Improving the digital employee experience

The widespread shift to a hybrid workplace during the pandemic has created many new challenges for business leaders including CIOs, vice presidents, and directors. Perhaps no concern is greater than the need to retain workforce talent by keeping employees in the digital workplace and remote locations engaged and fulfilled in their jobs.

We know that a better employee experience is directly correlated with a better customer experience. Yet improving the digital employee experience depends on keeping people productive while making everyone feel like they have opportunities for personal growth in the company.

In fact, employees at most large enterprises today rely on 12 or more applications to do their work. Effectively supporting all that software technology requires a new strategic focus. Yet there is a growing digital skills gap in which one-third of employees receive just one hour or less of training when adopting new software, according to the Whatfix 2023 Digital Adoption Trends Report. In addition, the report showed that 78 percent of software users lack the proper expertise to use their new applications.

To address employee engagement, leaders must look to improve the digital employee experience, also known as DEX. Research by Gartner shows that 50 percent of IT organizations plan to establish a DEX strategy, team, and management tools by 2025, marking a major increase from just 5 percent in 2021. Also, by 2025, more than 50 percent of IT organizations will use DEX to prioritize and measure their digital initiative success rates, up from less than 5 percent in 2021.

Double Trouble: Application Friction & Solution Sprawl

Users become dissatisfied when they are unable to easily deploy software tools to be productive in their jobs. This creates friction when employees get stuck in a business process and do not know how to proceed. They may need to ask a colleague for assistance, or raise a support ticket, or send an email to their boss to get help. In each case, they are not happy about the disruption.

Enablement is the first step toward helping employees succeed in their jobs. If software tools treat every user the same way, friction will persist among different age groups from different geographies with different requirements based on different backgrounds and educations. Instead, the software should abstract away those differences and deliver a custom solution based on each user’s unique needs. For instance, a 30-something employee may quickly grasp the shortcuts and best practices in their Salesforce CRM app, but some in their 60s may need more handholding in the application. This distinction highlights the need for DEX strategies, which involve tools that gently nudge each employee with proactive, customized suggestions within their workflows to help people take the right actions.

Another big problem involves software sprawl, which can overwhelm both new and tenured employees alike through the sheer volume of tools and practices they need to learn. In the past, most enterprises adopted monolithic systems for ERP and CRM, but many more specialized tools are available today for specific functions, resulting in an overload of applications.

Solving this problem requires a process of continuous learning and redesign to improve the employee experience. Before investing in any new capabilities, leaders should review their existing capabilities to identify any potential product additions for workplace analytics, endpoint management, automation, or IT service management.

Developing a Comprehensive DEX Plan

It takes a united team of stakeholders to build a successful DEX strategy. This group should include the CIO who controls the software budget, the HR leader who oversees digital employee experiences, and the business leaders who are most affected by the changes.

A DEX approach promotes the use of automation to integrate data, simplify tasks, and make software functionality simpler for employees to use. For instance, roughly 3 percent of global employees apply for leave on any given day. Instead of requiring people to navigate through a complicated approval process, a DEX platform automates each step and abstracts the complexity away, leaving employees to answer only the simplest questions such as the dates and reasons for their paid leave.

DEX teams also should take an interdisciplinary approach to partner with shared services across business units and consolidate requirements. They should work with the HR and the legal teams to maintain regulatory compliance and governance, and with the internal communications team to prepare employees for the introduction of new DEX tools, and to address any privacy concerns.

To measure the success of DEX gains, IT teams can build dashboards to get a comprehensive view of the various applications accessed by employees, their time spent on each app, and the productivity delivered as a result. Thus, IT teams can perform granular ROI analyses to justify any spending on new applications and tools. They should also develop experience scores and benchmarks to internally measure progress against failure over time.

Improving the digital employee experience requires a major shift in the prevailing business mindset. Remember, the goal with DEX is not to train employees to adapt to their apps, but to train the apps to adapt to their employees.

Image Credit: Goodluz / Shutterstock

Khadim Batti is the Co-founder and CEO of Whatfix. Khadim co-founded Whatfix with Vara Kumar in 2014 with the mission of empowering individuals and organizations to freely use and experience the maximum benefits of technology. An entrepreneur at heart with an engineer’s mind, Khadim is also giving back to the start-up community by sharing his passion, knowledge, and mentorship with aspiring talent for over a decade and a half. Follow him on Twitter.