Due to increases in digital transformation, fostering a great digital employee experience (digital employee experience) is more important than ever. Turn to digital employee experience management.
Digital employee experience (DEX) refers to every way in which employees interact with the digital tools, systems, and environments they use to work. The DEX has become an essential part of helping today’s employees work wiser. Since remote and hybrid teams rely heavily on enterprise technology, creating a seamless digital employee experience is essential for employees who work outside the office.
Positive digital experiences help employees work, collaborate, and achieve their goals. 82% of executives believe employee happiness is significantly impacted by the efficiency of workplace technology, and 77% of employees will look for new work if their current position doesn’t provide the right tools, information, and systems they need to get the job done. Digital employee experience management is key, but how can managers give employees the digital tools they need to succeed?
In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of creating a great digital employee experience and why improving the digital employee experience is so essential for the enterprise. We’ll also discuss what makes up an excellent digital employee experience, and cover how managers can use ActivTrak’s workforce analytics software to create the best digital employee experience for their employees.
What is the Digital Employee Experience?
The digital employee experience refers to every aspect of how employees interact with their workplace technology, from device and application performance to network speeds to end-user sentiment. Digital employee experience also factors into the overall employee experience, fostering engagement and innovation through a positive company culture.
Creating a great digital employee experience involves leveraging technology that streamlines workflows, improves internal communications, and aids workplace productivity, but it’s much more than supplying the right digital tools and apps. Excellent digital employee experience is about creating a positive, holistic experience for employees where enterprise technology supports the mindset, processes, and people within an organization.
Digital Employees and the Future of Work
Work environments today are more digital than ever before, and employees connect to their organization quite differently now than in the past. This rise in digital work can be attributed to three key trends:
1. The proliferation of information: Information technology is growing and taking up more space (physically and metaphorically) within the enterprise. The only way to search, sort, gather, and act upon this information is through an arsenal of digital tools.
2. Shifting workforces: With Baby Boomers retiring and Gen Zers joining the workforce, tech-savvy employees are becoming the norm. These new employees use flexible, intuitive tools in every aspect of their lives and they expect the same from employers.
3. Faster operations: Faster speeds have become the norm for modern work environments, and employees must match this pace. By digitizing manual or outdated processes, they can keep up with the speed of business and work more effectively.
The Expansion of Remote and Hybrid Work Environments
Along with advances in enterprise technology, the COVID-19 pandemic spurred an unprecedented increase in remote work. Now that remote work has become the standard for many companies, it’s even more critical for employees to have a great digital employee experience with reliable remote access to enterprise systems, tools, and other digital features.
Remote employees must be able to seamlessly communicate with coworkers and work alongside them without major roadblocks or pain points. Oftentimes, remote work challenges like disengagement, burnout, and silos stem from poor digital employee experience. If your remote employees don’t have access to the tools they need to work effectively — from any location — employee engagement and employee productivity can suffer. By prioritizing the digital employee experience for your remote workers, you can support employees’ well-being and ultimately drive their success.
Why Should You Invest in the Digital Employee Experience?
According to Harvard Business Review, just over half (53%) of respondents believe that in order for organizations to succeed at digital acceleration post-pandemic, the most important change is to create a corporate culture that supports digital agility. We agree! When companies help employees be digitally agile, everyone benefits. Investing in a top-notch digital employee experience helps promote:
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Increased employee productivity
When employees have access to the right technology, they can do their jobs easily and efficiently. Great digital employee experience also includes streamlining workflows so employees can maximize their time and energy to get more out of the workday. This also helps boost employee satisfaction and raise retention rates.
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Higher profitability
Productive employees in a digital workplace equipped with streamlined workflows, strategic automation, and self-service portals increase revenue for your organization. Also, since a good digital employee experience enables employees to resolve their own technical issues, your IT teams can spend their time addressing high-value projects that drive business value instead of fixing minor issues.
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Better customer experience
96% of consumers say the quality of their customer service experience is a key brand differentiator, and most millennials prefer to resolve issues over online live chats on mobile devices. If your organization doesn’t have a great digital employee experience, your employees aren’t fully equipped to support customers whenever they’re needed. By giving your team the best new technologies, you’re helping them better help customers and provide more positive interactions that will build your brand.
What Makes the Digital Workplace Better?
Supporting a great digital workplace helps employees do their best work in the ways that work best for them. As a result, employees are more efficient and confident in their roles. This increases your profits, improves employee satisfaction and customer experience, and pushes your entire organization towards success. Digital workplaces with excellent digital employee experience also support better internal processes.
However, managing the digital workplace and ensuring a positive digital employee experience is easier said than done for many organizations.
Challenges of Prioritizing the Digital Employee Experience
When it comes to prioritizing digital experiences for employees, simply getting started is the first hurdle. DEX initiatives take lots of planning, research, and financial support to ensure they transform the workplace experience in meaningful and long-lasting ways. Also, there can be some confusion around who is in charge of making these digital experience changes, and some organizations don’t consider digital employee experience a high priority. A great digital employee experience is the shared responsibility between managers, employees, and organizational leaders.
The new technologies used in an organization’s digital transformation can also present obstacles. Having the latest apps and software isn’t enough to create an excellent digital employee experience — they have to be the right tools, operations, and services for your employees and your organization. Otherwise, you’ll only further complicate your employees’ digital experience. Any new digital tools and systems should integrate well with existing workflows, processes, and technologies, always keeping in mind that user experience is most important.
Designing a Memorable Digital Employee Experience
Here are three ways to design an excellent, memorable digital employee experience for your employees:
1. Define employee journeys
Every employee is different and will interact with technology in unique ways. Managers need to distinguish between employee personas and understand how each type learns and uses technology. By defining employee types and their preferred journeys, team leaders can more appropriately prioritize technology improvements and allocate IT resources.
2. Form a cross-functional digital employee experience team
Having multiple departments work together on boosting digital employee experience helps you take a holistic approach to the digital employee experience process. This enables management to create a digital employee experience that empowers all employees and optimizes workflows that will be most beneficial for teams across the organization.
3. Use KPIs to measure your progress
As you’re forming a digital employee experience plan, it’s important to create tangible goals that track the progress of DEX improvement initiatives. Team leaders should use operational metrics (how employees are performing) to measure whether tasks are completed as planned, and experience metrics (how employees are feeling) to ensure the changes you’ve made are having a positive effect.
Examples of Great Digital Employee Experience
Fenway Health, a community telemedicine center
After adding solution after solution to its core architecture, Fenway Health was left with a tangled web of disparate application systems. By switching to a centralized and scalable platform designed for remote work, Fenway now supplies its agents with everything they need in one place. This expedites processes, streamlines employee training and onboarding, and aids the transition to remote or hybrid work environments.
Mediasmith, an independent media agency
When Mediasmith used separate systems for different business processes, they needed full rooms of technology servers like switches and servers. By migrating existing systems and integrating with other enterprise tools, Mediasmith was able to keep operations familiar while improving and streamlining business processes. This improved the digital employee experience for all Mediasmith employees, especially remote workers, without requiring a total overhaul.
Staying Competitive with Digital Employee Experience Management
Creating a digital employee experience that includes everything employees need to work wiser is a key aspect to keeping your organization competitive. However, it requires ongoing monitoring and management to ensure that employees have the digital tools they need.
Digital employee experience management helps team leaders and employees understand how they currently interact with digital enterprise tools, so everyone can discover areas of opportunity for digital employee experience improvement. Monitoring digital employee experience in a transparent, objective manner also creates a company culture of continuous improvement, one where all employees work together in cultivating the best digital employee experience possible.
By monitoring and managing DEX within your organization, managers and employees can create the ultimate digital employee experience. Not only does this help your team leverage the most up-to-date technologies, but allows them to use these advanced technologies to the best of their ability — boosting profitability and ensuring your organization stays competitive.
Technologies Influencing the Digital Employee Experience
Here are some of the new technologies on the market today that make great DEX possible:
- Platforms like ActivTrak that offer employee engagement solutions can help foster a top-notch digital experience for your employees through ongoing quantitative engagement data that complements traditional point-in-time surveys. Employee engagement measurement software gives managers and employees personal insights into their levels of engagement. This helps workers understand how they work and how they can use digital tools to work wiser.
- HR ticketing software helps human resources create and manage issues, so they can stay up to date on employee concerns and automate administrative tasks. Also, self-service HR apps give employees 24/7 access to their pay stubs, time-off requests, tax forms, and more. Having these resources at their fingertips boost employee satisfaction.
When combined with an open and transparent approach, these digital tools can help organizations foster a productivity-driving digital employee experience for all employees.
Using ActivTrak to Ensure Healthy Workload Balance and Improve the Digital Employee Experience
Creating an excellent digital employee experience starts with understanding how they currently perform. With ActivTrak, managers can uncover opportunities to improve the digital employee experience by ensuring a healthy workload balance for all employees.
Empower Employees to Optimize Their Work Habits and Schedules
Using data-driven workforce analytics, ActivTrak’s workload management solution can help managers balance employee workloads. Team leaders can identify overutilized or underutilized employees by spotting spiking or consistently high work hours, comparing working hours to pre-defined healthy ranges, and receiving notifications when teams show warning signs of burnout.
ActivTrak also empowers managers to become more effective coaches, providing personalized recommendations based on employee work habits so managers can offer targeted support. These coaching recommendations, which are updated on a weekly basis, help managers foster a better digital employee experience and overall employee experience. Team leaders can even subscribe multiple end-users to dashboards to share updates on productivity metrics and keep teams aligned.
With ActivTrak’s benchmarks and goals, you can further align team members and ensure their success. Compare actual employee performance versus pre-established goals, at both the individual level and team level, and assess performance trends over time — last week, the past four weeks, and the past 12 weeks — to understand the impact of your digital employee experience initiatives.
Combining Data Sources for a Holistic View of Experience
With ActivTrak integrations, organizations can combine workforce analytics with data from other business tools — like Salesforce, ZenDesk, Lattice, and many others — to get a comprehensive view of employee experience and place productivity insights in a broader context.
Capture a holistic view of workforce productivity by bringing key analytics into a single place for streamlined discoveries. Free starter templates make it easy to pull ActivTrak data into business intelligence tools like Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and Google Data Studio. You can also export data and run custom queries for flexible analysis to answer a wide range of questions about employee experience and performance.
Improve the Digital Employee Experience with ActivTrak’s Workforce Analytics
As the digital workforce expands and remote or hybrid environments become standard, creating an excellent digital employee experience is more important than ever. Investing in DEX fosters productivity, profitability, and improves employee retention. But prioritizing digital employee experience and implementing positive changes is often a challenge.
By defining employee journeys, forming cross-functional digital employee experience teams, and establishing measurable digital employee experience goals, you can create a great digital employee experience for all your employees. This will help everyone work more efficiently, pushing your company forward and helping you maintain a competitive edge.
ActivTrak helps you achieve your digital employee experience goals through workforce analytics. Intuitive dashboards and integrations put all of the employee experience information you need in one place and features like productivity coaching and workload management display actionable insights for managers and employees. By providing visibility into work habits, workflows, and technology usage, ActivTrak helps your entire organization create a better digital employee experience for more productivity and overall success.
Pro Tips:
- Establish digital employee experience goals using data-driven insights and experience metrics, and keep track of when and if they are achieved.
- Give employees access to their own data so they can identify opportunities to improve personal work habits and play an active role in improving the digital employee experience.
- Remember that DEX is an ongoing process. With objective insights into employees’ work habits, you can create a culture of continuous improvement, evaluating the impact of new initiatives over time and iterating until you find what works for your organization.