Ten Pillars of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Strategy

Problem Statement

Despite significant investments in IT, the level of Digital Friction remains very high among employees and the level of Productivity Growth seems to be declining at an alarming pace. To exacerbate this, more applications have been added to the Digital Workplace leading to duplication and sprawl. Any meaningful Digital Workplace strategies have been hampered by siloed activities within IT. Also, many Digital Workplace leaders tend to treat employees as homogenous technology users. Intranet and Portals are overwhelming employees with too much information that lacks cohesion and relevance. Business applications are disconnected with Digital Workplace tools and applications leading to high cognitive load and context switching for employees. Many times, business led Digital Delivery initiatives are viewed negatively and discourage Digital Dexterity. Finally, Digital Workplace leaders often cannot get the funding and resources needed to advance their organizations Digital Workplace capabilities.  

Solution

Instead of continuing to delve into the problem, let’s fall in love with the solution. The solution to the problem is a robust Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Strategy. Here are the ten pillars of a successful DEX Strategy.

1. DEX Blueprint: Start with a well-established, proven DEX Blueprint. There are many out there including the one from Gartner that has been implemented successfully. Having a baseline blueprint will give you a jump start and avoid reinventing the wheel.
2. Focus Group: Form multiple focus groups to poll for Digital Workplace pain points from a wide variety of employee groups. Seek participation from them if you don’t get enough volunteers. Ensure all possible personas applicable to your organization are accounted for in the focus groups.
3. Feedback Survey & Metrics: Establish a framework to collect feedback from the employees through the surveys and translate that into metrics that can be measured consistently. Make sure that the survey as well as metrics are kept relevant and don’t get stale over a period of time.
4. Identify Key DEX Platforms: While employees can interact with a wide variety of applications, there will be a few key platforms where most of the DEX interactions play out. For example, few of the platforms could be ServiceNow, Microsoft 365 or Workday. Knowing these platforms is key so that you know where to start and prioritize optimizing the experience.
5. Platform Roadmap & Backlog: Build roadmap and backlog of improvements for your top 5 DEX platforms. 
6. Change & Communication Strategy: Like any major initiative, in order to keep your employees engaged and realize the benefit of a DEX Strategy, you need to manage the change it brings to them and support them with the transition. At the same time, you need to periodically communicate the progress and the successes with them in order to create FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and keep the engagement level high.
7. Security: A big contributor of Digital Friction is overly aggressive Security policies many of which could have been introduced with the best intentions but got out of hand. Security policies could be implemented and enforced in an invisible manner without compromising Digital Employee Experience.
8. DEX Accelerator/Management Tools: There are many tools out there that can accelerate DEX Strategy and enable proactive management of Digital Friction and address them before they affect employees. Some of the leading tools include ControlUp and Nexthink. These are typically used by your End User Computing team as they support your employees with their day-to-day needs.
9. Complex Integration: You should expect to find a lot of the Digital Friction caused by lack of complex integrations between applications that your employees rely on. There is no easy route to tackle them but build a business case and seek portfolio funding to address them. A good example of this could be Single Sign On integration for all critical applications using enterprise wise Identity Access Management capability
10. Leadership Support: Finally, DEX Strategy cannot be successful without full support from leadership in alignment with enterprise strategy and vision. This should not be a challenge as all Enterprise Strategy takes into account developing talent and building a high performing workforce. Having a DEX Strategy is crucial to doing the same.