Is technology standing in the way of great digital employee experiences (DEX)?
Every modern business is supported by a foundation of technology solutions, ranging from ubiquitous email through to bespoke frontline solutions. There have been dramatic changes over the last decade in the scope and functionality of these solutions, and many organisations are now in the middle of widespread digital transformation.
So with all these changes, it may seem odd to ask: is technology preventing us from delivering a great experience for employees?
Results from the global 2019/2020 DEX survey conducted by Step Two shed light on the current state, and trends to date.
The story so far
Nobody would claim that most enterprise software is elegant, or for that matter, easy to use. Major ERP solutions are immensely powerful, but have previously had interfaces that were intimidating at best, and downright confusing at worst.
The situation hasn’t been any better for most HR, finance or IT solutions, and the most pain has often been felt by frontline staff.
The problem with these systems is not typically one of functionality, but rather of the digital employee experience (DEX) they provide. This prevents employees easily and efficiently using the system, or if the system is sufficiently poorly designed, prevents them from using it all.
It’s no surprise that in the first DEX survey conducted by Step Two, 50% of respondents indicated that “technology issues or limitations” were an issue. These issues were ranked 4th overall, behind competing priorities, no clear vision or strategy and organisational complexity.
More broadly, there has been a significant lag between technology used widely by consumers, and the tools available within the enterprise. This has slowed the pace of collaboration and knowledge sharing, and has made it hard to streamline or simplify tasks or processes.
For this reason, many IT teams have put a focus on the “consumerisation of IT”, with the stated aim of providing business solutions that are at parity with those used outside the corporate world.
So has progress been made?
Technology is no longer a barrier?
The 2019/2020 DEX survey examined organisational readiness across three facets:
People: including leadership, culture, skills, roles and responsibilities
Process: including working practices, collaboration and business processes
Technology: including platforms, products and technologies
Perhaps surprisingly, 46% of respondents rated their technology readiness as either mostly or very ready. This scored higher than both people readiness (30%) and process readiness (27%).
This year, respondents reporting “technology issues or limitations” also dropped to 36%, now sitting at 10th place rather than 4th in the previous survey.
With the widespread rollout of modern tools in recent years — from Office 365 and Workplace by Facebook to ServiceNow and Workday — it must be presumed that organisations are now much better placed to make progress on DEX.
Many organisations are also now fully exploiting modern web-development practices that enable highly efficient bespoke solutions to be delivered in a cost-effective way.
Moving made easy
It’s often presumed that only large corporations and government agencies have sufficient resources to take a strategic approach to digital employee experience, but that’s challenged by Moving Made Easy, a 50-person property company that specialises in facilitating the sale of new homes on behalf of house builders.
A 2018 winner of an Intranet and Digital Workplace Award, the company chose to rebuild its core systems using Office 365, resulting in a new custom-built digital workplace. The new system covers every part of their selling process, from logging customer and property details, through to capturing details of the sales process and generating marketing documents.
The new system is supporting enhanced decision-making, delivering significant time savings, supporting a positive shift in culture and providing a springboard for the evolution of the company.
It shows how a focus on the digital experiences provided to employees helps shape strategy and design decisions, to provide an outcome that is a step-change in terms of productivity. For example, creating and sending valuation forms to customers used to take 15 minutes but now takes seconds. This saves the account management team two months of effort each year.
Another area of time saved is KPIs. In the previous system, generating KPIs involved a clumsy manual export to spreadsheet and then manual manipulation, taking up to 30 minutes. Management reporting is now automated with a dashboard created with Power BI and hosted in Azure, where users can generate a set of KPIs in seconds.
All of this demonstrates how a widely used off-the-shelf technology platform such as Office 365 can be placed at the centre of the way the organisation works and interacts with clients. No longer a barrier or constraint, technology is now an enabler for better outcomes.
Exploiting opportunities
The obvious next step for most firms is to take stock of the tools and platforms now available to them, and to identify ways of exploiting the full capabilities they provide.
These are likely to fall into a number of broad categories:
- Simplifying and streamlining tasks, often by providing a better digital employee experience that sits in front of corporate systems.
- Improving the way information is captured and communicated, typically by delivering a better corporate intranet.
- Supporting greater collaboration and knowledge sharing between employees, delivering benefits that potentially touch every aspect of work.
- Supporting core business, such as enabling frontline staff to provide better customer services.
All of this encourages organisations to make a substantial mind shift, from treating corporate IT systems as a cost (the view in the early 2000s), to seeing modern technology platforms as capable of providing business benefits (but only when designed well!).
Addressing weaknesses
If technology has shifted from being a barrier to an enabler, the same can’t be said of organisational readiness when it comes to people and process. Leaders need to put a focus on these areas, which rated poorly in the recent DEX survey.
This is how one survey respondent put it:
“There may be things happening of which I am unaware. In general, my feeling is that some people with some influence (e.g., Internal Communications, Intranet, HR) understand the need, but there’s no alignment or executive leadership direction.”
A similar story was reported in a public-sector organisation:
“We are a large public organisation where this area has no tradition, so to at all see our employees as internal ‘customers of a service’, worthy of good DEX, is still kind of new to the more traditional side of management, at all levels.”
This points to the need to have a robust digital employee experience strategy that’s championed and led by senior leaders. This must be supported by a mindset shift among leaders across corporate services and business areas, to prioritise the improvement of day-to-day digital experiences for employees.
It will also be necessary to ‘bake experience into standard practices’, such as project management methodologies, and IT planning processes. Corporate strategy development should also consider employee experience (beyond just the digital aspects), alongside other priorities.
We’re ready, let’s get started!
Technology is becoming the good news story of digital employee experience. Many organisations have a suite of modern tools and platforms at their disposal, even if some legacy systems remain. The opportunity now exists to deliver substantially better digital experiences for the workforce, utilising the capabilities and flexibility of these new solutions.
To really make a mark, however, people and process aspects now need urgent attention in the context of digital employee experience. This is where leaders can have the greatest impact, by putting a priority on DEX and setting the expectation that experience is considered in all corporate activities.
