Let’s Talk Digital Employee Experience: Not Good Enough, Say Employees

Along with customer experience, employee experience has risen to the top of business minds — and such concern is more than justified. Keep in mind this formula:

• Happy employees = Happy customers
• Unhappy employees = Happy competitors

In light of the push toward better employee experience, the emphasis has shifted to digital employee experience — providing employees with the tools and support needed to do their jobs better. Thus far, companies are not delivering. No less than 67% of employees participating in a survey by 1E agree that “digital experiences in personal life are better than digital experiences at work.”

While investments in workplace technologies have been increasing at a relentless pace, “the employee experience with technology remains a black box” for most executives, a recent Gartner analysis relates. Still, many companies recognize this as important, and Gartner predicts that within the next three years, 50% of IT organizations will have established a digital employee experience strategy, team and management tool — a major increase from 5% in 2021.

The survey of knowledge workers across 300 enterprises by 1E finds even higher levels of commitment: 74% say their business has “a fully implemented DEX strategy and 16% say they are in the process of implementing a strategy.” However, a majority of workers and executives, 54%, believe there is a tremendous need for improvement in their companies’ employee experience approaches. (It needs to be noted that 1E, a provider of DEX solutions, has a vested interest in these results. Still, employee experience and digital employee experience are too often ignored aspects of management.)

The 1E survey, along with Gartner’s analysis, treats digital employee experience as a product category in which applying tools and analytics will bring about more progress. Such approaches likely will deliver progress, but what is also needed is a much more holistic approach to boosting and enriching the roles of employees running organizations. “Digital” employee experience should be tightly interwoven with the tenets of employee experience overall — participation in decisions, encouraging a sense of ownership, entrepreneurial thinking, and, of course, fair treatment and empathy from management. Technology can serve as a great enabler of such a positive culture — enabling open two-way communication, access to compute power for testing or innovation, and providing access to knowledge at unprecedented levels.

The 1E survey suggests that executives recognize the link between positive digital employee experience and company success (finally!). At least 91%, believe a digital employee experience influences operational efficiency, 86% believe it influences organizational revenue, and 85% believe it influences go-to-market speed.

Still, it’s going to take time until employees start to have decent, productive experiences with the technology that is available. The survey shows 95% of employees saying they “struggle with digital friction such as software and network issues, workplace application access problems, and slow devices.”

This all may be below the radar of their executives and managers, as “employees rarely report all technology interruptions to the IT organization,” the Gartner team points out. “As a result, IT is often unaware of the volume of technology issues encountered on a daily basis.”

Again, however, it’s more than simply putting in sleeker, smoother technology to bring about a workforce that feels engaged, challenged, and a part of a company’s success story. “Employees today don’t want jobs,” says Tim Minahan, executive vice president of Citrix. “They want to do meaningful work and spend purposeful time in the office. Investments made over the past two years to get employees working safely and securely in a remote world and maintain business continuity have set the stage for greater agility and accelerated innovation. The technologies companies used to digitize their businesses to survive have given way to new business models – from telemedicine and virtual learning to the metaverse – that are enabling them to thrive.”

Challenges to ensuring a decent digital employee experience, as found in the 1E survey, include security/regulatory policies; IT overwhelmed by number of issues that need resolving; lack of training for IT personnel; and handling the shift to hybrid/remote work.

“The real question is, can companies successfully pivot to a platform-first virtual model if that isn’t what they’ve done in the past,” says David Rock, neuroscientist and CEO at NeuroLeadership Institute. “We believe the answer is also yes, but in order to be successful, leaders need to be more deliberate about the markers of their culture, be more intentional about onboarding new people, and above all, more focused on skills of managers at all levels.”