A strong digital employee experience (DEX) helps organisations survive the worst that the world can throw at it

The Covid-19 pandemic is pushing organisations to the breaking point (and far too many beyond it). The impacts are obvious for businesses that rely on face-to-face interactions with customers, such as food, tourism, hotels and retail.

The impact on office workers and knowledge workers, however, has been far greater than anyone was ready for. Moreover, business leaders are discovering that beyond tackling the basics, the digital experiences provided to employees are some of the key drivers for organisational resilience.

Discovering new approaches to leader engagement

Over the last six months, Step Two has been working with an Australian government agency, researching staff needs and putting in place a digital employee experience (DEX) strategy.

In the middle of this, the pandemic hit, and the agency suddenly found itself shifting to an entirely remote organisation. One day, staff were at home as part of a test of network capacity, the following day they were told not to come back to the office.

The changes wrought on the organisation and have been sharp and painful. Everyone, from senior leaders down, has been scrambling to find new ways of working entirely virtually.

In the early stages of rolling out Office 365, Yammer was quickly put in place as a mechanism to maintain engagement with staff, and to help problem-solve issues as they came up.

In normal times, the agency runs a quarterly all-hands session with senior leaders. Formal in tone and structure, these sessions brought everyone together in the one spot to update them on strategic decisions.

With lockdowns in place, this session was forced to go online, with a live stream out to all employees. Senior leaders sat at home, surrounded by the normal trappings of their lives, and found themselves opening up in ways they’d never considered before. More informal in tone, and far more engaging, this virtual session was immediately seen as the most successful that the agency had ever run, despite diving into the deep end of new digital tools.

While there’s still a lot of work to be done to grow productivity using the new technology platforms, the digital experience has already fostered a stronger culture that will provide long-term dividends.

Great DEX increases organisational resilience

This is just one example that we’ve seen in our work at Step Two where the necessary changes wrought by the pandemic have been utilised to deliver business benefits.

Similar experiences have arisen from previous natural disasters, such as major floods or fires. In all of these cases, business-as-usual can’t continue, and organisations need to find better digital solutions for employee needs.

A strong digital employee experience (DEX) is crucial in four main ways: enabling access, ensuring productivity, delivering a great customer experience and fostering a strong culture.

Enabling access

In a discussion about the strategic benefits of digital employee experience, it will seem odd to start with an exploration of the most basic of topics: how employees can get access to their tools and information when working virtually.

It’s entirely taken for granted that staff can work away from their desks, using tools such as VPNs or remote desktops. What this overlooks, however, is that the experience of obtaining access is crucial beyond the basic technological mechanisms.

Let’s face it, the tools we typically use for remote access are often clunky, slow and unreliable. Left as a basic IT issue, this inevitably becomes a case of ‘just enough is good enough’.

Without wading into the technical details, the digital experience remote workers have should be considered as a key business issue. Decisions should be made — and resources allocated — to ensure that all employees have a simple, productive and enjoyable digital experience regardless of where they are working.

Ensuring productivity

Most businesses are already flooded with many different collaboration tools and other online systems, including Office 365, Salesforce, Dropbox, Slack, and dozens more.

When organisations are hit by external issues, such as a pandemic or natural disaster, employees need to keep powering on with their work, even as their physical work environment undergoes disruptive change.

From a business-led perspective — and through the lens of digital employee experience — firms should assess their current state and make plans for short- and long-term improvements.

In the biggest of disasters, such as Covid-19, business leaders are finding themselves experiencing the same issues as the rest of the organisation. Unable to work face-to-face, managers and leaders are now ‘walking in the shoes’ of those now relying on an effective digital experience to get work done.

This helps to drive a business agenda around digital productivity, which cuts through the low-level discussions of ‘which tool to use when’, and whether to pick ‘one platform to rule them all’.

Delivering great customer experience

During a crisis, employees invariably have to go ‘above and beyond’ to provide great service to customers who are feeling the immediate pain of unfolding issues.

Frontline employees themselves will therefore require greater support, to ensure that the weight of customer needs doesn’t fall entirely on their shoulders.

They also need to be provided with an effective digital employee experience that allows them to ‘scale up’ their responses to overwhelming customer demand. They should also be given digital tools which allow them to collaborate internally, to problem-solve collectively, and to quickly determine new approaches to the ongoing crisis.

Conversely, frontline employees who are locked into clunky and narrowly-defined digital tools will be quickly overwhelmed by increased demand, and will flounder when trying to address unexpected issues.

Fostering a strong culture

On November 1, 2013, a gunman stalked the halls of the Los Angeles International Airport, the home base of Virgin America. Asking directions to the nearest TSA officer, one officer was shot before the gunman was confronted by police.

Throughout this, Virgin America used their enterprise collaboration tools to quickly send out directions to help staff evacuate the area. Following the attack, these tools were again used to help employees emotionally recover from the incident.

This is one of the clearest examples of how digital tools can be used to foster a stronger culture during these types of extreme events. Unable to reach out to all staff face-to-face, the tools provided within an effective digital employee experience enabled this vital engagement to happen online.

A coherent digital employee experience provides new channels for leaders to connect with staff, on an emotional as well as a practical level. A clear focus on providing an effective and productive digital experience also sends the clear message ‘we care about you, and we’re here to help you’ during unfolding crises such as a pandemic.

Shining a light on digital resilience

As part of normal business continuity planning, managers and leaders must consider the aspects related to digital employee experience. From this starting point, productive conversations and decisions can happen that address the combination of employee needs, business priorities and technology solutions.

With a great digital employee experience, firms can increase their resilience to disasters and other external shocks, as well as fostering a stronger and more engaged employee culture.