By 2025, Gartner estimates that half of IT organizations will have established a Digital Employee Experience (DEX) team. This is undoubtably a positive step forward, yet creating a team doesn’t in itself demonstrate the DEX maturity of an organization. The key to driving DEX maturity is collating and accessing the right data and then sharing it across the wider organization, including with HR and People teams, who can leverage this data to improve the wellbeing and satisfaction of employees.
In our latest research, Unlocking the Digital Employee Experience Black Box, we delved into the current state of DEX maturity and how insights can be used by decision makers beyond the IT department.
Work to be done
A third (32%) of IT decision makers (ITDMs) say their organization doesn’t currently have a Digital Employee Experience Manager. And of those organizations that do have a colleague dedicated to improving employees’ digital experiences in their workplace, only 56% can easily share detailed data on employees’ digital experiences with them.
This underlines that there is work to be done for many organizations. Sophisticated DEX analytics delivers key data points that allow those responsible for improving experiences to assess burnout risk, understand engagement, identify quiet quitting, help employees protect focus time, spot training needs and ensure a healthy workload balance. But our data shows that most organizations are some way off achieving that level of insight. For example:
- Under half (44%) of organizations say they can currently identify excessive out-of-hours working.
- Only just over half (52%) can identify workers that need training and support to use technology.
- And again, only just over half (56%) can spot changes in collaboration and communications trends that might indicate an employee is less engaged.
With more of our working lives spent using digital tools, understanding how engaged employees are, what working patterns exist, and how teams collaborate is critical – not only to optimize productivity but also to ensure employees are happy and satisfied.
Communication between departments is key
Despite the challenges organizations face, the good news is that the majority (88%) of organizations recognize the need for better communication between IT and HR departments. To optimize employees’ digital experiences while protecting wellbeing and ensuring engagement, IT and HR departments must speak a common language powered by purpose-built DEX solutions.
Armed with actionable insights based on DEX solutions, IT and HR can shift from a reactive “firefighting” mode to a proactive approach to optimizing the hybrid working experience. The most sophisticated businesses will be able to go even further. For example, HR decision makers and line of business managers can even use DEX data to determine whether remote work is contributing to higher levels of burnout and make data-driven decisions about headcount and resourcing needs based on team capacity.
With this approach, organizations can deliver a modern digital workplace that helps attract and retain top talent, whilst ensuring the most productive and engaging environment for employees.
Download the full report to learn more here.
