Research shows that providing a good digital employee experience turns out to be associated with some very desirable business outcomes, including:
- More productive, engaged employees
- Better customer satisfaction
- Higher revenue growth
- Greater profitability
- Easier talent recruitment and retention
Perhaps that isn’t a surprise to you. These days, all of us make extensive use of digital capabilities to get our work done. And all of us know that we’re more productive in our work when we’re working with systems and technologies that are powerful, easy to use, and seamlessly connected with each other.
So with a better digital employee experience, it’s only natural to expect employees to be more productive in their work, resulting in better business outcomes.
Digital Employee Experience Leads to Better Outcomes
What might surprise you, though, is the sheer scale of the difference in outcomes that a difference in digital employee experience makes.
A study by researchers at the MIT Sloan Centre for Information Systems Research, for instance, compared organizations in the top quartile for quality of digital employee experience with organizations in the bottom quartile for digital employee experience.
Top quartile organizations were more than twice as innovative, with 51% of revenues coming from products and services introduced in the previous two years, versus 24% for bottom quartile organizations.
Top quartile organizations had customer satisfaction levels more than twice as high as bottom quartile organizations, with industry-adjusted net promoter scores of 32, versus 14.
And top quartile organizations were on average 25% more profitable than bottom quartile organizations.
All in all, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that these are some fairly compelling differences in business outcomes.
Digital Capacity
So what makes for a superior digital employee experience? And how do organizations go about making sure that they’re actually delivering a superior digital experience to their employees?
It turns out that the two questions are related. Because the top-performing organizations that MIT examined exhibited a clear determination to proactively provide and facilitate the digital capabilities that their employees sought in order to be more productive.
Organizations in the top quartile in terms of digital employee experience, for instance, delivered an average of 66% more digital capacity to employees than did organizations in the bottom quartile.
And the distinction was particularly noticeable in areas such as mobile access to work, effective support, and the ability to search for and access people and knowledge anywhere in the organization.
Moreover, these top-performing organizations were also 61% more likely to provide personalized toolkits based on working needs, and utilize internal social-networking platforms for collaboration and the sharing of ideas.
The Answers You Need
The moral is clear: if organizations want to enjoy better business outcomes, then they’ll need to be better at rolling out the superior digital capabilities that enable their employees to be more productive.
So the questions for would-be top-performing organizations are obvious.
Which digital capabilities do we roll out, exactly? And delivered to who, precisely? And how do we prioritize which capabilities to roll out first?
Yet if the questions are obvious, the answers certainly aren’t.
Enter Acumen, from Scalable Software. Acumen automatically tracks the usage of your organization’s systems and technology investments, monitoring digital KPIs that map directly onto pointers to employees’ digital experience.
Acumen takes the guesswork out of figuring out how an organization’s technology investments are used, and by whom, and under what circumstances.
With Acumen, you get a handle on the digital agility not only of individual employees, but of the organization as a whole. Automatically.
To learn more, download our guide, Providing an Exceptional Hybrid Working Experience, to discover how to deliver exceptional digital experiences for hybrid workers by optimizing the way your people and systems interact.
