Why Digital Employee Experience
As we sit in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution with the nature of work and the workplace being transformed before our eyes it is critical for businesses to pause, take stock and examine how their staff experience working for them. In order to thrive in this next industrial revolution, organisations need to work on developing and creating employee experiences that meet their employee’s needs, demands and help to maximise their productivity. At the centre of all of this sits an organisation’s Digital Employee Experience.
Employee Experience
Before having a look at Digital Employee Experience and why organisations need to be focusing on it, it’s important to rewind a little bit and take a brief look at what Employee Experience is in general. In a nutshell, Employee Experience is about creating workplace environments that employees what to bring their best to, rather than having to be at. Employee Experience consists of three areas within an organisation: physical environment, cultural environment and digital & technological environment.
In order to create workplaces that employees want to bring their best to, HR departments need to take the lessons learnt from marketing around User Journeys, Customer Experience and Design Thinking. It’s about turning the lens inwards to gain an understanding of how employees experience your organisation. Creating an engaging employee experience that creates an environment that employees what to show up to means putting them at the centre of internal processes and keeping them front of mind.
Digital Employee Experience
Outside of work your employees live connected lives which are enhanced, infused and made more convenient by digital devices and apps. Take a moment to think about your own daily life and how infused it is with technology. Did you order lunch from a delivery service on your phone? How about calling a cab? or ending an argument by asking Siri? Employees enter the workplace with the expectation that the digital work environment you provide will do the same. That they will be able to work in a frictionless digital world. Sadly, this is often not the case and employees end up increasingly frustrated.
Your digital employee experience encompasses all digital interactions within the work environment (the digital tools and digital workplace) and are mission-critical for your organisation. I like to think of it as the central nervous system of your organisation. Although it can’t be physically seen it is infused throughout your entire organisation and influences every area of it. When healthy, working well and meeting employee expectations your organisation runs smoothly, achieving great things. However, when it’s faulty, when it becomes paralysed, it becomes a massive disturbance to the functioning of the business. Although many people view digital as completely non-human it is anything but. Your digital and technological environments are human to the core. The digital environment and experience you create for your employees can either render your employees completely powerless or empower them to achieve great things. How your employees experience your digital and IT environments is essential to everything.
In order for businesses to thrive in this new era, it is crucial for them to invest in their digital employee experience. It’s no longer a “nice to have” but rather critical to business success. Organisations need to be meeting, or exceeding, the expectations of their employees when it comes to the technological infrastructure they provide as well as the digital environment in which they work.
If you’d like to find out how you can create great digital employee experiences, then get in touch with us and we can help guide you through the process.
