Employee experience - the next IT frontier?

Customer experience is a topic that commands the attention of every executive leadership team. IT plays a critical role in promoting positive experiences with paying customers by providing tools that can be used to discover their needs, determine their buying behaviors and measure their satisfaction. Enlightened companies in some industries have concluded that employee experience may be as important to their commercial success as customer experience. To what extent can IT promote positive employee experience?

 Modern enterprises have become obsessively focused on the ways in which their customers discover, purchase and use their products. Customers have always been important to commercial enterprises for obvious reasons but the effort devoted to gauging customer needs, monitoring their behavior and exceeding their expectations has expanded considerably over the past 20 years. Some enterprises have even added Chief Customer Officers, Customer Success Officers or Customer Experience Officers to their executive teams.

It is gradually dawning on some companies that employee experience may be as important to their commercial success as customer experience.  As labor costs rise and the competition for critical skills intensifies, the ability to recruit, retain and maximize the productivity of employees can play a pivotal role in growing revenue and boosting profitability. Positive employee experience can make a company an employer of choice within a particular industry or region, reduce employee churn and offset rising labor costs through productivity gains. 

Employee experience is a personal phenomenon that is shaped by many different factors. Primary factors include such things as relationships with bosses and co-workers, pay and benefit policies, reward and recognition practices, the ability to develop new skills and the availability of advancement opportunities. Secondary factors include the physical facilities and IT resources that enable employees to perform their jobs. Although IT professionals like to think that IT plays a primary role in every aspect of their company’s business operations, it is truly a secondary factor in shaping employee experience. The most user-friendly and lowest friction IT organization probably can’t overcome poor people management practices, inadequate pay and benefits, the absence of advancement opportunities, etc. At best, IT can merely hope to reinforce positive experiences along the primary dimensions referenced above or provide a partial offset to negative experiences within one or more of these dimensions (i.e. avoid making a bad situation worse!).

Where is all this IT friction coming from?

It’s become very fashionable for IT leaders to talk about ways of reducing end user friction by reducing bureaucracy, promoting end user choice and emulating various forms of consumer technology. The purpose of this article is not to suggest ways of improving employee-IT interactions but rather to determine the underlying issues that are creating friction in the first place. Key contributors to employee-IT friction are listed below. Note that this list is not intended to be exhaustive. These are some of the major culprits – you may have other friction-generating practices within your organization.

Provisioning. Most IT professionals think of provisioning as a new employee orientation experience but in fact it’s a continuous process. New applications are continually being purchased and distributed to existing employees. Laptops are refreshed on a periodic basis. Application and infrastructure access privileges change as an employee’s role and responsibilities change over time. It’s a hassle to have to ask IT for resources that are so obviously essential for an employee to perform their job and it’s a double hassle to wait for a response. (It’s a triple hassle to be forced to submit the same request more than once!)

Support. Most employees consider IT to be a service organization whose primary responsibility is to ensure that they have the resources they need to perform the work they’ve been assigned. When they encounter an IT-related issue and contact their local service desk they are seeking technical assistance, personal empathy and timely problem resolution. These are the three essential dimensions of any employee-IT service interaction. Failure to resolve issues in a timely fashion with a sense of urgency and sincere expression of personal empathy is a high friction experience from an employee’s perspective.   

Reliability. Employees have the general expectation that they should have ready access to all the applications and tools they need anytime, anyplace and on any device. IT has direct control and corresponding responsibility for ensuring the reliability of selected capabilities such as wifi networks, application integrations, data warehouse updates, etc. However, if the performance of a SaaS service is degraded or disrupted IT can only function as the middleman, reporting the news to an application’s users and keeping them abreast of remediation efforts. Even though employees intuitively understand that their IT team isn’t responsible for SaaS outages or slowdowns, they’re frequently frustrated by IT’s failure to provide timely updates on remediation efforts or insight into the root cause of service disruptions after they’ve occurred. 

Ease of Use or Discovery. Employees are frequently frustrated by the non-intuitive navigation paths they encounter within their business applications or personal productivity tools. IT service desks receive a significant number of “how to” questions from employees seeking instructions on how to perform a relatively simple task after their trial-and-error attempts to perform the task have failed. Data discovery is also a common source of frustration. The data resources in most enterprises are so vast and diverse that many employees become exasperated trying to find the information they need to complete specific work assignments.

Policy Enforcement. Contrary to popular belief, most IT organizations didn’t develop the spending approval policies, procurement practices, certification requirements or information security regulations they are required to enforce. Like it or not, IT teams are required to police the enforcement of these policies, practices, requirements and regulations.

Data Inconsistencies. Many employees waste considerable time every work week trying to reconcile data produced by different systems. Data definitions employed in individual systems may differ, creating confusion. Key data types may not be synchronized across systems in a consistent fashion which can also create confusion. IT obviously has very little control over the quality or consistency of data being entered into business applications and may not even control synchronization practices but when discrepancies occur and they’re brought to the attention of business executives, they’re invariably referred to as “another IT problem”.

Context Switching. The proliferation of SaaS applications and collaboration tools within the modern workplace has created an information jungle that employees must hack through every day to be productive. They may need to access 20 or 30 different business applications in a given day. They may receive alerts or notifications from a wide variety of email, texting, file sharing, workflow orchestration, project management, trouble ticketing and video conferencing tools. It’s remarkable that almost any work can get done in the interrupt-driven workspace we’ve created on our laptop and smartphone screens. (Add in the visual and auditory distractions that are present in an open floor space office and it becomes doubly remarkable that anything useful can actually be accomplished during a normal work day!) Employees share a significant portion of the responsibility for creating this context switching jungle. Functional teams have justified the procurement of many niche business applications, in some cases procuring them with their own funds and administering them directly. At the same time IT has become increasingly reluctant to standardize the use of collaboration tools across the corporation. It’s currently considered to be best practice to let individual teams and departments select the collaboration tools makes them most productive, even if that hinders or complicates certain forms of cross-functional collaboration.

IT’s ability to contribute to positive employee experience is limited

IT’s ability to remediate the friction created by the problems referenced above varies considerably. IT obviously can find ways of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of its provisioning and support procedures. These procedures are largely within IT’s direct control and can be streamlined in many cases through process simplification and automation. 

Most IT organizations could also do a better job of communicating with employees during and after a SaaS outage or wifi slowdown. That won’t necessarily reduce the business impact of a service disruption but it will serve to mitigate perceptions of IT incompetence or indifference that fester in the absence of such information.

Ease of use and discovery frustrations will likely be with us forever, particularly as enterprises expand their SaaS portfolios and collect a wider array of data to support daily business operations. However, there’s a new generation of digital adoption tools such as WalkMe that provide navigation overlays for commonly used SaaS applications. These overlay pathways guide employees through commonly performed tasks. The advent of GDPR and CCPA has also spawned a collection of data discovery and cataloging tools. Although these tools were initially developed to secure the management of PII information, they may assist employees in discovering other forms of information as well. Investments in these new forms of technology may mitigate some of the usage and discovery frustrations employees have experienced in the past.

Policy enforcement is another matter altogether. IT obviously can’t choose whether to enforce specific corporate policies but it can control when and how enforcement requirements are communicated to employees. IT organizations are notoriously inept at providing employees with information about why they’re required to do certain things. A little extra effort in managing the messaging of regulatory requirements may alleviate some of the pain employees experience when IT is required to enforce corporate policies.

Data inconsistency issues and context switching problems are almost wholly outside IT’s control. At best, IT can advise functional teams about the benefits of adopting common data definitions, adhering to consistent data synchronization procedures, standardizing on the use of specific collaboration tools for certain types of work, etc. But ultimately changes regarding current data management practices and tool usage need to be initiated and enforced by functional teams themselves (with IT assistance wherever possible).

It’s sobering to realize that employee-IT interactions are a secondary factor in determining employee experience and even within that limited context, IT’s ability to resolve many of the chronic issues associated with the use of IT resources is constrained by factors outside its direct control. Unlike customer experience, employee experience may be a crusade in which IT is bringing up the rear instead of leading the charge.