The digital experience is the employee experience.
Employees today are users of digital tools. For many workers, the digital realm is the primary context in which we experience our organization, our teams, our work, and our customers.
Yet despite good intentions, the digital experience for many employees is fractured, confusing, and inefficient. That’s usually because, no matter where someone sits within an organization, the systems that deliver those experiences are led by a variety of stakeholders across HR, IT, and the business—each with their own priorities.
HR wants solutions that:
- enhance the employee experience.
- attract, retain, and develop top talent.
- maintain compliance with all regulations.
Common platforms owned by HR include HRIS/HCM, talent & learning management systems, and employee engagement.
IT wants solutions that:
- scale to meet needs across the enterprise.
- are secure and governed to reduce risk.
- provide data-driven insights to the business.
Common platforms owned by IT include enterprise collaboration, data management, and support & workflow management.
The business wants solutions that:
- bring measurable ROI.
- support agile, dynamic response to change.
- align strategically to provide meaningful value.
Common solutions owned by the business include ERPs, CRMs, and industry-specific platforms such as point-of-sale, electronic medical records, and CAD/PLM tools.
In the middle of all these silos? A performer. A marketer trying to learn a new analytics approach for their latest campaign. A banker trying to find the latest product updates to consult customers. A new manager trying to seek insight from leaders on how to coach a team. A warehouse worker trying to update insurance coverage for their first child. A new hire trying to find a mentor. A nurse trying to reconnect with the mission of the hospital just to make it through another day. All of them—trying to do their job, grow their career, find support, and feel connected to the purpose of the organization.
If we want our employees to thrive, it’s our responsibility to equip them with digital experiences that support those goals by being:
- holistic, so they are more intuitive.
- connected, so they can collaborate seamlessly.
- personalized, so they are meaningful and efficient.
Successful digital organizations work continuously to have their priorities aligned, not competing.
At TiER1 Performance, we believe that every productive relationship between users and technology starts with designing experiences for people. Leveraging technology doesn’t mean the solution has to be less focused on the performer, or less human. When used well, digital interactions can deliver experiences, change mindsets, impact behaviors, and drive results.
Here’s what we’ve learned from doing this work:
1. Create agile cross-functional teams.
Stakeholders from across the organization may have competing priorities, but they all bring valuable perspectives. Customer-facing product teams have learned to embrace these tensions by adopting agile practices, such as:
- Teams should be cross-functional, with all skills needed to design, develop, and support the rollout of new features.
- Success is measured by delivering value to users, so teams must have a relentless focus on user-centered design and change adoption.
- “Big bang” delivery doesn’t support the changing needs of users. Iterative delivery provides value faster and gives regular opportunities for feedback.
- Budgeting isn’t driven by planning line-item projects months in advance, but by funding dedicated teams that focus on outcomes, not outputs.
These approaches have helped organizations better serve their customers across every industry. Why not also use them to serve your employees? Creating agile, cross-functional teams ensures that the people and processes are in place to deliver the experiences people need.
A team focused on the digital employee experience will likely include representatives from HR, IT, and the business to balance priorities; user experience (UX) designers, change management practitioners, and communicators to represent user needs; senior leadership to promote the vision; a product owner to define and prioritize features; and a scrum master to facilitate team collaboration. (We weren’t lying when we said cross-functional!)
2. Align to a common definition.
It’s critical to have a “north star” that guides the work to come. We start by defining the organization’s desired employee experience (EX). The EX should be informed by three things:
- Your employer brand, which encompasses your values, culture, and hard truths.
- Your employees’ needs and desires, which are impacted by their environment, role, and more.
- Neuroscience-driven insights for optimizing the human experience, which are universal truths that should be part of every EX at every workplace.
Then, the digital employee experience (DEX) should both align to the overall desired EX and align to the context of the digital environment.
For instance, if the EX is empowering and trust filled, then the DEX should be highly accessible with transparent information and data that isn’t locked down.
If the EX is one of high resilience and nimble transformation, then constant improvement and iteration should be part of the DEX, as the expectation is employees will embrace a continually evolving environment.
Finally, if the EX is enabling high performance and individual potential, the DEX must be intuitive and easy to navigate, so that no one wastes time or effort replicating tasks while working in the digital environment. (We humbly believe every DEX should be intuitive and easy to navigate, because that’s the best way to support people in achieving their results.)
3. Put people at the heart of system design.
Organizations are becoming more fluid thanks to hybrid work, talent mobility, dynamic teaming, and faster iteration. Yet to support this fluidity, their ecosystems are becoming more complex with multiple channels, intelligent platforms, and automated processes.
Too often, the systems provided to users have been driven by the needs of implementation and support teams; these needs might include technical requirements, integration timelines, licensing cost optimization, ease of administration, data security, and compliance reporting. While these are all critical to the success of enterprise platforms, to truly get value from these systems we must start with the goals, needs, and pain points of users.
Creating a digital ecosystem that is centered on human performance, not implementation requirements, often includes:
- user guidance through new concepts and experiences.
- just-in-time support tools with multiple points of access.
- connection to peers and mentors.
- challenges to increase confidence in new skills.
- engagement to the work and organization.
- seamless integration between tools and processes.
User experience (UX) design provides mindsets and tools for ensuring people get the most out of technology with the least amount of confusion, friction, or waste. UX design should look at any individual digital interaction within the broader context—optimizing for the whole, not the parts. Just as importantly, prototype and test solutions with users to make sure they’re truly solving problems.
4. Design for the moments that matter.
EX (which includes DEX) is the collection of day-to-day interactions that employees have with their leaders, managers, each other, and any aspect of the organization (tech, tools, environment). Make-or-break interactions can be defined as moments that matter.
Healthy, high-performing organizations intentionally design these critical moments to be positive, secure, and trust-filled. Then they enable leaders, managers, and employees to deliver these moments to each other. This results in employees who are engaged and thriving, able to give their best effort to work, and committed to leaning in and growing.
Intentionally designing moments that matter can ultimately impact stakeholder value; the organization’s potential to grow and scale; brand equity; employer reputation; talent level, diversity, and loyalty; innovation and progress; and norms and ways of working.
In short: When organizations design the DEX to support people in the moments that matter, they will be able to drive desired results like never before.
So, who owns the digital employee experience?
We all are called to support the DEX, even if our functional goals or objectives may differ, because we all share the same end goal: building and maintaining a healthy, high-performing organization.
This requires alignment across multiple functions and leaders that’s built on a shared vision of the DEX and a commitment to sustaining efforts such as listening, strategic planning, iterative design and development, and measuring to align. Yet when HR, IT, and the business can together leverage the digital ecosystem in which people learn, communicate, and do their jobs, it enables the use of technology to deliver experiences, change mindsets, impact behaviors, and drive results.
About the authors
Laura Hoppa is a Principal Performance Consultant at TiER1. She’s known for activating strategies that truly move organizations forward. With decades of communications and marketing experience, Laura has helped design moments that are meaningful, important, insightful, celebratory, surprising, fun, and results driven.
Ryan Meyer is TiER1’s Director of Solutions. With a background in software engineering and a career in people-focused technology, he seeks to balance innovation and pragmatism. Ryan focuses on bringing together cross-functional teams to architect solutions that get organizational results through individual behaviors, skills, mindsets, and emotions.
Want to learn more about designing the digital employee experience? Fill out the form below to get in touch with a member of our team.
