09 Jul
What should HR leaders know about Digital Employee Experience?
Forbes has defined employee experience (EX) as the sum of all experiences an employee has with their employer over the duration of their relationship – from recruitment to onboarding and career development to exiting the organization.
Over the past year, rapid digital transformation and remote work have changed the fundamental relationship between employers and employees. HR leaders now realize that employees are the customers of a digital workplace. To ensure higher productivity and employee engagement, the HR leadership must deliver a compelling digital employee experience.
Employees function within limited hours and must cater to numerous demands. Consequently, they must be able to access the right information and be reached at the right time – much like customers.
Jared Spataro, Microsoft Teams and 365 leader, once stated, “The time has come to acknowledge a fundamental truth – for so many people, the “place” where work happens – today and here on out – is the internet. The digital experience of working for a company is the employee experience.
So, how can HR leaders define digital employee experience? Most importantly, what should they know about digital employee experience?
Let’s find out.
What is Digital Employee Experience? What should HR leaders know about DEX?
Simply put, digital employee experience (DEX) is the quality of an employee’s interactions with the technology in their work environment. From email and social collaboration tools to internal communication apps and the intranet, technology dominates today’s business landscape.
Having defined what digital employee experience is, HR leaders must understand why DEX is essential?
Firstly, in-office experiences and perks, such as free meals, gyms, off-site visits, cultural events, “bring your kid to work,” etc., were limited to the physical space. With most of the employees working remotely, HR leaders must recreate such experiences virtually. Secondly, exceptional digital employee experiences build a conducive work culture, boost individual and team productivity, and help employees achieve higher customer satisfaction levels.
In a recently conducted research, 500 HR leaders were surveyed and 92% confirmed employee experience as a top priority in 2021.
Employee experience matters because all of the individual moments of an employee’s experience play a role in how a worker feels about an employer’s purpose, brand, and culture. These feelings directly affect employee engagement, retention, performance, and development.”
Such metrics are crucial for HR leaders to know, understand, and improve. In today’s competitive job market, an excellent digital employee experience allows the HR team to hire and retain the best talent. Moreover, employees are far more likely to recommend an organization that provides a great digital experience, making the company an employer of choice for outside talent.
HR Consultant and educator, Josh Bersin, has rightly said, “It used to be: Let’s put a lot of desks together, give them a great coffee machine, a great chef, and people will be happy. It’s a lot more complicated than that now. There’s a lot of reengineering of the workplace going on at a granular level.”
That is where a digital experience platform (DXP) comes into the picture. A cohesive space for employees to communicate, collaborate, and engage, a digital experience platform drives productivity, engagement, and employee satisfaction by bringing the right information, connections, and tools to the right person – all within the daily flow of work.
The crucial elements of a DXP platform fall into the following categories –
1. Increase knowledge discovery with cognitive enterprise search
When working with different apps and multiple tools, organizations often lose the capacity to bring information together. In a remote setup, accessing relevant information at the right time is crucial to maintain employee efficiency and reduce fatigue and burnout.
A DXP platform simplifies knowledge gathering by integrating with enterprise apps and legacy systems and organizing structured and unstructured content available on the company’s network using meta-tagging, classification, and taxonomy usage. Besides, the platform’s cognitive search capabilities help in the seamless discovery of the most contextual and relevant information by surfacing search results from all internal and external apps.
Additionally, AI-powered chatbots embedded on the DXP platform can help employees retrieve documents, files, and other content – 24X7, using a conversational interface.
2. Promote employee well-being through social collaboration tools
Amidst the pandemic, employees have been dealing with stress, grief, and anxiety. Long work hours, problems in collaboration, coupled with the follies of working in silos and the grief of losing close friends and family to the disease, and employee burnout has surged exponentially. In an in-person office situation, it’s easy to notice when someone is exhausted and struggling to maintain a work-life balance.
A DXP platform provides social capabilities that allow employees to collaborate on projects, get personalized updates and company news, and stay connected with peers using tools that recreate the “water cooler” at the office in a virtual setup. Additionally, leaders may conduct team lunches, group mindfulness activities, town halls, and one-on-one employee check-ins that help promote and stimulate conversations around mental and emotional well-being.
Moreover, DXP platforms leverage workplace analytics tools that help employees better track and manage their schedule, take out time to unplug and unwind, and focus equally on family and professional commitments – all of which are crucial when employees work remotely.
3. Make learning a habit with single window access to all learning platforms
HR leaders must recognize that learning is directly related to employee well-being, happiness, and success at the workplace. A recent survey found 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development. With a just-in-time learning approach, a DXP platform provides access to organization-wide content libraries and learning systems (including LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, and the company’s own content) – anytime, anywhere, and on any device.
“We expect the tools to say – It looks like you’re searching for 2020 census data. Let’s help you figure out how to read that data,” Jared Spataro said, offering one example. The new knowledge you need should find you.
4. Create a positive organizational culture through consistent top management communication
A DXP platform helps redefine the company culture. With most employees working from disparate locations, it becomes imperative for HR leaders to reiterate goals, beliefs, and expected behavior through videos, blogs, message boards, and policy documents, which are readily available on the DXP platform.
By accessing a global pool of talent and focusing on how to get the best out of them, HR leaders can promote consistent company culture and digital employee experience, not at the team level but at the company level.
Furthermore, they can promote innovation through an idea management tool that enables the staff to brainstorm ideas to solve common business challenges.
Exploring Mesh 3.0 - A Digital Experience platform for HR Leaders
At Acuvate, we assist clients in delivering the ultimate digital employee experience with Mesh 3.0, an AI-driven digital experience platform built with the best of Microsoft technologies, including Azure Search Services, Office Graph, LUIS, and MS Natural Language Stack.
Mesh 3.0 brings all apps and tools that enable internal communication, collaboration, analytics, and knowledge mining under a single roof, helping HR leaders create personalized digital experiences for your entire workforce.
Some of the powerful capabilities of Mesh include –
To know more in detail about Mesh 3.0, feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.
Poonam Chug is AVP - SaaS Strategy & Business. She has worked in various areas, right from designing and executing sales & account management strategies to reengineering digital workplace solutions. With her determined focus on our mission and progressive approach, she has achieved customer delight in the space of AI, Knowledge Mining, Content & Collaboration, Virtual Assistants, RPA and more. Backed with a deep understanding of customer needs and technology, she leads the SaaS business unit with an upshot of maximizing revenue while ensuring customer satisfaction.
Poonam Chug