What Is Digital Employee Experience (DEX)?

Digital employee experience, or DEX, broadly refers to how employees interact with the digital tools in their workspace. When employees struggle with poor-performing technology, complex processes, confusing systems, and insufficient support, the resulting frustration not only affects the employee’s well-being but can also result in dissatisfaction with the workplace overall.

This blog post provides a high-level overview of DEX, including what it is (and is not), its significance in the modern workplace, and what organizations can do to improve it. We’ll also discuss the best practices that underpin creating an effective DEX strategy with a forward-looking perspective on the future of DEX in the digital age.

Download the Ultimate Guide to DEX — a free resource for organizations interested in maximizing employee productivity, enhancing service desk efficiency, increasing employee satisfaction, and realizing the cost savings benefits of providing employees with great digital workplace experiences.

• Introduction to digital employee experience
• Why is digital employee experience important?
• Best practices for improving the digital employee experience
• How to create an effective digital employee experience strategy in just 5 steps
• Essential components of a digital employee experience solution
• The future of digital employee experience

Introduction to digital employee experience

According to Forrester Research, there are a number of inaccurate digital employee experience definitions used by vendors on the market today, including DEX being defined as:

• An alternative name for a company’s intranet
• Tools used to measure the employee experience of endpoints, applications, and IT interactions
• Human resource tools for employee education and recognition
• Collaboration tools to centralize team member messaging and communication
• An emerging strategy focused on improving the technical end-user experience

Instead of thinking of DEX as a single tool, strategy, or platform, Forrester believes these definitions of DEX understate the roles technology, processes, and policies play in shaping an employee’s perception of their digital work experience.

Digital employee experience: The sum of all the perceptions that employees have about working with the technology they use to complete their daily work and manage their relationship with their employer across their employment lifecycle.

Instead, this perception should be what organizations define DEX as, and the solutions needed to measure, monitor, and address the factors that negatively impact how employees interact with company technology and processes should be viewed as components of a successful DEX strategy.

As remote and hybrid work models become the norm, IT help desks face increasing demands, and the primary employee experience increasingly becomes digital, prioritizing DEX is not just beneficial — it’s essential. It’s the cornerstone that supports seamless work experiences, ensuring employees remain productive and satisfied no matter where they are. Let’s dive deeper into its practical importance in today’s work environment.

[Read also: What is Employee Experience (EX)? A Simplified Guide]

Why is digital employee experience important?

DEX has become more critical in the last few years as the world’s workforce shifted from in-office to remote work. Now, remote work has become a permanent fixture in many workplaces as organizations realize the productivity and cost benefits it offers.

The move to fully remote and hybrid work has also added a host of new variables to the availability and performance of workplace technology, impacting everything from connectivity and security to apps and data access.

For example, employees now access apps designed to be powered by an organization’s high-speed networks via less reliable home and public networks across a VPN. These changes have made the digital work experience more challenging for many employees.

Research shows that during the pandemic, monthly help deck ticket volumes spiked as much as 35%. When help desks become overloaded, it creates a cascading effect of higher costs per ticket, longer remediation times, and lower employee satisfaction. Unfortunately, many IT help desks still face a constant barrage of tickets, as many of the contributing factors increasing help desk demand (like budget cuts, lack of tool investments, and scale of support needs) remain the same.

Historically, IT has tried to provide employees with self-service options to help expedite issue resolution and reduce ticket volumes. However, by putting the burden on employees to find the appropriate remediation procedures, many may call or submit a ticket to the help desk anyway. Other employees may suffer in silence or find workarounds that mitigate the issue but reduce their productivity and leave them dissatisfied with their technology experience.

For in-office, hybrid, and fully remote workers alike, the digital work experience has become the main or even only means of interacting with colleagues or the job itself. If workers find it burdensome to access information, perform daily tasks, and get help resolving technology issues, their overall satisfaction with their employer can diminish. That’s why providing a great DEX is an essential retention tactic in a competitive job market where talented employees are willing to quit and explore other job opportunities because they’re unsatisfied with their jobs.

With this understanding of the tangible benefits organizations can realize through fostering a great digital employee experience, let’s shift our focus to the best practices that can enhance DEX and keep employees engaged and happy at work. In the following section, we’ll explore the strategies and actions that can transform the digital landscape at work, creating a more intuitive and satisfying workplace for everyone.

Best practices for improving the digital employee experience

From understanding how employees interact with technology to utilizing the most insightful success metrics, the following are the building blocks of how organizations should approach not only meeting but exceeding the digital needs of today’s workforce:

• Put people at the center of the process: To optimize an employee’s digital experience, you must first understand how employees use technology at work. To achieve this, most organizations need more insight into who their end users are, how they work, and what tools they need to perform their jobs effectively.
  
  To create a digital employee experience that delights your employees, focus on the job the employee has to do and the issues that get in the way rather than trying to craft the digital experience around the business processes it must enable. Effectively understanding how employees use technology can lead to more intuitive, streamlined workflows and, ultimately, a more productive team.
• Think in terms of lifecycles: The employee experience encompasses all an employee’s interactions with the organization from pre-hire, onboarding, to post-exit. To improve the digital employee experience at every touchpoint, it’s critical to assess the digital component during each of these stages, identify the problem areas, and share ideas for improvements.
  
  IT, HR, and other departments each bring unique perspectives to employee relationships, and by breaking down the barriers between these different departments and siloed tools, organizations can develop and provide a seamless digital employee experience that enhances collaboration, increases efficiency, and fosters a culture of unity and innovation throughout the employee lifecycle.
• Measure DEX using the right metrics: There’s no shortage of tools that collect all manner of performance data, so there may be a temptation to tackle the full spectrum of issues employees face daily with every type of DEX-related software available — but that’s neither possible nor practical.
  
  Utilizing the right solution to measure, monitor, and address the most impactful digital employee experience challenges of your organization ensures organizations make informed decisions that enhance the digital work environment, improve employee satisfaction, and create a more efficient workplace.

Bottom line: A positive digital work experience is more crucial to employees than ever as the average workplace experience increasingly becomes digital.

Building from these foundational best practices, you can begin to craft the best DEX strategy for your organization. In the next section, we’ll distill these practices into five actionable steps, providing a high-level, step-by-step wireframe for designing or reevaluating whether your existing digital employee experience strategy resonates with employees.

How to create an effective digital employee experience strategy in just 5 steps

1. Determine what you want to achieve: As with any business strategy, the first step is identifying how the DEX strategy will fit into your organization’s overall employee experience.
   
   Start by asking some broad questions:
   – How will improving DEX support your business goals?
   – What are the current employee experience challenges to address?
   – What digital tools will be needed?
   – How will employees be trained to use them?
   – How will you measure success?
2. Create a digital employee experience team: You need someone to own the adoption, performance, and satisfaction of the digital employee experience. A cross-functional team that includes leaders from integral departments like HR and IT, as well as employees from across the organization, will ensure you take a holistic view of your organization’s DEX strategy, identify opportunities to empower frontline employees around their job roles, and steer the organization towards the right technology investments.
3. Develop employee personas: Different employee segments interact with technology in different ways. Understanding their daily workflows is essential to designing the optimal digital employee experience for each. The DEX team should use end-user IT data, employee engagement surveys, and sentiment scores to identify pain points and create personas around groups of employees that share characteristics and requirements to better prioritize and allocate resources for architecting the best digital employee experience.
4. Set the right KPIs: Once your organization understands the value of optimizing the digital employee experience, it’s time to identify achievable goals to realize that value and create strategies for meeting them. There’s more to delivering an optimal digital employee experience than tracking IT metrics like downtime, mean time to repair (MTTR), and service-level agreements (SLAs).
   
   Ultimately, you want employees to feel that they can rely on their digital technology, will experience minimal disruptions, and are happy with the support they receive when they need it. While IT metrics help drive some of these business outcomes, experience metrics such as employee satisfaction, employee sentiment, and employee retention can also act as metrics for determining how effective your DEX efforts are.
5. Look for a DEX solution: As organizations increasingly recognize the importance of delivering an exceptional digital work experience, the focus is shifting to understanding how to oversee, manage, and ensure the reliability and performance of the complete digital work journey for employees.

Organizations are also seeking improved methods to communicate with employees and gather feedback, enabling them to measure satisfaction with the digital workplace experience and take proactive steps to improve it. An optimal digital employee experience covers every aspect of the employee lifecycle. Taking a piecemeal approach with disjointed tools may only succeed in making the digital work experience more complex and intimidating for employees.

Let’s discuss the foundational elements to look for in a comprehensive DEX solution that can help organizations support every aspect of an effective DEX strategy by ensuring the digital workplace is not only functional but also empowering and user centric.

Essential components of a digital employee experience solution

When choosing a DEX solution, Gartner  recommends assessing whether the solution provides the following must-have capabilities:

• Actionable reporting insights and scoring: A DEX solution must provide several ways to quantify and analyze the effectiveness of your DEX strategy. By aggregating device and software data and contextualizing it with employee survey data, a DEX solution should provide you with a sentiment score you can track to understand employee satisfaction at the organizational level and key groups in your organization, such as the C-suite and senior leadership team.
  
  Tracking and scoring persona-based experiences by role, job level, and interactions can also help you better understand the unique technology needs and the impact of digital workplace technologies, services, and processes have on specific workforce segments.
• Enhanced visibility and control: By pinpointing the key issues that hinder employee productivity and satisfaction, IT teams can take a proactive stance in detecting and swiftly eliminating barriers to productivity.
  
  A DEX solution should enable the IT team to improve asset visibility, identify and fix problems, establish efficient workflows, and refine processes more easily. As a result, employees gain easier access to the digital tools they require, and the applications, devices, and endpoints employees depend on remain available and perform as expected, leading to a smoother and more efficient digital work experience.
• Improve remediation efforts and employee engagement: A hallmark of an effective DEX strategy is responding to employee feedback and improving a poor digital experience. A DEX solution should allow IT to ensure that employees and their devices receive only the notifications, remediation tasks, and surveys that apply to their particular roles and devices.
• Increase self-service rates and tech support lifecycle efficiency: A DEX solution should allow IT to create trigger-based, self-service remediation actions that proactively notify employees of performance issues and suggest actions like running real-time automated fixes.
  
  Since DEX capabilities enable more effective self-remediation options, this will also reduce the number of service tickets and allow IT and help desks to shift focus from supporting these routine tasks to working on more critical business initiatives.
• Measure daily technology experiences from the employee’s perspective: Surveys are vital in establishing a feedback loop between employees and organizations. For example, organizations can create surveys to gauge users’ overall digital experience and gain qualitative employee feedback about specific workplace tools, the adoption of new technology, and whether employees are utilizing tech investments.
  
  You can also send a post-remediation survey to determine if the recommended actions performed by the employee, IT, or help desk adequately resolved the issue and use these insights to improve interactions in the future, such as creating custom notifications and remediation actions.
• Streamline operations by centralizing and integrating meaningful data: From identity management tools, ITSM solutions, employee sentiment, real-time endpoint performance, and other data sources, the ability to centralize these insights into a single DEX solution can reduce time spent troubleshooting, performing root cause analysis (RCA), detecting anomalies, and analyzing device and application usage to quickly reveal what isn’t working and what’s causing or could cause issues for employees.
  
  This single source of truth view allows teams to proactively resolve unreported technology issues and help end users remain productive behind the scenes, without employees ever experiencing disruptions.

[Read also: Learn how Tanium closes the digital employee experience loop with ServiceNow]

From fostering a culture of continuous feedback and improvement to addressing the overlapping pain points of end users, endpoint, and experience management, choosing the best DEX solution to address your digital employee experience challenges is critical to transforming DEX into a powerful asset for employee satisfaction and organizational success.

The future of digital employee experience

Digital employee experience is poised to be significantly influenced by AI, enabling IT to deliver optimized digital experiences, monitor organizational digital experiences, and empower employees with automated self-healing workflows.

AI-driven DEX tools will likely focus on preventing help desk ticket creation by allowing employees to take more remediation actions independently, further reducing the help desk load and enabling them to concentrate on tasks that require their expertise.

Additionally, integrating AI in DEX could enhance sentiment survey efforts to assess and improve employee perceptions, further contributing to a positive digital work experience.

Organizations are facing a pivotal shift in understanding how to maximize the efficacy of both employees and business operations for a modern workforce. Better digital employee experience starts by addressing employee satisfaction from every perspective, including the predominant digital workplace experience. By harnessing the power of DEX, organizations can nurture a culture that values ongoing feedback and enhancement while addressing the common challenges faced by end users through effective employee experience.

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Empower your workforce with seamless digital work experiences, automated self-service workflows to reduce help desk tickets, and a continuous feedback loop to gauge and enhance employee satisfaction over time. Learn how you can elevate your digital employee experience with Tanium’s DEX solution, an industry-leading endpoint management platform with integrated DEX capabilities built to help organizations consolidate the number of DEX tools and centralize crucial insights needed to monitor and manage DEX effectively leveraging real-time endpoint data.

You can also read about our vision for integrating AI and machine learning techniques to deliver our vision for autonomous endpoint management (AEM) and its ability to address previously unsolvable challenges.