Anna Grome As organizations undergo digital transformation, the digital employee experience (DEX) is an increasingly important topic of attention. Organizational leaders care about the digital experience because it’s a central component of the way employees experience their work in the digital age. It can impact a variety of outcomes that leaders care about including talent attraction, retention, and overall organizational performance.
You might find yourself asking questions such as:
The way to answer these questions is through assessment. Assessing the DEX enables you to gain insight into how employees are experiencing the digital environment today and where attention might be needed for improvement. The level of rigor for assessment is ultimately up to you and your organization. A more rigorous approach requires more time and resources, but can give you greater confidence in the validity of the insights and in the decisions that stem from the assessment. Yet, even relatively informal assessment methods can provide useful and directionally relevant insight into questions about your organization’s DEX.
If you’re not sure where to start with assessing your organization’s DEX, we offer some tips here.
Before doing any assessment, it’s important to first lay the foundation and define what a good DEX is for your organization. How will we know it when we see it? The principles of an optimal digital experience can be found in scholarly literature from the fields of human factors and cognitive science. It’s our job to contextualize those principles to our work environment and align the DEX to the organizational strategy and key business objectives.
For example, a universal element of an optimal DEX is good usability—which refers to the quality of the employee’s experience when interacting with the digital tools used in performing their job (e.g., software, websites, applications). Good usability reflects a combination of characteristics:
In other words, “good usability” can be operationalized as employees who like engaging with the digital tool and find it pleasant (not frustrating) to use. Tying this aspect of DEX to business objectives: If one of your key business objectives is retention, focus on identifying and mitigating friction points that employees are experiencing with digital tools that they use on a regular basis, so that their overall experience is improved.
A great DEX can also be defined as an experience in which the digital tools make the work of the employee easier or simpler, and/or more efficient and productive. We know from human factors research that the configurability, customizability, and transparency of digital tools contributes to an improved digital experience. A great DEX could be defined as an experience in which digital “noise” is minimized for employees—reducing interruption and distraction and thereby improving productivity and satisfaction.
We can also define a great DEX as the extent to which technology is integrated with employees’ workflow. For example, if a clinical decision support tool is well designed and integrated into a physician’s natural workflow, they feel that the tool supports and facilitates—rather than takes them away from or impedes—patient care. If the digital tool is well integrated with a customer service representative’s workflow, they won’t have to click on multiple disparate screens to find the information they need to respond to a customer’s question or concern; they will have the right information when they need it and in the right format so they can help the customer.
As these examples illustrate, the specific characteristics of your organization’s optimal DEX will vary based on the employees and the nature of their work. An optimal DEX for an airline pilot is quite different than an optimal DEX for a sales representative or for an auto parts manufacturer—even if the underlying principles are consistent. As you define the DEX, also define the functionality and way in which employees in different roles need to use technology for their work—including how they need to use it for communication, the type of information they need from the technology, when they need it, how they need it displayed, whether and how they need to manipulate the information.
Once the dimensions of a good DEX are clearly defined, operationalized, and aligned to your organization, the next step is to determine how to measure those elements. To do this, ask yourselves questions related to the “who,” “when,” and “how.”
The “who” questions help you address from whom or what you can gain insight into the DEX. In most cases, the “who” will likely be your workforce or a subset of the workforce.
The “how” and “when” questions may lead you to gather input and user perspectives through surveys, interviews, or focus groups. You can observe or do side-by-sides (for example, observing how many tabs or screens a customer service rep needs to click through to resolve a customer concern), though those methods are more labor intensive. There also are programs that can determine the number of mouse clicks, which you can use to assess how many “clicks deep” workers must go to access the information they need to perform a given task. You can also leverage existing survey tools to assess some components, such as usability assessments built upon research-based principles of good usability (e.g., Brooke’s System Usability Scale or the Usability Metric for User Experience).
In other situations, you may need to create a customized survey or observational instrument that reflects the dimensions or characteristics that you’ve articulated when defining a good DEX. As an example: If you’re assessing the amount of digital “noise” experienced by your employees before and after you’ve redesigned elements of the DEX, consider both surveying and observing a select portion of your workforce to identify the quantity and type of interruptions or distractions that disrupt your employees’ workflow or pull them away from job-critical tasks.
Depending on how you’ve defined what a great DEX is, you may be able to use existing metrics or automated data analytics captured within your systems to provide insights into the quality of your DEX. For example, if you’ve defined a great DEX as an experience that enables efficient communication and information-sharing among critical functions, you may use embedded network analytics as one means to shed light on communication touch points.
Remember, the level of formality and rigor of the assessment is ultimately up to you and your organizational leadership. Even informal assessment that is formative in nature can provide valuable insight into your organization’s DEX.
No one assessment is perfect or provides the whole picture, so we recommend a multi-method approach when possible. Using a combination of surveys, focus groups, observation, and system analytics can show you where and how the DEX is working well. It will also enable you to identify opportunities for improvement so your employees can have a positive and productive experience in their work while contributing to your organization’s key business objectives.