Elevating the Digital Work Experience

By Emily Berridge

The digital work experience (DWX) has taken on new meaning over the last 2 and a half years; so much so,?a recent article?by Harvard Business Review (HBR) points out that the digital work experience is now so important that it can used to attract talent, but that there is currently a significant gap between what organisations deliver and what employees want from their digital work experience.

According to HBR, for a DWX to be successful it must resonate with your workforce, be user-friendly, suit the working patterns of your workforce and truly reflect the ways that your employees work.

However, if like 52% of the respondents in HBR’s article, you’re planning to increase investment in your digital tools over the next two years, now is the time to pause and consider what your outcomes are from creating such a DWX. What do you expect to achieve and why? For many organisations, it is all about three critical outcomes:

1. They want to improve employee TRUST in the organisation.
2. Once trust exists, they want to increase employee LOYALTY to the organisation. Decreasing staff turnover not only saves huge amounts of unwanted (and often un-measured) cost but also makes customers happier.
3. If they are successful at the first two, then the third occurs as a natural outcome. Their employees’ ADVOCACY for the organisation helps them to find and recruit new talent and also new customers.

Once these three outcomes are set, it is simple to say: What are the drivers of these three? The answer is simple: they are all outcomes of meeting employees’ expectations.

Deciding to invest in your DWX presents an ideal opportunity to design it in a way that is unique to your employees and their expectations. This means reviewing the expectations of your workforce first, before splashing the cash on snazzy new digital tools.

Asking your employees what they expect from an ideal employer gives you a unique treasure trove of insight about all aspects of their experience. This treasure trove is in the form of a map, a blueprint of their ideal experience. It is used to craft your entire employee experience, ensuring successful integration of the physical and DWX, and building a DWX that resonates with your workforce.

We recently carried out expectations-based research of a small sample of US employees. This gave us a ranked list of the 20 most important expectations to US employees in 2022.

From these expectations, we might design a DWX that provides:

• a vehicle for engagement and communication
• ways for your employees to shop for, and access, their benefits
• a portal for educational and professional development
• ways for your employees to organise everyday working life, whether working flexibly, remotely or a 9-5 Monday to Friday office job.

We come across many executives who say their goal is to meet their employees’ expectations. Our response is:?“Super, what are they?”?We get a blank look most of the time. They don’t know. Others say we have been talking to them for years, so we know. Our response is:?“Ahem, you may know SOME of them but as all expectations are not of equal importance, you probably don’t know how they weight them, which ones are more important than others. You may also be missing some of the really important ones and conversely providing things they do not care about.”?This weighting gives them a ranking.

Having a ranked set of expectations means you can see exactly what is most important and prioritise accordingly. Your employees’ expectations might look a little different and that’s why asking now before you invest is so important.

Asking your employees about their ideal expectations provides you with the blueprint for an employee experience, physical and digital, that truly resonates with your employees, aids staff retention, attracts talent, and builds trust in, and advocacy for, your Employer Brand. Everyone’s a winner!