aim is to question your employees about their experiences with technology, as well as how your IT department handles issues and support requests, introduces new digital tools, trains staff, and interacts with employees to understand and meet requirements. Then, take those revelations and put them into action.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for creating a strong digital employee experience. However, your employees will be able to tell you which digital employee experience works best for them.
Common Issues Associated With Prioritizing Digital Employee Experience Strategy
It is not an easy task to implement the best digital employee experience DEX strategy. Knowing what hurdles you’ll face ahead of time will help you prepare.
Among the difficulties connected with addressing an organization’s DEX are:
#1. Cost
Creating a solid DEX necessitates a large financial investment as well as time and work. To secure the necessary budget and resources, you must demonstrate how the initial investment will result in both short and long-term payoffs.
#2. Buy-in from stakeholders
You may need to overcome your natural aversion to deviating from the way things have traditionally been done. One challenge is persuading leadership that digital transformation is necessary enough to justify the budget. You may also need to sell the technology to staff first before they learn how to use it successfully enough to make their jobs easier.
#3. Creating the ideal technology stack
You must choose technologies that will benefit both your staff and your organization’s aims. The tools and platforms must also work together to simplify, rather than complicate, your employees’ digital experience.
#4. Change Management
There will be several modifications and shifts as a result of digital deployment. Workflows and business procedures will need to be adjusted in addition to employee training. This organizational shift will necessitate meticulous preparation and flexibility.
Conclusion
When technology assists and empowers people to execute their tasks, it has a significant beneficial influence on both the employee experience and the bottom line. HR’s role is critical in providing an employee-centric DEX that encourages an engaged and productive staff. In the long term, such a workforce is ready to assist your firm in meeting its objectives.
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