5 Core Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Factors
As a digital workplace pro, you’re well on your way to planning investments and strategy this year. But where to start? With so many macro trends impacting tech decision-making — recessions, hybrid work, supply chain disruptions, and more — it’s clear that we’re in for another year of unpredictable change in the digital workplace.
At Milestone, our Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solution should be top of mind for digital workplace leaders like you as you continue to use technology to attract shrinking talent, improve productivity, and promote employee engagement.
How You’ll Tackle Your Digital Workplace
Below are five DEX factors we believe you’ll need to address to succeed this year.
1.Striving to Improve DEX ROI
Even before the pandemic DEX was making its way into the business world, especially tech startups short on funds: My friends on marketing’s creative side have been working remotely since 2000 outfitted with a laptop and subsidized high-speed internet at a few different startups and as contractors.
The pandemic only hyper-accelerated this evolution and made this universal when it forced most employees home. In fact, 60% of tech leaders say that improving DEX is a top priority through 2023.But so much talk about recessions and recent layoffs at big players– Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft in recent weeks—will impact DEX investment in 2023. Will companies be making smaller DEX deals? Will they struggle to justify costs when they resume rehiring?
More likely than not, you’ll have to focus more on reducing costs while also improving the DEX experience. BUT, like it or not, remote and hybrid work is going to stay, and while some of your competitors may not see that and try to go back to the way things were in 2019, YOU should embrace the switch and increase your digital experience investment spend in core apps and services that you stay productive and improve employee experience while increasing ROI.
2.Fears of DEX Adoption Slowing Down?
However, the all-too-near recession will mostly likely negatively affect DEX investment resulting in sharply decreased spending and, unfortunately put a damper on expenditures in this still-newish worker paradigm.
While most businesses are reactionary and act in haste “strategically” decreasing or removing DEX investment, we think you need to continue spending on your businesses’ core apps to protect not only your already purchased business assets and services but also—and more importantly for an employee-first org like Milestone—your people.
Having this employee-first focus keeps your employees from having to think where they may be working
(or not working) while you leapfrog your competition. Plus, thinking strategically will help you bring a solid ROI into your CEO’s lap.
3.Building Accurate Data Models to Enable Proactivity 
What is proactivity? Using the right data to make informed actions. Sounds like sound business practices, but whatevs. With proactivity, you string together multiple data types to prevent experience issues from impacting employees that can both improve DEX while reducing costs. We see enterprises moving into a more proactive model to expand into new use cases such as asset management, break/fix, and device refresh.
4.App Streamlining Will Increase this year
Would DEX improve if your employees could access their collaboration tools from a single platform? Of course! Collaboration apps that took off during the pandemic, such as Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, have been integrating more sharing features throughout their ecosystem. Microsoft has increased integration with SharePoint and file support throughout Windows 10/11. In 2023, expect to see greater integration between End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM), Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps), and various other smart collaboration tools and integrations into digital workplace offerings. Some questions to ask yourself:
- How is your current application stack now? Look for overlapping feature sets from multiple providers.
- Are there opportunities to simplify your environment?
- Would accessing your DEX from a single platform reduce context switching and improve employee productivity?
5.Enhancing Your Digital Workplace with Personalization
To make the digital workplace successful personalization is key. Equip your employees with the devices, other hardware equipment, and software they would need if they were on-premise according to their workplace preferences. For instance:
- If they’re working in a small apartment in the city, perhaps, a laptop, headset or earbuds with a mic, and maybe even music subscription to white noise channels.
- If they’re in a basement office setup, a sunlight would help
- Did someone say coworking? If a coworking business, such as WeWork, is nearby, maybe a basic membership plan usually access to desk space with limited access to a conference room
Of course, personalization is individualized. Such experiences are based on each of your employees’ roles, seniority, or whether or not they travel. Such segmentation in the digital workspace means targeted delivery of content, knowledge, and notifications into preferred devices (gone are the days of uniform company-supplied devices). To succeed in personifying the digital workspace for employees, DWS leaders in your organization will have to “go all in” in terms of investment. There is no holding back.
Success Will Be Based on XLAs and SLAs
To succeed, we can help your organization develop a sound DEX strategy so employee satisfaction is based on each individual’s experience, not just how apps/hardware equipment are operating. Moving forward to take into account employee journeys, such as onboarding, experience level agreements (XLA) using real-time human centric experiences will be used in conjunction with service-level agreements (SLA).
