Thoughts on Digital Employee Experience (DEX)?
Kurt Kragh S?rensen
Making the world a better place to work through sharing knowledge about digital employee experience, intranet, digital workplaces, Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Enterprise Search and Sitecore
We asked the speakers from The European DEX Conference - IntraTeam Event Copenhagen March 2-4 #IntraTeam20 what thoughts they have on Digital Employee Experience (#DEX):
Absolutely necessary!
- Agnes Molnar, Search Explained
How much DEX can we do when using standards-based intranet components? We need to combine all our group functions superpowers (IT, Comms, HR, Busines Services, facilities, events etc.) to establish great experiences for the employee lifecycle.
- Christian Skj?ran, VELUX Group
It is simple, yet difficult to achieve. Put the employee at the centre of your efforts, provide him with the tools he loves because they help him to be productive and are easy to use. But in reality, if employees did use the tools they loved most or know we would end up in siloed technologies, that are unsecured, cannot be technically supported. In the end, DEX is a great guiding north star that we should always aim for but will hardly ever reach.
- Christoph Schmaltz, Thinknext
DEX is something that we can all rally behind, putting people at the centre of all our decisions. It’s also something that our senior leaders can champion more strongly than intranets or even digital workplaces. We’re at the beginning of this journey, so this is our collective opportunity to shape how DEX evolves!
YESSSS, that’s what it’s about. No more Intranet, no silos of news, information, search. It’s about the integrated employee experience. Bringing together the relevant content, data from other sources, assignments, forms, (chat)bots, widgets, videos, social channels, etc. in the right place, at the right time, for the right audience. Making things surprisingly personal, remarkably easy and refreshingly smart.
The Digital Employee Experience is nowadays perhaps even more relevant and critical than ever before within every single organization. At a time where we are starting to both understand and embrace the mantra that in order to provide delightful customer experiences we first need to work on the employee experience, the impact of digital tools to help out with this is unprecedented. We are currently working in an environment where we have got the unique opportunity to influence the overall employee experience through digital tools in order to help them collaborate, connect, share their knowledge across and eventually become more effective at what they already do not only with their peers but also with their customers and business partners. DEX is, finally, that opportunity we have all been waiting for to help enable knowledge workers to achieve more in a smarter way removing plenty of the burdens and overload they may have been having all along having to juggle with multiple isolated environments, on a need to know basis, and for very restricted audiences. DEX breaks away from all of that into a much more open, collaborative, public knowledge sharing platforms where knowledge flows freely across the organization into the final frontier: be where your customers and business partners are! The final frontier with all of these digital tools has never been to just improve the way people collaborate and share their knowledge internally. Quite the opposite, with DEX it’s an opportunity to finally break away from the firewall and start collaborating and co-creating better customer experiences where the focus happens to be both with the employees as well as the customers themselves!
Insufficient attention is being paid to employees who have difficulty accessing applications because of physical and cognitive disabilities.
- Martin White, Intranet Focus
It strikes me a very vague concept that appears to cover all aspects of what an employee does day-to-day. However, much is not solely the responsibility of a platform but is the concern with company management, culture, and direction. We risk overclaiming how technology platforms can change the culture, employee work, and interaction.
DEX is a good lens to view the Digital Workplace through – it resonates with senior stakeholders – although it is a certain extent a relabeling of what we’ve been working with for years. It is a good term though as it doesn’t describe a “destination” which I think is one of the problems with the term ‘digital workplace’.
- Steve Bynghall, Spark Trajectory
I don’t like using the word ‘digital’ but have to when it comes to the Digital Workplace. All my work has been online work since I started my careers in Document Management and Internal Communications back in 2003. The ‘digital’ mindset has been evolving for decades. If we accept that the user experience is all about a person’s experience of using particular software (from start to completion) then we know that the many different systems and apps within the Digital Workplace will each offer a different user experience. It’s a UX cacophony! We might also accept that the employee experience covers everything within the organisation, every aspect of being an employee, and so Digital Employee Experience relates to every aspect of the Digital Experience. Everything we know about user experience is relevant to Digital Employee Experience. I’m unsure if I need to say or know more than that!
- Wedge Black, ClearBox Consulting
It’s a good way to frame the challenge but I worry about buzzwords and how they are used. It can be tempting to use DEX to another way to sell stuff rather than think more broadly about how to change your approach.
- John Baptiste-Kelly, Wellcome
The DEX starts always from reality and the real needs of the employees. We all live in a world that is changing quickly: it means new technologies, new needs, new expectations. Our challenge, like HR or internal communication leaders, is to anticipate them and enhance, through technology, employee engagement and creativity.
- Cecilia Coletta, Angelini Holding S.p.A.
What are your thoughts?