As we start the new year, it’s the perfect time to look back at some of our 2024 research and media highlights. Last year we wanted to continue exploring the challenges organizations face in delivering a great digital employee experience (DEX) in the modern workplace, and the impact poor DEX has on teams. To achieve this aim, we’ve released numerous pieces of original research and data, building on work we’ve completed in previous years. Let’s dig into some of the headlines here.
A DEX deep dive
We started 2024 by taking a closer look at the digital employee experience of knowledge workers. Our research found that while technology is advancing at pace, experiences are not. Almost a fifth (18%) of all knowledge workers (home, office and hybrid) rate the DEX provided by their employer as poor. While this is slightly up from 15% in 2021, it’s clear there’s still a lot of room for employers to improve the digital environment.
Worryingly, 43% of knowledge workers suffer from reduced job satisfaction due to poor DEX, and 29% said it made them consider quitting. This underlines why businesses must make optimizing DEX a priority for 2025, or risk losing talent to organizations that can deliver an engaging digital workplace.
Exploring productivity in the modern workplace
In May, we highlighted the significant productivity losses that poor DEX results in. Our research of senior US and UK IT decision makers (ITDMs) showed that on average, they estimate employees lose nearly four hours a week (3.78) because of DEX failings.
Productivity losses are often blamed on hybrid work. The research backed this up, with 90% of ITDMs reporting their organization has "productivity paranoia" over hybrid working. Yet the findings made clear that many organizations are still adapting to hybrid digital work environments. Indeed, many businesses are still using traditional productivity measures that are not relevant in hybrid digital workplaces, so are unable to accurately assess productivity or identify where blockers occur.
Half of employers in the dark on how employee get work done
In September, we published follow up research looking at how organizations are measuring and optimizing DEX today. Our data showed that a majority (92%) of ITDMs claim to have the necessary data to optimize employees’ digital experience. Yet, with our earlier knowledge worker research finding that 52% of employees say DEX is getting worse, not better – there is clearly a disconnect between the data being collected and what it tells ITDMs about DEX.
One of the issues the research exposed and that explains partly why DEX isn’t improving is the absence of employee journey mapping. Nearly half (45%) of organizations don’t conduct any journey mapping, which means they’re in the dark about how digital friction impacts workers and how employees complete their work.
Unnecessary hardware replacements
In October, we released our final piece of research for the year, in time for World Sustainability Day, highlighting that 77% of enterprises replace tech based solely on age. Not only is this detrimental to the environment, creating huge amounts of e-waste, but it is also wasting large amounts of money.
Instead, we showed that by using sophisticated DEX analytics, businesses can take an employee-centric approach that aligns tech refresh cycles to the needs of the employee rather than arbitrary timeframes. This delivers a better experience for employees whilst improving the sustainability practices and reducing cost.
Leading the way on DEX
Outside of our research, our co-founder Mark Cresswell has also been discussing trending issues with the media – including around the return to office debate, among many other topics.
Earlier this year, Mark’s letter on “presenteeism” – following EY’s decision to monitor staff attendance in the office that caused resentment among employees – was published in the Financial Times. Mark was also interviewed by HR Tech Edge in September to discuss how DEX analytics enables organizations to boost employee wellbeing.
And to close out the year, in December Mark wrote an opinion article on bridging the employee experience gap in US publication, CIO Influence. In the piece, Mark discusses how organizations can tackle the disconnect between IT’s perception and employees’ reality when it comes to DEX.
We have another exciting year planned for 2025 so be sure to keep an eye on our blog for the latest updates.
