Leveraging Digital Employee Experience Management Software to Transform Today’s Dynamic Workplace

“Digital Employee Experience is too significant to measure by running a brief survey every now and then on a small user group, which is why this space is ripe for advancement. It needs to be measured factually, based on sound technical metrics and sentiment data, and at every step of the employee’s digital journey,” says Yassine Zaied, Chief Strategy Officer, Nexthink, in an exclusive interview with EnterpriseTalk.

ET Bureau: As enterprises think about reopening their offices, what measures should they have in place for their employees’ health and security?

Yassine Zaied: The most critical thing for enterprises to think about when deciding to reopen their offices will be employees’ access to vaccines and testing equipment.

Rolling out the return to the office will take a lot of careful considerations. Enterprise Leaders need to gauge employees’ comfort with the environment, their ability to return, and ensure local guidelines are met. In earlier waves of office reopenings, customers leverage survey platforms to roll out COVID-19 health declaration forms to employees who needed access to onsite office space. So, for instance, an employee who needed access would fill out one of these forms and once deemed fit, IT Ops will individually send them a building access code and group them in teams that are allowed to access the building for a week at a time on a rotating basis.

I anticipate these types of measures, as well as further flexibility, will be implemented at the start of return to office plans and roll outs.

But the most important measure companies can have in place is to ensure employee health and safety. The ability to provide consistency across a digital and in-person environment is key.

Also Read: How Businesses Can Achieve End-to-End Digital Service Delivery in 2021

ET Bureau: What are the challenges enterprises encounter that require digital employee management software? 

Yassine Zaied: The main challenge today’s enterprise leaders are witnessing is the assumption that implementing a one size fits all solution for digital employee management will work for businesses. The reality is that every technology user is different. Every employee interacts with technology in different ways and, not only that, they also respond to the issues they encounter with their technology differently.

According to research from Nexthink and Vanson Bourne, a whopping 45 percent of IT issues are never reported by employees. Many IT executives I’ve spoken with actually believe that number is higher.

For a digital employee management transformation to be successful, IT teams cannot simply rely on reported incidents. They need to be able to proactively support employees and resolve issues before they ever start impacting the end-user. Accomplishing that is no easy task, and it requires a high level of technical sophistication.

Another challenge is that understanding the performance of the end user’s technology is simply not enough. IT professionals also need to understand the users’ sentiment around that technology. An application may be working perfectly from a tech standpoint, but if users dislike the app itself, they’re still not going to have a positive digital experience. As such, IT professionals need a way to combine both device and application-level analytics with employee sentiment to truly deliver a positive digital employee experience.

ET Bureau: How can enterprises leverage innovative technologies to advance the digital employee experience management software? 

Yassine Zaied: Enterprises need to be empowered with the right technologies to transform the digital employee experience. They need real-time analytics and reliable employee feedback, plus an IT team that is empowered to operate on a proactive basis to resolve issues before employees are aware they’re happening.

By adopting a proactive approach based on real-time analytics that can signal targeted alerts, problems can be pre-emptively resolved by employees themselves or by IT detecting and automating the solution completely, removing the need for any employee intervention. Through engaging the workforce in this way, IT can become a source of positive employee sentiment rather than a topic synonymous with disruption or confusion.

IT needs to be able to deliver personalized support at scale. In order to do this, they must have a better understanding of the workforce’s various needs. Clustering employees into groups based on their day-to-day activities and technical requirements rather than their job titles can be a great solution. This empowers IT teams to deploy targeted remote campaigns based on more specific needs, implementing quick fixes without requiring employee involvement.

Also Read: Why Experience Monitoring is Key to Successful Digital Transformation

ET Bureau: What trends do you think will transform the digital employee experience (DEX) management in the foreseeable future?

Yassine Zaied: I think there will be a lot more emphasis placed on implementing digital tools that can capture employee satisfaction with their digital landscape more holistically. Today’s enterprise leaders are most likely familiar with NPS (Net Promoter Scores), a ranking used by many businesses to measure customer satisfaction or the Employee Net Promoter Score – to measure an employee’s experience. This often takes shape in the form of surveys, which on their own are flawed ways of reporting.

Digital Employee Experience is too significant to measure by running a brief survey every now and then on a small user group, which is why this space is ripe for advancement. It needs to be measured factually, based on sound technical metrics and sentiment data, and at every step of the employee’s digital journey. And whether it’s a major IT initiative or a day-to-day project—everything in the IT department should be judged and compared to the same overarching index or score. If enterprise IT is dedicated to solving their company’s digital experience problems, why wouldn’t the effort behind it be measured and treated the same way?