Digital transformation is high on corporate agendas and is becoming even more of an imperative. Analyst firm Gartner, for instance, notes that two thirds of all business leaders believe that their organizations must accelerate the pace of digitalization in order to remain competitive.

Nor is it difficult to see why. Central to digital transformation is the goal of enabling employees to do more and achieve more, through providing them with a superior digital experience—an experience that’s richer, more productive, connected to more systems, and which enables them to interact better with more people.

Why? Because these days, all of us make extensive use of digital capabilities to get our work done. And all of us know that we’re more productive in our work when we’re working with systems and technologies that are powerful, easy to use, and seamlessly connected with each other. This turns out to be associated with some very desirable business outcomes.

Superior performance

Which business outcomes, precisely?

A study by researchers at the MIT Sloan Centre for Information Systems Research sheds light on the answer, by comparing organizations in the top quartile for quality of digital employee experience with organizations in the bottom quartile for digital employee experience.

Top quartile organizations, they discovered, were more than twice as innovative, with 51% of revenues coming from products and services introduced in the previous two years, versus 24% for bottom quartile organization.

Top quartile organizations also had customer satisfaction levels more than twice as high as bottom quartile organizations, with industry-adjusted net promoter scores of 32, versus 14.

And top quartile organizations were also on average 25% more profitable than bottom quartile organizations.

Time and again, in fact, there’s seen to be a link between providing employees with a superior digital experience, and those employees in turn delivering some superior business outcomes.

Proactive people development

So how should organizations go about building a superior digital employee experience?

It transpired that top quartile organizations differed from their lower-performing peers in another respect, too: their commitment to identifying—and eliminating—so-called ‘friction points’ in employees’ digital experiences.

In other words, they proactively worked to find out what was holding employees back in their use of systems and technologies, and then worked to deliver improvements and fix any identified problems.

Lower-performing organizations, on the other hand, did this a lot less.

So while top-quartile organizations developed digital workplace champions, and actively sought out employees’ views using tools such as enterprise collaboration platforms, bottom-quartile organizations largely didn’t.

Likewise, top-quartile organizations actively sought data on the digital employee experience from many channels, including measurement of digital KPIs and capabilities associated with work patterns and work processes. Bottom-quartile organizations, on the other hand, took a far more passive approach—occasional employee surveys, and so on.

Actionable insights

But suppose that there were a better way?

Suppose that it were possible to build up a picture of the digital employee experience directly from workforce and system interactions and behavior. And suppose that it were possible to do this not only for individual employees, but also for teams, individual functions, and even the entire organization? And go beyond reporting to benefit from actionable insights that lead to improvements in productivity and end user satisfaction.

And suppose that it were possible not only to build up this picture, but also benchmark it against other comparable organizations?

Suppose no more.

Enter Acumen, from Scalable Software. Acumen automatically tracks the usage of your organization’s systems and technology investments, monitoring digital KPIs that map directly onto pointers to employees’ digital experience.

Acumen takes the guesswork out of figuring out how an organization’s technology investments are used, and by whom, and under what circumstances.

With Acumen, you get a handle on the quality of the digital experience not only for individual employees, but for the organization as a whole.

To learn more, download the eBook, Providing an Exceptional Hybrid Working Experience.