What is digital employee experience?

Digital employee experience (DEX) definition

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

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 support employees in their daily work. 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. Ivanti’s 2025 Digital Employee Experience Report found that employees are interrupted by tech problems 3.6 times a month on average. For a 2000 person company, that’s nearly $4 million a year in lost productivity.

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.

Why does digital employee experience matter?

Employees who don’t understand the technology, or how to use it, are frustrated, disengaged, and unproductive. Nearly one in four IT professionals (23%) had a colleague resign due to workplace burnout, often tied to the frustration of managing broken processes and tech complexity. 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. 

The key components of digital employee experience

• Device and app performance: how fast and reliably an employee’s tools run day to day

• Access: how easy or painful it is to log in and stay connected

• IT support how quickly issues get resolved when something breaks

• Findability: whether employees can locate the answer, policy, or contact they need without asking around

• Consistency: whether there’s one current, trusted version of information instead of five outdated copies

How to improve digital employee experience: 3 things to consider

• 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.

Is your DEX problem a device problem or a findability problem?

Device problems that should help support fixing:

• Things load slowly or crash
• Employees are stuck waiting on tickets
• Logins or VPNs are a pain

Information discovery problems that an intranet can improve:

• Employees can’t find the current policy, form, or contact
• The same question gets asked over and over in Teams or email
• New hires don’t know where to look
• Distributed teams miss updates because they’re scattered across three tools

If most of your list falls in the second column, the fix isn’t a faster laptop. It’s one place people can trust to find what they need.

Common questions about digital employee experience

What does digital employee experience mean?

It means the overall quality of an employee’s interactions with the digital tools and information their organization provides, covering everything from device performance to whether they can find what they’re looking for.

What are examples of good digital employee experience?

Logging into a laptop without delay, finding the current expense policy without asking three people, or getting a company update the same day as everyone else, are all part of a good digital employee experience.

What is a DEX tool?

Most tools labeled “DEX tools” monitor device and application performance for IT teams. That covers one part of digital employee experience. The other part, helping employees find information and stay connected, is where an intranet fits in.

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