Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Hub

A practical guide for pragmatic IT teams

 Who is Digital Employee Experience Management for?

Digital Employee Experience Management is for every organization, large or small, that cares about employees. It is important regardless of whether IT is in-house or outsourced.
In the simplest terms, DEX is all about putting digital employee experience in the center.

In practical terms, a DEX solution is often needed to measure and monitor the experience and find improvement opportunities.

Why Digital Employee Experience and why now?

According to primary research by leading IT industry analytics firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), 70% of organizations regard 'increasing workforce productivity' as a high priority to their business objectives—a goal inhibited by the fact that, on average, each individual employee is impacted by a digital experience issue 18 times per week”  

 According to EMA, one out of every ten workers will actively seek employment elsewhere if they are forced to use IT resources they do not like.

Digital Employee Experience is one part of the customer-centric and customer-experience revolution. And for IT, the customer is the employee.

Digital Employee Experience Solutions

Traditional IT management tools do not measure or monitor employee experience, and finding experience improvement opportunities is often hard. In practical terms, a DEX solution is often needed. 

Most DEX solutions are designed for large enterprises requiring implementation projects and dedicated resources. However, lighter and simpler, yet fully featured DEX solutions that are designed for every organization, and not just large enterprises,  are also available, making measuring, monitoring, and improving digital employee experience accessible for all IT organizations and teams. Applixure is such a solution.

Measuring Employee Experience

You get what you measure, and the same applies to the Digital Employee Experience. 

Digital Employee Experience should be measured objectively as well as subjectively. Objective experience is measured by monitoring how the computer and software are used and behave. E.g., hangs and crashes are obviously big negatives. Subjective experience is measured with surveys.

How to Improve Digital Employee Experience

Improving your employees’ IT experience starts with data. The IT team needs to be able to see what is going on with computers and software. IT departments traditionally have loads of data, but the key to successfully improving your digital employee experience is having the relevant data available to you in a format where it is actionable. 

Clear metrics, such as scores, trends, and benchmarks, help IT teams to understand where they stand when it comes to digital employee experience, how things are improving, and how they are doing against others.

Data and metrics give visibility, and that visibility leads to data-guided decisions, turning IT operations from reactive to proactive.

There are certainly low-hanging fruit to be harvested in any IT environment. For example, battery wear or high memory usage – both of which cause daily hassles for employees. So, being able to identify computers with these issues will allow you to bring relief to end-users quite easily. 

Importance of visibility into your computer and software environment

You can’t improve something if you don’t know it’s in bad shape, and you can’t fix something you don’t know is broken. So to improve digital employee experience, you need visibility into your computer and software environment. 

The roadmap for improving your Digital Employee Experience

Improving DEX is a journey that you can break down into three steps: 

1. Gain visibility and start being data-driven:

IT teams have a lot of data. The problem is that it's not always the data they need to see what is going on in the computer and software environment, so that they can take action. Many companies use their employees as their computer monitoring systems and respond only when employees report a problem. This method means missing most issues, as less than half of them are ever reported, and it means being reactive, which is not a pleasant mode of working for IT. 
So, the first step towards better DEX is to ensure your IT can see the state of the computer and software environment and the issues therein so that they can start taking action based on that data. 

2. Automate monitoring:

Once you have gained visibility and started acting on the data you have, you'll want to start automating that process to make it run more smoothly.

3. Incorporate employee feedback:

In steps 1 and 2, IT is working with data about the computers and software to fix issues. In this step, the end-user's perspective comes more strongly into play as employees are invited to share their experience with their computers and software. This is the final piece to understanding which fixes to prioritize and how best to ensure employees have an uninterrupted workday. 

Benefits of Digital Employee Experience Improvement

1. DEX improves employee productivity

One of the key benefits of improving DEX is that you increase employee productivity. There are two levers that you can use here: minimize IT hassles, which cut into productivity, AND raise the ceiling on productivity by developing the digital tool set in use. 

2. DEX increases employee satisfaction and happiness

When employees are frustrated with their digital tools, they are not just less productive, but also unsatisfied. According to EMA, one out of every ten workers will actively seek employment elsewhere if they are forced to use IT resources they do not like.

Benefits of DEX for IT teams

1. DEX enables IT teams to shift from a reactive to a proactive way of working

Is your IT team tired of firefighting? Would they rather be working on more value-adding tasks? Making smart use of data will enable your IT team to move from a reactive to a proactive way of working. 

2. Clear metrics help focus effort

When the IT team has clear metrics, such as DEX scores together with trends and benchmarks, it is easier to focus everyone's effort to a common goal of improving the overall employee experience.

3. More meaningful IT work

Let’s face it, fighting fires is not what most IT pros prefer to do. With better visibility to the End-User IT environment, with clear metrics and prioritized lists of issues to focus on, the IT team can focus on where it matters the most, and find patterns where fixing one thing makes the experience better for many.

4. Work smarter, not harder

The beauty of the DEX approach is that with the right tools, it does not require more resources and more work; instead, it requires the opposite. When the team can focus on the right improvements and issues, those that will bring the most improvement with less effort, the overall situation will soon get better, and focus can be moved to proactive work.

5. Competitive advantage

The DEX approach often opens up possibilities to provide not just better working tools, but also tools with more choice while keeping the environment easier to manage at the same time.

Benefits of Digital Employee Experience for security and compliance

Surprisingly, taking the DEX approach also leads to better security and compliance. One of the cornerstones of the approach is the concept of a well-working PC. A DEX solution will help find software that requires updating, is unapproved, or is an out-of-date or end-of-life version. It also helps to see other security issues, such as whether the computer is unnecessarily used with local admin rights. And whether security software is installed.

In short, the DEX approach helps to reduce the attack surface and security risks while still allowing the IT team to offer more choices for the employees with less effort.