What is the Digital Employee Experience?

Digital Employee Experience (DEX) refers to the overall quality of employees’ interactions with their digital workplace. It encompasses how employees work, what tools and technology they use, and the culture they exist within. DEX reflects how effectively these factors empower employees to do their best work, stay engaged, and perform their jobs well.

Digital Employee Experience definition

While the digital workplace experience itself isn’t new, the terminology and growing focus is. The digital employee experience is defined as the sum of digital interactions between employees and their organization.

If you are still trying to understand what this actually means, imagine a scenario where there are a wide assortment of technologies in the workplace, such as a documentation storage repository, shared network folders, an online form builder, or even an activity stream of sorts.

All of these applications aim to assist employees. However, if these applications or documents are not easy to access or use (or aren’t available on mobile) then the employee experience won’t be very great.

You could have secure technology that’s designed to solve a specific pain point, but, if it doesn’t enable employees to do their job, it’s not helpful. One study revealed that only 17% of frontline workers report a good or very good digital employee experience.

We recently talked about how the digital workplace employee experience isn’t about how we think employees work, but rather how they actually work. Therefore, when we introduce technology without considering the  experience, we miss the mark on achieving a great digital workplace.

DEX shifts the focus to technology that employees want to use, can use, and enjoy using. It puts employees at the heart, with a focus on their engagement.

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Why does the digital employee experience matter?

Employees who don’t understand the technology, or how to use it, are frustrated, disengaged, and unproductive. Broken processes are one of the main reasons IT professionals are leaving their jobs. While that sounds dismal, the solution isn’t really that complicated: Design and structure technology around your employees.

How an intranet can transform your digital employee experience

Many organizations fail at DEX because no one has taken real ownership over it. A digital workplace platform designed for collaboration, like a social intranet, can help unite staff and provide an avenue for improving the overall digital employee experience.

Human Resources want happy employees, and IT wants good technology without shadow IT. As you can imagine, these two groups rarely interact or align with each other. So there might be some strong employee experiences, and some good technology acquired, but they are still mostly happening in isolation of each other.

For example, this is often seen around tools like SharePoint. It’s a tool that’s easy to manage for IT, but doesn’t have a great user experience. This inevitably leads to frustration on both ends as adoption is low, and users end up creating their own workarounds (shadow IT).

The digital employee experience aims to close that gap with tools like modern intranets (and extranets!)—which serve both IT and HR better than they did ten years ago.

At the center of your digital workplace, an intranet provides a seamless user experience, reducing the need for additional applications, but more importantly, ensuring employees have access to tools that help them get their jobs done. From the time a user first logs in there is a cohesive experience with Single Sign-On. The result is a strong consistent experience across different devices, giving employees access to everything they need, from wherever they are.

Experiences must be considered with every digital workplace touchpoint. 

3 things to consider when improving digital employee experience

• IT Infrastructure: What tools do you currently have? Are they all necessary?
• Employee Interaction: How do employees interact with each other? Which processes do they rely on to complete their jobs?
• Experiences: Do employees find the technology they use difficult and complex or is it intuitive and productive?

Whatever your approach, we can likely all agree that more needs to be done to bridge the gap between the digital workplace and the employee experience. A strong digital employee experience isn’t a passing fad, but rather an evolutionary shift in how we use and view technology in the workplace.

This article was originally authored by Kelly Batke and has since been significantly updated by the ThoughtFarmer team.