The Decade of Digital Employee Experience (DEX)

As the marketing world lands in Cannes for 5 days of self-congratulation, it’s my opportunity to announce that I spent the first half of last week at the Gartner Digital Workplace Summit, in the exotic London Docklands (a less glamorous but suitably utilitarian setting for the topic).

The summit opened with a Key Note which branded the 2020s as the decade of “Digital Employee Experience”, following on from the 2010s which were the decade of “Digital Customer Experience”. ?It is an assertion that served the theme of the conference, but even through a lens of heavy cynicism I think there may be something to this idea.?

I don’t think this means anything dramatic like Digital Customer Experience is dead, far from it.? Anyone who has received an estimated bill from their energy provider for an address they no longer live at knows there is still much to do.? ?But the discipline of CX is pretty well defined and the general approach of Personas and Customer Journeys is grudgingly acknowledged in even the most conservative industries.? Digital Employee Experience, by contrast, seems febrile and uncolonized.

The events of 2020-21 stretched and in some cases completely snapped the rubber band tethering most employees to desks in company offices.? The accompanying move to cloud based technologies like Microsoft 365 promoted digital applications from workplace tools to being the principle way that employees interact with their workplace. And the paroxysms of excitement and anxiety that have followed the emergence of Chat GPT have obscured the fact that Artificial Intelligence is now woven into the fabric of the digital workplace.? So there is a good reason Digital Employee Experience has jumped up the priority list. ?????

Of the three large Life Sciences corporate I have worked with in the last 18 months, only one has a DEX team, and the discipline seems to occupy an awkward space between the remits of Global IT (who have traditionally provided and safeguarded workplace technology) and Global HR (who notionally own the idea of employee experience). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their core business is helping businesses select technology vendors, the Gartner’s conference was very focussed on IT professionals. But the survey data (also from Gartner) also suggests that employees are currently looking to IT for innovation in this area, with the CEO (67%), COO (54%) and CIO (49%) voted as the executives with the most ability to impact employee experience.? Somewhat surprisingly the Chief HR Officer (37%) trails behind the CFO (38%).? And less surprisingly, since we have recently been through another “Death of the CMO” period, the CMO is in last place (27%).? ??

So, if it really the case that we are 4 years into the decade of Digital Employee Experience, then then these are the things I learned from the Gartner Summit that might make for a smoother ride over the next 6 years. ?And I’m going to try my best to avoid anything that sounds like a school yard pun i.e Practicing Safe DEX.

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1.????? Gen Z Will Expect More From DEX

Poor Digital Employee Experience will result in more than a sense frustration of frustration, according to data from Gartner’s hybrid collaboration survey, those employees that report a high level of satisfaction with the hybrid working experience at their company are more likely to stay (54% more likely to report intent to stay), work harder (63% more likely to indicate high discretionary effort) and generally perform better (55% more likely to indicate high performance). This trend is more pronounced with younger Gen-Z workers, with instances of workers saying that they would not continue following their probation period because the digital tools were not up to their expected standard, so these issues are likely to become significantly more pressing as we get further through the decade and they make up a higher proportion of the workforce.?

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2.????? DEX Requires Partnership With The Business

One of the points that came out through all of the Gartner analyst presentation was the need to align Digital Employee Experience with the goals of the Business Leaders and the Business Units where the employees sit.? This is perhaps a bigger transition than you might imagine for IT teams whose success has previously been measured in terms of response time to service desk tickets, uptime for critical systems, and utilization of software licenses.? Building a Digital Employee Experience means partnering with key stakeholders to understand the specific challenges their teams face, before deploying connected digital experience in combination with new ways of working that address the challenges. ?This starts with personas and employee journeys, but Gartner goes one step further, recommending the creation of Fusion Teams bringing together the understanding of the business with the understanding of the IT implementation landscape, and Change and Influencer or CandI (not my favourite acronym) Networks to support the roll out of new initiatives. This focus on the business is also likely to make it easier to engage Leadership, who think about these things as business problems first, not technology problems.? In a 2023 Gartner survey of Board Directors, the second highest priority was to “Transform our ways of working, talent strategies, external partnerships” with 43% including it in their top 3 priorities, whereas “Digital Workplace” was down in 19th place with only 6% seeing it as a priority.

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3.????? Focus on What Matters, Not What Can Be Measured

Digital Employee Experience needs to avoid the trap that Customer Experience (and Digital Marketing more generally) has disappeared into over the last decade - a confusing place where that where numbers trump common sense and anything that can be measured and tracked must by default be important. ?For example, there is no point in measuring utilization of Microsoft CoPilot by Sales Teams before there are any established use-cases or evidence that it has any impact sales.? This may require real pilot programs and A/B testing, giving new tools and ways of working to some teams and looking at how their performance compares to the control groups.? It is very unlikely that the most valuable changes will easily be represented on out-of-the box analytics dashboards. ????????

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4.????? Generative AI Might Be (Indistinguishable From) Magic, But How Useful is Magic?

Another regular theme was the looming AI disillusionment hangover.? Microsoft CoPilot in particular was taking flak from an IT crowd whose budgets are being absorbed into expensive and often interdependent sets of software licenses, while the technology itself is failing to deliver the promised shift in business performance. ?This is to some extent the famed Gartner hype cycle in action.? Technology gets hyped, fails to deliver, falls out of favour, and eventually emerges ready to drive real productivity.? But in this case it is a bit different.? Chat GPT created so much buzz in 2023 not because it had the potential to do amazing things, but because it already did amazing things. ?Normally the technology evolves slowly and enterprise emerges with an adoption cycle that runs in decades.? But Microsoft has shipped an generative AI layer that is woven into the productivity tools that the majority of businesses already use, leaving their customers to work out what to do with it. ?This moves experimentation from a novel approach undertaken by companies at the bleeding edge, to a necessary approach for all corporate IT teams. On this front Gartner predicts that through 2024 and 2025, 30% of Generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof of concept as we experiment with use-cases for the technology.? ?

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5.????? Don’t Be Creepy

Digital workplace technologies provide employers with an unprecedented ability to monitor their employees. By their very nature AI technologies are recording interactions and collecting data in order to provide useful insights.? Even if they are deployed in the most benign/vanilla form these technologies can still provide uncomfortable and jarring moments. I recently asked CoPilot to summarize a meeting and it include the unrelated chat with a client that occurred before the other attendees had joined.? Thankfully we are paragons of professionalism and the summary included some general musing on the state of workplace technology, but it could easily have been eyebrow raising or relationship damaging. You add facial recognition, key stroke tracking, sentiment analysis, and additional behaviour tracking hardware, and this could get pretty dystopian.? The general sentiment (backed up by survey data) at the Gartner conference was that employees were crying out for a better digital experience and they would be willing to accept some additional data collection in return for a better experience.? But this is an area where the technology is going to run well ahead of the regulation, and businesses that overreach will lose good employees and may even find themselves being the test cases for new employment law.