Most IT Leaders we talk with are confused about Digital Employee Experience (DEX.)
It's easy to think that DEX is just the latest vendor buzzword for expensive new tools. In reality, digital employee experience management is a transformational shift in how IT organizations work with their internal customers and users.
Digital employee experience is a game-changer for IT Leaders. Gone are the days when IT viewed employees as mere users, almost as a burden. As an IT Leader, you must learn how to create personalized, intuitive, and user-friendly IT solutions that help employees be more productive and engaged.
Today you must understand what DEX is and is not for you and your organization to succeed. This post explains how managing digital employee experience gives you insights into how employees interact with technology so you can design solutions tailored to their needs and preferences. As a bonus, your IT staff will upskill as they build better digital workplaces and improve employee productivity and satisfaction.
Let's get right to it.
What Is Digital Employee Experience? (Hint: It's Not a New Tool)
Are you ready to take your IT organization to the next level with digital employee experience? Get ready to revolutionize how you work with your internal customers and users—it's time to learn how to create an optimal digital employee experience!
Digital employee experience (DEX) is an assessment of IT made by the people who use IT solutions.
Internal IT customers and users calculate DEX as they work. The lower their productivity, the lower their score on the digital workplace solutions (products, services) provided by IT.
Low DEX results in poor service to external customers and increases costs while reducing profitability. Turnover within IT and the business, including "the great resignation," is the direct result of poor DEX.
The good news is that the cause of digital employee experience is well known, as are the solutions to improving it. Any Information Technology Executive can solve DEX problems.
All it takes is your leadership intensity to fix your DEX problems. Improving DEX reduces turnover as it increases employee engagement and productivity. Both of which correlate to higher external customer loyalty and increased profits.
Digital Employee Experience Isn't A New Concept
Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is a term for a new IT generation. Nothing more and nothing less. And it's not a new idea.
Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is a term for a new IT generation. Nothing more and nothing less. And it's not a new idea.
Digital Employee Experience, or "DEX", is the latest in a long line of efforts to align information technology and business.
Earlier attempts include: end-user experience monitoring (EUEM), user-experience (UX), service quality frameworks like ITIL, and even HR engagement and satisfaction surveys of customer experience (CX.)
What's new about digital employee experience today is the urgency to take action. Now.
Today, the workplace is very different. The COVID-19 pandemic drove remote and hybrid work. A focus on remote working led to the Great Resignation — a wake-up call for business and IT. That makes DEX a must-action task for Information Technology Executives and their IT Leaders.
Neither IT nor business alone is responsible for DEX. Taking action on DEX requires a prosumer mentality. To adapt Toffler's vision:
IT and business employees join, with the business contributing not just the money but market and design information vital for the IT production process. Business and IT share data, information, and knowledge. Business employees push buttons that automate remote production processes. Consumer and producer fuse into a prosumer.
— Adapted from Alvin Toffler, PowerShift
Compounding this is the proliferation of workplace apps and the task-switching IT imposes upon employees.
Statista shows organizations use an average number of 110 SaaS applications. [2] This number is up from 8 since 2015. More apps mean switching between apps, and today tasks can rob up to 40% of worker productivity. [3]
Gartner says only 13% of employees are fully satisfied with their experience. [4] On the other side, Oxford showed that workers are 13% more productive when happy. [5]
Employees are overwhelmed. Remote hybrid work and too many workplace apps are the real drivers of DEX. And employees have more choices than they've ever had before. A poor digital workplace experience is reason enough today for employees to quit.
87% of employees can see a 13% increase in output. Employers lose from 1 to 3 hours per day per employee. That's why DEX matters.
If DEX isn't your most critical IT metric, perhaps it should be.
Unpacking Digital Employee Experience Definitions
Forrester says [1] there is no shortage of digital employee experience definitions:
Tools for measuring technology endpoints, apps, and IT services. These tools try to guess if the employee is satisfied. Some even try to gauge sentiment.
Platforms that serve as a central place for employees to collaborate and communicate with colleagues.
An alternative name for the corporate intranet. This definition makes no sense. It's counter-productive.
Human resource tools that span learning to recognition to pay and benefits.
A new tech strategy designed to improve the employee experience.
Notice how most of those DEX definitions hinge on technology. IT tech vendors and tool consulting firms are running with digital employee experience as the next big marketing message. To people who sell tools, DEX is something to "fix with a tool."
But before you can tinker with tech, you must know what aspects of the tech need tinkering.
Let's see how others in the industry define Digital Employee Experience.
Here's how one Gartner analyst described Digital Employee Experience: [6]
DEX is a strategy that focuses on employees, their experience, and their use of technology.
By this description, you could think DEX is an IT strategy for technology experience. But digital employee experience isn't about IT. It's about employees.
Forrester describes Digital Employee Experience as [7]
DEX is not a single tool or strategy — it's an employee's perception of how an ecosystem of technologies, processes, and policy choices either improve or degrade their work experience.
— Andrew Hewitt, Digital Employee Experience Is Not A Tool — It's A Perception
This description positions DEX closer to an employee perception.
Better, but which processes? Whose policy choices?
Digital employee experience is a measure of how effectively employees interact with various technologies in the workplace — and how they feel about those technologies. A DEX strategy focuses on tracking, assessing, and improving employees' technology experience.
— Bob Violino, What is digital employee experience? A key worker retention tool
So close!
Digital employee experience is a sentiment measurement — how adequate consumers feel their IT provider is.
You must have a strategy for DEX — you need to take action on internal IT customer and user sentiment.
The point of DEX assessment is to adjust IT engineering and support activities.
The benefits of increasing DEX does include higher retention.
Unfortunately, none of the three preceding references from these IT industry powerhouses tells you how to take action on DEX — outside of using or buying tools.
Each tool vendor creates a unique DEX definition or uses one from Gartner or Forrester.
But it's not about tools to detect low DEX. You have that information already. You need answers.
Digital employee experience is employee perception. Employees do assess their ability to be productive with the kit IT provides them. If employees decide the IT solution isn't adequate, they will quit.
An Actionable Digital Employee Experience Definition
Digital employee experience is a reflection of Core IT Vitals — a set of human assessment factors that measure the performance of IT and help identify user experience issues. It's not a tool, prediction, or improvement strategy.
DEX is confusing because it's the new "IT buzzword." As such, every IT vendor is trying to stake a claim.
Plus, there are two sides to your digital employee experience: your consumers (e.g., internal IT customers and users) and your producers (e.g., your IT staff.)
You can't "fix DEX" without engaging both. This concept of coproduction is the key to your understanding and success with DEX — it's all about your people, not tech.
Start taking action by putting the focus on people working together. We at DEXSIGHTS describe Digital Employee Experience as follows:
DEX is an assessment of the adequacy of an IT-delivered digital workplace solution made by the employees that produce and consume that solution.
— DEXSIGHTS, Digital Employee Experience Got You Confused?
Your Next Steps with Digital Employee Experience
Understanding that digital employee experience (DEX) is just a measurement of IT delivery quality eliminates the confusion.
Now the question is, "What will you do about it?" If you struggle with DEX and its customer-centricity, your teams are inward-looking.
For you to raise digital employee experience to levels that increase profits, reduce costs, and start helping retention takes another method. You'll need an outward-looking approach that you and your staff must learn quickly.
While DEX is easier to understand now, historically, IT Leaders need some help delivering adequate solutions. DEX elevates IT quality to an imperative, which is a good thing.
From the Information Technology Executive and IT Leader point-of-view, Digital Employee Experience is:
Learning what actions you must take to change sentiment, not buying sentiment tools
Building relationships between your IT teams and the employees they serve, not automating requests
Finding facts about IT activities at your IT-employee interface, not satisfaction or feelings
Changing IT perception and behavior, not admonishing employee behavior
Strategy becomes the particular array of activities aligned to deliver a particular mix of value to a chosen array of customers.
In short, improving your digital employee experience is a sound IT strategy.
Achieving that strategy takes human interactions and diagnostic criteria.
You can achieve significant and lasting digital employee experience gains without investing in more tools.
If you've got tools, make the best use of them with a DEX strategy.
Assess your internal customer and user Digital Employee Experience forensically. That is, go past "unhappy" or "low NPS," etc. Find out which of the five determinants of dissatisfaction is responsible for your low DEX score. Once you know the primary driver of dissatisfaction, turn your attention to your IT staff.
Assess your IT delivery value chain (strategy, design, transition, operation). Start with the link closest to your internal customers and users — your operations function. Then, work backward until you discover the breakdown responsible for the low DEX.
Make adjustments to your IT people, products, or service providers to solve the problem that causes low DEX. Repeat these steps until your internal customers, users, and IT staff are satisfied.
Main Points
Digital Employee Experience is an important concept. Like CMDB at the turn of the century, tool vendors are trying to usurp it. Keep these main points at hand:
Digital employee experience (DEX) is an assessment of IT made by the people who use IT solutions
Digital employee experience isn't a tool, strategy, or abstract concept
DEX isn't a new idea — it's a new approach based on digital transformation and the need for effective IT delivery
Low IT performance (aka poor DEX) costs employers 1-3 hours per day per employee
If DEX isn't your most critical IT metric, it should be
Poor Digital Employee Experiences are an IT problem, and IT owns it — not HR
Low DEX comes from IT delivery failures between IT plan, build, transition, and run functions.
Customer experience tools are reactive, can't solve DEX problems, and can only report it exists
Solving Digital Employee Experience issues requires leadership to make changes in IT
Conclusion
So that's what Digital Employee Experience is and isn't.
What are you going to do about it?
Treating digital employee experience symptoms with tools won't fix the problem with your technology — that takes changes in how people work together.
Think horse-and-cart. Digital employee experience is just a measurement. A low score is a symptom. You must remove the root cause of low DEX to improve.
Clarify your strategy for IT product and service digital employee experience
Discover what your internal customers and users want and need from DEX
Uncover what prevents your team from providing the best IT experiences
Recover your organizational advantage by aligning your resources for the best DEX experiences
With what you've learned from this post, I know you can begin transitioning into more proactive approaches.
If you have questions or suggestions, please leave a comment below. Also, check out the links below for more tips on digital employee experience and why you must prioritize it starting today.
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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.
