Employee perception matters because it is the most significant factor in improving business outcomes – and the key to your success. I often get asked, "How can we manage expectations of our business?" This brief explores a simple approach you can follow to ensure success.
5 Simple Questions for Better IT-Business Outcomes
Most IT organizations have low Digital Employee Experience or DEX. But you can learn how to improve it.
Digital Employee Experience, or DEX, is an assessment made by the employee when using IT an solution (products, services.) The mental equation we all make when using any product or service, including every single IT solution is:
DEX = Perception - Expectation
Employee experience is the sum of their perception, less their expectations. Expectations are what they need to get their job done. Employees rate you on reliability, assurance, tangibles, empathy, and responsiveness (remember them as RATER.)
If you manage the delivery of any IT product or service there are just five questions you should ask if you want to deliver the highest quality DEX:
Do you have an agreed plan of action to meet internal customer and user DEX expectations?
Have you blueprinted standards to meet your agreed plan of action based on data?
Were people, process, partners and products put into action as blueprinted?
Do systems and people put in place deliver to defined standards?
Are internal communications about DEX quality standards correct?
If your answer is "no" or "I don’t know" to any one or more of these questions, then there is a likelihood that your employees are dissatisfied with IT, and probably looking for another job.
This means that if you work for corporate IT your service is at best a nuisance and at worst contributing to corporate failure. Non-profits and government are wasting money.
Want to have some fun? Pick one of your IT products or services. Choose one that keeps you up at night. Ask the IT product owner or manager those five questions. Want to have even more fun? Ask them to show you artifacts justifying each answer.
On a more serious note though, these five questions are much more useful in the context of an unhappy business partner for an IT solution you know doesn't perform to employee expectations.
Implicit within these five questions are a couple of assumptions:
You have the means of relating employee perception and expectation with your IT solutions
You have a system or tool in place to measure digital employee experience expectations
You have some form of Continuous Service Improvement (CSI) process in place.
If you manage IT, there are five questions you should ask to understand if you're meeting expectations. Suppose your answer is "no" or "I don't know" to any of these questions. In that case, there's a high likelihood that your employee experience is lower than it could be.
For enterprise IT Leaders, this means less than the total business value in terms of productivity and business outcomes.
For managed service providers, you’re losing business to your competition.
Non-profits and governments are wasting donor or taxpayer money.
Employee perception matters because Digital Employee Experience is the most significant single factor in a real-world evaluation IT – and the key to your success.
RATER and the five questions represent state-of-the-art thinking in experience management -- the formal science of managing expectations. You probably have at least one IT product or service you know doesn't meet business expectations. This is where you should begin.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Employees develop perceptions and expectations for IT based on their use of IT solutions. Employee consider the following characteristics to determine their satisfaction — even if they do not consciously know it.
The consistency and dependability of the IT solution, its reliability. Reliability is the ability to perform the required functions under stated conditions for a specified period.
The level of safety or confidence felt when using the IT product or service, its assurance. Security, privacy and risk play into assurance.
The physical aspects of the IT kit provided to them meets expectations, its tangibles. All IT product and services have some element of tangibility — user interface device, manuals, hardware, etc.
Making the employee your top priority, your empathy. Empathy includes making efforts to understand, offering convenient hours, being available for support when needed, etc.
Your solutions performance, its responsiveness. This includes not only the speed of the system, but also your teams prompt, accurate, and timely support too.
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO:
Choose an IT product or service you deliver. Choose one brought to your attention for performance concerns. Find the product or service owner, and ask them the following five questions.
These questions take into account the RATER aspects of experience quality. Ask to see artifacts that justify each answer. Implicit within these five questions are the assumption that you’ve the means of relating customer perception and expectation with the service; you’ve a system or tool in place to measure customer and expectation for the service, and you’ve some form of continuous service quality improvement process in place.
If you don’t then it’s fairly certain your customers are dissatisfied and that would be the place to start improving QoE. The five questions in order (and the order is important) are:
Do you have an agreed plan of action to meet customer expectations for the five service quality aspects? (reliability, assurance, tangibles, empathy and responsiveness) Ask to see the written plan, as well as the documented service levels required for each aspect.
Have you blueprinted service standards to meet agreed plan of action for each quality aspect? A service blueprint is a complete plan for the people, processes, products and partners involved in this service. It identifies how each one must change, and to what degree, to meet your written plan of action. It should include job descriptions, new roles, process changes, automation, etc.
Were people, process, partners and products put into action as blueprinted? If you’ve got a written plan and a blueprint, verify it actually happens.
Do the systems and people put in place deliver to defined standards? Validate that you’ve got in place the means to measure your teams’ performance against the new requirements. These new requirements must align to employee development and compensation systems.
Are communications to customers about quality standards correct? Ensure you’re delivering what you promised. That what you deliver matches what you promised, as well as customer expectations and perception.
Virtually all of us have at least one IT product or service that we know doesn't meet customer perceptions and expectations for DEX quality or business value. This is where you should begin. If you have multiple situations then you should choose the one that requires faster resolution, based on business value return.
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Our Principals Hello, we're the Principals of DEXSIGHTS. We're guiding IT Leaders through the journey of transforming into employee IT experience experts. Each of us has been in IT for over 20 years. Our past roles include IT Leader, Analyst, startup founder of a SaaS firm, and Practice Leader at a global consultancy. We've always focused on the experience of IT's consumers — employees, customers, and users. As a result, we've achieved global visibility as IT thought leaders. We've learned how to quickly find and fix IT customer and user problems. We've combined all our experiences, research, successes, and struggles from leading IT by using employee experience as our compass. Now we're providing it to you.
Our Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Blog Posts The author is responsible for the content of this post. First, the author drafted this post using a word processor. Next the author used AI (OpenAI and Grammarly) to refine parts of this posts structure. Finally, the author edited the text for content, voice, and desired reading time.
