What Does Digital Employee Experience Mean?
Digital employee experience (DEX) describes the quality of a workforce's daily interactions with the technology they use to get work done.
The goal of DEX is to drive positive change from analyzing how employees interact with the organization's computing devices, local and cloud applications, networks and virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs). In some industries, DEX may be a sub-set of employee experience or end-user experience management (EUEM).
Today, employees increasingly work in numerous locations, on multiple devices and use more than one operating system on a daily basis. The data from an employee's interactions with digital resources can be gathered, analyzed and used to improve DEX. Parameters commonly used to gain visibility into digital satisfaction include:
- Network connectivity
- Network performance
- Device performance
- Application performance
- User engagement
- End-user sentiment
- Number of sytem events/errors
The shift to remote work during COVID-19 shutdowns was a new experience for many organizations and has accelerated the need for visibility into employee experience. Since the Great Resignation, it's become increasingly clear to employers that learning how to manage a remote or hybrid workforce is a business issue, not just an information technology (IT) issue.
In the past, it could be challenging for IT managers to gather performance data from endpoints outside their corporate network. Cloud service providers are increasingly making that task easier by providing customers with DEX tools that can provide employers with visibility into when, where and how employees are interacting with digital resources.
Techopedia Explains Digital Employee Experience
According to the research firm Gartner, employees who are dissatisfied with workplace applications are twice as likely to leave their job. The same Gartner survey found that only 13% of employees are fully satisfied with their digital experience at work. In response, many organizations have been making significant investments, both in time and money, to improve employee engagement.
To get a holistic, 360-degree view across a digital environment, information technology (IT) managers needs to be able to gather data from mobile devices and the internet of things (IoT) just as effectively as they can from work-issued laptops. Cloud-native DEX platforms are well-suited for gaining visibility into the behavior of hybrid and remote workforces.
In the cloud, new features and bug fixes are executed automatically, which can translate to a significantly faster time to value. Because coud-native DEX platforms are hands-off, there is no need for IT operations teams to set up servers and no need for DevOps staff to manage cloud instances, as they would for on-premise instances.
The market for digital employee experience platforms significantly increased since the pandemic. In a recent survey of C-level executives, 90% reported that DEX was a medium to very high priority. A cloud-first approach to DEX not only frees IT staff up to do other things, it also reduces the OPEX (operations expenses) for continuous data collection and infrastructure maintenance.
