Everything you need to know about a Good Digital Employee Experience in 2020

Digital transformation is pervasive. Self-driving vehicles. Smart architecture. Commercial drones. New payment methods. At every turn, you can see how new technologies are creating new value and delivering great never seen before experiences.

These innovations play an integral part in how companies do business as well. Successful digital transformation also requires talent — both to drive innovation behind the scenes and to deliver better direct customer experiences.

To retain the best talent, a shift in culture is required, one that allows employees to work in the manner that suits their individual workstyle. Companies are increasingly prioritizing digital employee experience to help facilitate this culture shift.

We live in changing times, while there is a bigger and bigger focus on employee experience, it’s clear that using 1990 techniques in the 2020s just won’t make the cut.

In order to boost innovative performance, you must be focused on the human (employee) experience.

According to Gallup, the percentage of workers in the U.S. who are not engaged is 53%! In order to foster or even boost innovative performance, you must be focused on the human (employee) experience. Taking into account the ever-changing diversification of the workforce and complexity of the workplace with global office, co-working, work remote, and work-out-loud practices.

Digital Employee Experience Is Linked to Key Business Outcomes:

When asked which digital experience factors are most important to them, employees preferred the following as the most critical:

• Can easily find and install the right apps needed for work.
• Can access necessary apps and data on their first day of work.
• Can easily work remotely from outside the office.
• Have freedom to work from personally-owned devices.
• Can choose between Android or iOS and Mac or PC for work devices.
• These preferences emphasize the need for companies to embrace the new apps, devices and work styles employees demand in order to keep employees happy.

These preferences emphasize the need for companies to embrace the new apps, devices and work styles employees demand in order to keep employees happy.

We also found out the true value of providing these types of digital experiences to employees. Results reveal that providing a good digital employee experience (i.e., enabling more of these digital experience factors) is linked to achieving key business outcomes. In fact,

• The more competitive respondents rate their organization (leaders/pioneers vs. middle of the pack vs. followers), the more likely they are to have a good digital employee experience.
• The greater the annual revenue growth level of an organization, the better the employee’s digital employee experience.
• The organizations whose respondents are more likely to recommend are much more likely to provide a good digital employee experience.

The bottom line: providing a great digital employee experience is not just a nice-to-have, it is critical to business success.

There Is a Gap Between What IT Thinks It’s Delivering and What Employees Say They Are

Nearly 95% of IT decision maker respondents claim that IT provides employees with the digital tools they need to succeed in their job. However, nearly half of employee respondents said they do not have the digital tools they need.

And nearly two-thirds of employees (64%) felt they didn’t have a voice when it comes to which digital technologies they use at work; whereas 83% of IT decision maker respondents said employees do have a say.

This perception gap can be dangerous for any organization, as it can lead to employees and IT expectations not lining up when it comes to digital experiences. And, as previously established, if employees do not feel they have the tools they need in order to work on their own terms, they will seek an employer who will provide them.

The good news? Although delivery perceptions differ, both IT and employee respondents do agree on this: digital employee experience projects should be a priority for their organizations. In fact, 87% of IT respondents agree with that statement compared to 78% of employee respondents.

So, how can IT work to close the perception gap when it comes to digital employee experience? Bring other functional teams to the table.

How to fill that void in 2020?

As trends sometimes go, “what’s old is new again” — and I think we’ll see that come to realization as organizations work to ensure employees understand and comply with that dedicated cultural identity. As much as technology plays a part in the workplace, we anticipate we’ll see companies pull back from their credence in it to communicate these important messages. Instead, we’ll see an boost in employee events to unite and energize their people.

These will range from smaller, local-level gatherings to large-scale productions. But they’ll have similar intent: amplifying excitement and longevity to their message of their cultural identity while also creating extraordinarily valuable human connection among their people.

Change from within:

Employees today value working for a “mission-driven company” whose ideology they identify with — they desire connection to work of purpose alongside people they enjoy — and when they find it give more discretionary effort and are more likely to stay at an organization. Organizations are taking notice, working to develop higher organizational purpose statements and focusing more on their employees as a means of amplifying business success. This is leading to work on creating strong employee value proposition, one that emotionally connects employees to something bigger than themselves, and one that helps employees more clearly understand all the ways they fit (or maybe don’t fit) at the organization.

Make new technology fathomable:

The HR technology landscape is an ecosystem. There’s no end-to-end solution within the Employee Experience space, let alone the entire market. Imagine using the analogy of HR technology being like tools in your toolbox — you choose the ones you need, get rid of the ones you don’t — and it needs to be a quick and effortless experience. Furthermore, the employees using this technology have consumer-grade expectations, and expect it in the flow of their work.

As the market continues to grow and get more specialized — and as organizations begin to increasingly rely on multiple vendors for their HR technology suite — it will be crucial for these vendors to meet these rapidly changing market expectations and make it as easy as possible for companies and employees to adopt their technology.

Make communication impactful:

At the heart of it, putting the employee first when communicating to them should be the goal. What will help them do their job, engage with your message and receive the information you have to share? This is a trend that goes even beyond email through responsive design that allows a variety of content to be viewed on any screen size or device.

The efforts organizations take to evaluate the moments of impact in the employee experience, to respond to the need’s employees are vocalizing and the efforts companies are making to humanize the way they support their employees, will continue to be top of mind for leaders in 2020. Strategic planning, thoughtful messaging, user-friendly technology and regular measurement combine to create employee experiences will help your company build a cohesive, engaging work environment where employees and the company alike can thrive.

What does digital employee experience mean at your organization? Are you digitizing human workflows to make them easier, more scalable, free of error, or more cost effective? Are you transforming the way humans interact with each other, your products, or data? Let us know!

Shristi Verma is a communication designer at Crrux, a collaborative digital workplace solution to manage marketing, sales and support for your business.