Employee experience is nothing new. HR organizations have been tracking how satisfactory it has been for employees working inside their companies for years. The digital workplace has grown as a factor of satisfaction or frustration over the last years as many activities moved to digital and the digital workplace’s quality drive the day to day experience of your employees.
In the end, digital employee experience has a considerable impact on productivity, employee retention and engagement.
Remote work / Work From Home (WFH) during the Covid pandemic has taken the importance of DEX to another increased level.
Why does DEX matter?
First, Digital Employee Experience is critical to most organizations today. To realize this, let’s take a look at a few statistics that show how DEX can turn your company into the right or the wrong place to work in:
- Over 53% of employees suffer from slow-running devices outside the office
- 60% experience issues with the network, slow-running apps and device performance
- 72% of employees wait hours, days or weeks to get an IT issue resolved
- 74% of employees experience repeat issues.
- According to Gartner, only 13% of employees are fully satisfied with their experience
What is harming Digital Employee Experience?
Second, let’s take a look at what’s causing a problem in the digital workplace: the main incidents reported by users with a significant impact on their satisfaction are:
- Slow computer or program startups
- Apps that suddenly crash
- Network connection issues
- Outdated hardware and software
How should you monitor DEX?
Digital Employee Experience has moved to such level of importance that it should be monitored not only as a focus area for IT but for the executive management. Implementing such monitoring is new and is not an easy task for IT departments. Let’s dive into the obstacles, the objectives and what should be monitored in the end.
What’s difficult about monitoring digital employee experience?
The first obstacle raised by IT about monitoring DEX is that their current tools and processes are unfit for the new digital workspace:
- Users have trouble providing enough data to helpdesk teams to qualify issues
- Most performance tools are unfit for SaaS applications
- Most monitoring platforms do not integrate WFH
The new circumstances require a new approach.
What should you monitor?
In a nutshell, what you want to monitor consists in 2 main elements:
- how applications that support business processes are used
- the different aspects that make an application usable by your employees:
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- Responsiveness: A measure of how a device is reacting to the end user’s commands
- Stability: The frequency of software crashes / errors
- Performance: A measure of device statistics, such as CPU utilization, memory, and network but above the performance of the application as perceived by the employees.
Moving down to more technically detailed, what you certainly want to monitor is:
- Latency time (from a network standpoint, probably on different layers like DNS, TCP and TLS and certainly from where / “how far” services are provided by your users)
- Network saturation (signs of packet loss, increased latency)
- Application performance (how fast the different servers and API provide data back to your users)
- CPU/RAM usage (what’s the impact of the apps on the state of your user’s devices)
What are the benefits of monitoring DEX?
Monitoring Digital Employee Experience is key to resolving issues reported by your staff, optimizing the performance of your digital workplace and managing all the providers involved (end user devices, software clients, network operators, CASBs, SaaS providers) to ensure the best possible productivity.
In the end, these efforts translate in:
- More productive users and more fluid business processes
- Better retention and recruiting
- Fewer support tickets
- More tech innovation
To find out more about how to monitor SaaS user performance, read this article.
