All too often, organizations invest in large technology systems but don’t see widespread employee adoption, in part because these tools don’t reflect how employees actually work. At the same time, workers are clamoring for tools that will help them do their jobs better.
More than half (58%) of respondents to a 2022 Domo survey of employees in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand said their need for technology has increased in the past five years, but their organizations’ tech tools aren’t meeting those needs. Some 60% of the 3,000 respondents, a mix of desk-based and deskless workers, said they could be more productive and do better work with better technology tools. And 62% said better access to useful tech would make them happier at work.
As organizations begin to realize the importance of engaged employees, both remote and in-office, they have started to focus on optimizing the digital employee experience (DEX) — making sure employees have the best experiences with the technologies they use to do their work. And this means all the technologies they use: digital employee experience encompasses every interaction employees have with the multiple digital tools and systems they use to perform their jobs.
It’s critical for organizations to ensure that their employees have the best experiences with the technologies they use to do their work, said Johnny Martinez, director, people advisory and organizational change at consulting firm Protiviti. These days, employees expect an easy-to-use digital experience at work — but getting there isn’t always easy, given the presence of legacy systems, limited budgets, and concerns with change, he said.
The first step to improving employee tech tools is to assess the existing digital employee experience at the organization. Doing so enables companies to determine the strengths and weaknesses of their current digital environments so they can identify the areas they need to improve.
A soup-to-nuts approach to DEX assessment is to monitor and analyze how employees interact with their digital systems. Tracking such metrics as active users, logins, frequency of use, network speeds, and task completion rates enables enterprises to understand where their employees may be experiencing difficulties or frustration.
A burgeoning category of DEX management tools can aggregate and analyze usage and performance data for technologies across the workplace, helping companies pinpoint which technologies are underperforming and providing guidance on how to improve them. These tools don’t come cheap, however, and are resource-intensive to deploy.
For IT organizations with budget or staff constraints, performing usability testing with a representative sample of workers may be more in reach — and can still help identify hidden issues and provide insights into areas for improvement.
But the simplest approach is to gather feedback directly from workers — for example, by conducting a…
2023-11-12 18:41:02
Original from www.computerworld.com rnrn