Leveraging the Value of Digital Employee Experience (DEX)
Workers’ digital prowess and satisfaction will separate top competitors from other enterprises.
DEX practices can move enterprises from the post-pandemic adjustment era into consistent, long-term competitiveness driven by a more engaged, effective workforce. Dan O’Farrell, vice president of product marketing at IGEL, details practices and considerations to improve employee satisfaction and productivity.
The tech industry loves its acronyms. One that is beginning to gather interest, and for a good reason, is DEX, digital employee experience. DEX takes some of the lessons enterprises have learned as employees transitioned to remote work and added several layers of analytics and data over the experience. It offers not just a narrow view of how employees are using technology but a 360-degree perspective into how employees feel about the technology they use and data insights into whether the technology investment is delivering up to its fullest potential. It combines this knowledge and offers performance improvement via automation and behavioral change.
While at first, it may seem like added tasks for already stretched IT and operations teams, using DEX tools and practices can help a company’s bottom line by identifying the gaps, for starters, between company technology goals and results and where a less than ideal digital experience plays a part.
As Gartner notes, “Despite growing digital workplace investment, the employee experience with the technology remains a ‘black box’ for most I&O leaders.” While employee effectiveness at the remote workspace is critical to success, Gartner further says, “the current adoption rate of DEX tools is less than 5%.”
Over the next few years, by 2025, Gartner anticipates 50% of IT organizations will have a DEX strategy and tools in place.
See More: 3 Strong and Effective Remote Working Trends We Expect To See in 2023
Putting DEX to Work
DEX incorporates and improves several tools and practices that enable enterprises to be more effective in the work-from-anywhere environment. Areas in which DEX can help are workspace experience, performance monitoring, employee satisfaction, service automation, and deeper insights. Here are some considerations:
- Workspace experience: Work from anywhere has evolved from an endpoint device to cloud-delivered digital workspaces which support the employee at any location. To provide a DEX-level experience, IT separates the data and applications from any device and stores them in the cloud. Employees login with their profile-driven user credentials on a cloud workspace and have access to all applications they need to do their work. A secure OS like Linux, running VDI platforms like VMWare, Citrix, or Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) will provide employees with easy access. With this cloud/digital workspace delivery construct running in the background, employees experience the flexibility to use the device they want and seamless application access.
When enterprises hire staff or acquire companies, storing user apps and data in the cloud enables IT to deploy new workspaces in minutes. There is no productivity lag as onboarded employees wait to have access to their applications.
- Performance monitoring: IT service management (ITSM) tools were a start in capturing employee technology usage issues, but the results needed to be improved. Rather than rely on help desk tickets, DEX monitoring provides greater visibility across the cloud computing environment. DEX tools can spot problems in the cloud computing environment and potentially fix the issue, often capturing trends like excessive CPU consumption, for example, which were never reported.
- Employee satisfaction: ‘Sentiment’ is a key buzzword in DEX data collection and analytics. The goal is a deeper knowledge of employee usage and satisfaction, with the goal of combining these insights with performance data to arrive at a best-case scenario and experience for that persona/user profile. The data should answer questions including: is a software investment being used sufficiently, are there performance issues hampering its usage, or has the persona/user profile changed and thus needs different software? The goal is to spend the budget on the right applications to give the employee the most effective experience and identify tech investments that haven’t paid off in ROI or productivity.
Communication continues to be imperative. Positive sentiment will come if employees get advance notice of new processes or apps that affect their cloud workspace and have a good communication channel through which to ask questions.
- Service automation: DEX tools take automated remediation and help desk ticket resolution to the next level by adding more insights and data to help remediate performance issues and better pinpoint whether some issues are hardware, software, or endpoint device based. For enterprises storing apps in the cloud and using a secure Linux OS at the endpoint, IT can further avoid any workspace disruptions since workspace updates and automation can occur in the cloud. If a device is the issue, an employee at a Linux OS workspace can continue to be digitally productive by accessing their user profile with another device.
- Deeper insights: Companies like ControlUp are providing DEX tools that help IT teams further support employees moving to remote cloud workspaces. IT and Ops can use the tools to observe, analyze, and optimize the digital employee experience across VDI desktops and peripherals. The tools collect and analyze this data to offer insights into key performance metrics and emerging performance and endpoint issues.
While the endgame is more extensive use of automation to remediate all performance issues, as Gartner notes, enterprises will need to phase in the DEX model to become more comfortable with machine learning, data analytics, and automation – all essential to reaping the benefits of a DEX investment.
Making Careful Progress
DEX tools will enhance employee experience as enterprises further operationalize the work-from-anywhere environment. However, like any technology investment, it needs to be considered in context: how many changes in the process your IT team can manage over the next several years, what productivity and performance issues are in most need of improvement, and where the roadblocks to change may occur in your organizational culture.
With this groundwork, enterprises can launch a DEX initiative and strengthen their competitive position with a highly productive and satisfied workforce. A key result of all of this is attracting the best employee prospects and retaining your most productive people.
Which strategies have you implemented to improve employee productivity in your organization? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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