Is the Digital Employee Experience Holding Back Your Organization?

What makes for engaged and productive employees? Lots of things, obviously. But you might be surprised to learn that the digital employee experience is close to the top of the list.

Which, when you think about how much technology each of us uses in our work these days, perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise at all. Different devices, different collaboration tools, mobile working, desktop working—technology choices and requirements differ widely.

Simply put, technology that holds people back, and prevents them from working productively and efficiently, is a major switch-off.

Employees don’t want to spend their days struggling with old and slow technology that doesn’t let them do what they want. They don’t want to spend their days apologizing to colleagues and customers. And they don’t want to spend their days with klutzy IT systems, only to spend their evenings interacting seamlessly with slick and responsive consumer-friendly systems—Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, YouTube, and so on.

Better business outcomes

And it isn’t just productivity that suffers from a poor employee experience with technology.

Research by Gartner, for instance, highlights that organizations providing their employees with a productive digital employee experience achieve on average an 81% increase in customer satisfaction. Other research shows that companies that provide a superior digital employee experience are more likely to be able to attract and retain top talent.

Simply put, technology that provides a good employee experience enables people to do more, to do it better, to do it faster, and to derive more satisfaction from doing it.

They’re more successful in their roles, more satisfied in their roles, and more likely to engage with a wider range of technologies—which helps the organization move faster with its digital transformation.

Moreover, research suggests that a good digital employee experience is associated with improved business outcomes. For which, read higher levels of revenue growth. Not to mention better work-life balance scores, higher employee sentiment scores, and easier talent recruitment.

Perception gap

The trouble is, many organizations have a divided view of the digital employee experience that they provide.

According to research carried out by global research firm Vanson Bourne, IT functions have one view of the digital employee experience—and employees quite another.

Surveying 6,400 employees, HR professionals, and IT specialists across 19 countries, the study found that although 95% of IT decision makers thought that their IT functions provided employees with the digital tools they needed in order to be successful in their jobs, 42%—in other words, nearly half—of employees don’t agree with this.

Which is a perception gap that many organizations should find troubling.

And it isn’t the only perception gap regarding the digital employee experience. Nearly two thirds of employees—64%—don’t feel that they have a voice when it comes to which digital technologies they use at work. But 83% of IT decision makers contested that employees did have a say in this.

They can’t both be right.

Get the facts

What’s needed are facts. Cold, hard facts. And facts that are specific to the individual organization. Your organization.

How satisfied are your employees with their own digital employee experience? How dissatisfied? Which aspects of their digital employee experience excel? And which don’t?

Think, too, about the roadmap to a richer employee experience. What exactly needs to change in employees’ digital employee experiences? Why? And how?

But where are these facts and insights to come from? It’s one thing for—say—human resource organizations to point to employee attitude survey data, and quite another to have an incontrovertible set of facts that everyone in the organization can buy into. Including IT.

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 digital employee experience.

For the facts about digital employee experiences—and not just opinions—organizations need Acumen.

To learn more, request a demo to see Acumen in action.