Accelerated digital transformations created significant gaps between employees’ expected experiences and the experiences that companies provide. In an attempt to engineer effective, digitally enabled workplaces, companies raced to acquire an abundance of systems to support the workforce - with mixed outcomes. Now, there is a major disconnect between executives’ understanding of employees’ digital needs and employees’ own expectations. PwC found a significant gap between how C-suite executives perceive their company’s digital investments and how staff members experience them. 92% of C-suite executives are happy with their company’s technological experiences, but only 68% of staff express the same sentiment.
Without an accurate reading of workplace operations and a way to close this known gap, companies cannot sufficiently or proactively respond to issues that employees face at work, including factors such as downtime, network latency, slow systems, and other issues. For example, if all your C-suite executives have state-of-the-art MacBook Pros, but the rest of the organization uses eight-year-old hardware, it may be that no one who holds the budget is concerned about the major productivity gaps. Why not? Because they don’t have the data and first-hand experiences, nor do they understand that financial impact.
One way to close this gap is to measure employees’ digital experience objectively by using data from across the IT estate (e.g., device performance indicators and metrics related to whether the digital tools are effectively supporting end-user usage and productivity). Capturing a baseline is imperative for understanding employees’ ongoing digital experience and, more importantly, for building a complete picture of the IT estate to finetune a digital workplace strategy that aligns to realistic conditions.
Understanding the role IT plays in strategic business development
This heightened attention on the digital employee experience (DEX) makes sense; after all, the fundamental role of ITOps is to support the end user. Accordingly, IT departments across all sectors have evolved dramatically in the last decade as more companies have become digitally dependent. Though once considered a back-office role, a cost center, or one that operated on an as-needed basis when tech issues arose, IT is now essential for everyday operations. Not only do companies rely on digital systems, but they also look to the IT department for objective insights into whether digital tools are supporting employee productivity and efficiency.
A digital employee experience (DEX) strategy is enabled by monitoring, reporting, and adjusting workplace systems to ensure workforce optimization. Consider DEX the central nervous system of today’s company-to-employee relationship. It is a seamless digital experience that empowers employees to do their jobs well. Every time you try to join a Zoom call and your video freezes, or you get disconnected, or it just takes so long to start because it's constantly updating, you’re having a bad digital experience. With enough bad interactions, it is also the digital experience that sometimes can make or break an employee’s overall experience at that company, in turn bearing on other key business factors such as engagement, retention, attrition, and productivity.
It goes without saying, then, that IT health - from optimizing applications used across the company to the function of an individual’s work computer - directly correlates to an enterprise’s bottom line. It influences how companies invest in additional systems, the systems they choose, and how resources will be allocated. Companies need data at both the global and the granular levels to understand the full picture of business operations, and this is where IT-driven digital employee experience management plays a strategic role. Not to mention that bad digital experiences internally will trickle down to customer-facing engagements and, by extension, the company’s brand reputation or ability to build and maintain trust among its customers.
Gaining the complete picture of employee engagement
Understanding the end-user digital experience will require companies to understand a number of variables, such as device latency, software utilization or underutilization, session slowness, and more (to name only a few factors). Of course, it is rare, if not impossible, to find a company that uses a single system for all business processes. Thus, companies must always measure the digital experience across all hardware and software usage, generating an extreme amount of data.
For IT leaders to play the strategic role required of them to support business strategy, they need systems that monitor the digital employee experience but also parcel out that data into meaningful reports. For companies looking to improve factors such as engagement, retention, and productivity, a baseline is essential. This means that leaders in the C-suite and the IT department must initiate tracking and monitoring to establish benchmarks against which to measure improvements.
It is from this picture of employee engagement that companies can make strategic technological investments based on the objective data that the IT department provides through DEX. From here, executives can cut costs on ineffective or underutilized technology and make the proper investments that enhance daily operations.
Ultimately, the IT department is an essential strategic business partner in driving the company’s core mission, effectiveness, and engagement across the organization. For any company committed to digital transformation as a way to maintain a competitive edge, a solid digital employee experience strategy must be a priority among investments in digital tools, devices, and systems. To bridge the gap between expected and actual experiences, companies need a clearer picture of the issues their employees face each day; only DEX data will provide this complete picture.
