Enterprises have invested heavily in digital technology to keep hybrid employees connected in the modern workplace. Yet, the actual experience employees have with this technology often remains a mystery—what Gartner describes as a "black box" for many organizations.
Digital employee experience (DEX) analytics has emerged as a solution. While the concept of DEX was born out of the historical monitoring undertaken by IT teams, the beneficiaries of DEX data extend beyond IT and into other parts of the business. Interest in DEX is high – with Gartner estimating that by 2025, half of IT organizations will have established a DEX strategy, team, and management tool.
But it’s a journey to get to that point – where sophisticated, purpose-built DEX analytics are the backbone of the modern workplace. To find out how businesses are doing on this journey to DEX maturity, we asked 400 US and UK IT decision makers (ITDMs) for their views. We launched the findings this week, and you can read the full results in our new report. In the meantime, here are some of the key statistics:
- The disconnect between ITDMs and employees
Most IT leaders believe they already have enough data on DEX to optimize it. 84% state that they can “proactively identify and fix digital friction” and 86% are confident in their ability to track DEX and predict productivity issues. However, the main beneficiaries of DEX optimization, the employees, see it differently, as exposed by our earlier research. We found that more than half (52%) of knowledge workers rated the DEX provided by their employer as poor or merely adequate, and employees’ digital experiences are getting worse.
Because IT can access multiple traditional IT management point solutions, they feel they have sufficient data to assess and optimize the digital experience for workers. However, these tools were not designed to provide a holistic view of digital experience from the perspective of the employee. In a modern hybrid workplace, it’s more complex to assess DEX, and traditional IT management practices don’t go far enough.
- KPIs don’t take employees into account
When it comes to KPIs, there is more evidence that organizations are technology-centric rather than employee-centric. Three quarters (74%) of ITDMs say the KPIs they use to measure employees’ digital experiences are determined by the IT management software they use.
To accurately assess DEX, ITDMs, business leaders and HR teams should adopt employee-centric KPIs instead. This means looking at KPIs through an employee lens to detect non-technical aspects of the modern hybrid workplace that impact workers. Employee-centric KPIs include staff engagement, burnout risk, isolation and employee journeys, and are further extending by incorporating sentiment. Yet here again, traditional IT tools are unable to provide this level of insight.
- Employee journey mapping is not a priority
Almost half (45%) of organizations do not conduct any employee journey mapping, leaving them in the dark over how employees get work done and what digital friction impacts their productivity. Even among those that do attempt to map employee journeys, most (79%) are relying on subjective manual, or observational methods. Only 11.6% of all respondents have an automated method of assessing employee journeys that will work at scale.
To advance toward DEX maturity, companies need to analyze employee journeys in detail to optimize efficiency, recognize training needs, and identify and eliminate digital friction or bottlenecks within a workflow. That means capturing employee journeys and interaction data at a granular level that can be scaled enterprise-wide to reveal these barriers, which can only be achieved with DEX analytics.
Visualizing employees’ digital experience
We know that businesses take the matter of employees’ experiences in the workplace seriously. But our data shows that most are still at the early stages of the journey to DEX maturity.
A mature approach involves DEX data being shared beyond IT to include business analysts, HR and experience managers. Yet, the research finds only 56% of ITDMs can easily share data with HR teams, and 88% admit there is a need for greater communication between IT and HR. As DEX becomes increasingly relevant to other business functions, ITDMs can lead the way by providing the data to deliver an employee-centric view of DEX.
Repurposing instrumentation from traditional IT management tools is not the answer for DEX. Instead, purpose-built DEX analytics, and viewing the challenge from the perspective of the employee, is the only way to open up the digital experience “black box.” Sophisticated DEX tools reveal what the reality is on the ground for the workforce, showing how teams are accomplishing tasks and highlighting areas of inefficiency and digital friction.
Download the full report to learn more here.
