Experience Parity: Personalizing Your Organization’s Digital Workplace

Remember when most of the corporate workforce operated entirely on-site? Before the pandemic, remote work was the anomaly, and those who did so regularly faced technical obstacles when trying to collaborate with their on-site colleagues. 

The script has flipped. Remote work has become the rule rather than the exception. As the future of work continues to evolve, organizations face new challenges in meeting the digital workplace needs of all employees. Leaders must foster “experience parity” for those working in-office, remotely, or a hybrid of both. This means ensuring the work environment offers all employees an equitable end-user experience (EUX) regardless of where they work. 

Experience parity results in a democratized workplace, where all employees are continually empowered to collaborate, learn, develop, innovate, and succeed no matter where they are. Here is how to create it in your organization. 

Taking a Personalized Approach

Achieving experience parity goes far beyond offering all end users the same tools, support, and resources. Just as organizations tailor their services and solutions to specific customer personas, HR leadership must also apply these principles internally by working with IT leaders to identify different employee personas.

In any corporation, a central employee persona is the “knowledge worker” — accounting, marketing, research, development, etc. — who tends to work in a traditional office environment. Whether stationed at home or in the office, these employees need access to tools and software to complete their work efficiently and effectively. For example, they need high-quality webcams and headsets, access to a unified communication and collaboration platform, and a direct line to live or automated IT support. While some employees may prefer in-person help, the shift to cloud-based technologies and modern device management has enabled technicians to deliver IT support remotely via a messaging platform or automated workflows.

But many industries also have workers clocking in outside an office environment. For example, the persona of a field technician or salesperson will have entirely different digital workplace needs compared to a knowledge worker. This dynamic group’s continuous state of mobility may require cloud-based virtual desktops powered by secure devices, which provide seamless access to the tools they need in any location. 

Should they encounter a critical tech issue, employees on the road may be unable to wait for a call back from the help desk when traveling to customer sites. Instead, the company can offer a distributed network of IT lockers for quick device replacement and in-person tech cafés (or virtual tech cafes using merged reality) across its sales regions for immediate troubleshooting. These dedicated resources provide traveling employees with multiple channels for streamlined IT support, empowering them to get back to the field without major interruption to their workstreams.

Each industry has unique workforce personas, with those outlined above exemplifying only two of many. When optimizing the digital workplace, HR and IT must collaborate to identify each persona and ask: 

• How does this group collaborate? 
• Do they have the right tools to do their job? 
• Which devices do they most often use? 
• From what location are they completing the work? 
• How do they prefer to receive IT support? 
• What can we provide to set them up for success? 

Answering these questions will help organizations create an employee experience that supports strategic business outcomes.

Measuring Experience

Once an enterprise has identified the needs of each persona and delivered the proper tools and resources to that employee group, leadership often considers this project complete. In reality, it is only the first step in implementing successful experience management. Just as an account team measures and reports on the performance of a customer project, company leadership must also have a system in place to track and improve the employee experience. Ideally, a dedicated group of EUX experts will lead this initiative with the help of ongoing input from HR, IT, and individual business units. 

Service providers have traditionally used service-level agreements (SLA) to measure customer outcomes, including service metrics such as availability, capacity, and reliability. Now, forward-thinking providers have shifted to experience-level agreements (XLAs) to more accurately track progress and results not only for customers but also for their own internal workforces. 

XLAs report on experience-driven rather than service-driven metrics, i.e., whether a machine is running and how effectively it is operating for a particular end-user. Another way of looking at it is measuring outcomes vs. output. Studies have shownOpens a new window that organizations that prioritize employee experience benefit from outcomes including increased productivity, satisfaction, and retention.

Because each employee persona has its own customized technology needs, enterprises should develop XLAs tailored to specific personas and each group’s experience performance indicators (XPIs). As referenced above, a positive outcome for an employee in marketing will look very different from a salesperson’s seamless experience. Each persona will also require different tools and services to achieve their business goals. It is only logical the two groups’ experiences are not measured from a “copy and pasted” XLA template.

See More: How AI in HR Will Close the Gender Pay Gap

Enabling an Agile Workforce

Any effective workforce demands digital parity, meaning all workers have secure access to the resources required to do their jobs. But the most successful organizations will go one step further and design a workplace that provides experience parity, enabling agile ways of working and support that drive collaboration and innovation, anytime, anywhere, and on any device. 

Delivering experience parity in your organization requires a persona-based approach to determine what a successful digital workplace experience looks like for individuals across different business areas. This process may involve comprehensive employee assessments and interviews to identify worker types, the technologies they need, and how they want to be supported. From there, a specialized team can proactively track each group’s respective XLAs and identify areas for improvement. Of course, the key is to implement those changes and evaluate their impact.

It is not complicated: a happier workforce results in a more productive workforce, which translates to better business outcomes. Enterprises that embrace experience-driven management are leading the way. Do not let yours fall behind.

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