For years, organizations had one thing on their mind in terms of digital experience, and that was customers. Anything that made it easier for customers to get what they needed when, where, and how they wanted was job one. As a result, customers can now do business with companies in myriad ways at their convenience.
Today, we’re wrestling with the digital experience again, but this time we’re looking at it from the perspective of our employees. DEX has a direct impact on employee engagement. Technology that falters or inhibits employees from communicating and collaborating negatively affects the overall work experience. Frustration leads to dissatisfied people. Remote work has taken a giant leap forward and permanently changed how we communicate, collaborate, and deliver against goals.
But how do you improve the employee experience from a digital perspective? Is it a collection of tools? A tech stack? A business model? Here we explore the latest expert thinking and share our own POV as the leader in AV and UC systems integration.
We all expect our HR department leaders to talk about the need to improve the employee experience. Until lately, these efforts primarily focused on making it easier for employees to onboard, learn and contribute or to complete internal processes like submitting timecards, completing performance appraisals, or requesting time off.
More recently, IT leaders jumped into the conversation due to the impact of the pandemic and the rapid rise in hybrid work. They know that delivering a simplified employee experience in a work-from-anywhere world requires companies to think differently and adopt new tools to get the work done (e.g., Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Unified Collaboration).
What was once two paths (HR thinking about the employee experience and IT thinking about the digital experience) became so interconnected during the pandemic that they now move in lockstep. It’s time to deliver a digital employee experience (DEX).
In their article “The digital-ready workplace,” Deloitte says: “Creating a productive digital workplace begins with shifting one’s mindset from thinking about the workplace as a location to thinking of it as a network of digitally mediated relationships and interactions. Grounded in this viewpoint, organizations can more easily find new ways to promote collaboration, information-sharing, and creative problem-solving among teams working digitally.”
In their report “The Digital Workplace Reimagined,” Gartner offers this advice. “To go from looking digital to living digital, the workplace must be redesigned to operate in synchrony and connect all workers to those that they work with when, where, and how they need it – regardless of location, device, or time zone. Making the shift requires connecting worker experience to business outcomes. By putting workers at the center of design, it becomes possible to create a digital workplace that transforms how people collaborate, get work done, and ultimately do business.”
Quoted in an article for Computer World Magazine, Andrew Hewitt, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, offers this advice: “Leaders should care about DEX because it impacts overall employee engagement. If technology gets in the way of an employee’s ability to be successful at work, they will grow increasingly frustrated, burnt out, and eventually leave the company.”
In their article, “Our status with tech at work: It’s complicated,” PWC shares, "Technology is now such a central part of the overall work experience that you can’t separate it from the people agenda. To manage both, look to the promise of new technology and consider what motivates people to adopt new ways of working with tech. It can’t be one or the other.”
At AVI Systems, we spend a lot of time discussing tools and technology. So, it might surprise you that we also care deeply about human-centered design, the human-centered workplace, and creating human impact.
The reason is simple: while specs and capabilities may enamor us, technology is meant to work for people and not the other way around. That’s why we start every project by asking: what’s the outcome for your team? Once we know the answer to that question, we keep it at the heart of everything we do.
As the largest global systems integrator, we’re uniquely positioned to help CIOs and IT leaders understand how workplace tools create human impact. We can help you meet, collaborate, and communicate effortlessly using next-gen technology tools that deliver a streamlined digital employee experience and result in enthusiastic adoption.
Ready to move beyond tools and create an impact for your team? Let’s talk.