In the post-pandemic world where the workplace has become more flexible, the Digital Employee Experience highlights that employees still want to feel connected and valued in both digital and physical workplaces.
However, staff are leaving and the recruitment market is booming – should you care?
Yes! 40% of employees have said they plan to leave their current jobs within the next 3-6 months. What McKinsey has coined ‘The Great Attrition’ is a direct result of the global pandemic that we have slowly gotten to the other side of. Within the last 18 months, the dynamic of working life has changed massively and in ways that no one could foresee. Therefore, it is vital employers look at how they can retain talent, starting with the workplace digital employee experience.
What is Digital Employee Experience?
The Employee Experience is what people encounter and observe over the course of their employment at an organisation, DEX is a subset of it. For business leaders, employee-centric thinking can be used to help understand and assess the current employee experience in their workplace.
Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is a relevantly new term that expresses the quality of employees’ interactions with technology in their workplace. Research by Gartner suggests:
Only 13% of employees are happy with the digital resources provided in their working environment.
Digital Employee Experience includes interfacing with technologies for workflow, communication, or any internal systems. Devices, company apps, flexibility, performance and security all can affect the DEX.
Therefore, it is vital that organisations take a wider view of all workplace technology provided for employee use.
Why is Employee Experience important in both physical and digital workplaces?
We’ve introduced why employee experience matters more than ever, here are some highlights:
Talent Retention
As mentioned above, a high number of employees are planning on leaving their current workplace and improving employee experience could be a way to encourage employees to revisit their decision to leave.
Reputation Damage
With employee review sites such as Glassdoor readily available to employees, organisations with a poor employee experience can be exposed to damage to their reputation as an employer – thus affecting future recruitment efforts.
Performance
Employees encountering a negative workplace experience have been shown to be less productive and engaged than those who are happy in their workplace. Alternatively, organisations with a positive working experience have shown to have 2.5x higher revenue growth and 40% lower employee turnover, resulting in a longer-lasting, more productive workforce.
Can technology help improve the Digital Employee Experience?
On a macro level, smart workplace technology is designed to improve overall employee productivity and aid in the growth of the business. However more specifically, workplace technology can help the day-to-day life of employees, which affects individual and organisational performance.
On the other hand, research has shown the various outcome of moving to a digital workplace – some have found that productivity has been improved, and some have found it more difficult to stay connected and productive. The important question is:
1. An employee experience strategy
To put a digital employee experience strategy in place, leaders should align the strategy with the overall strategic view of the organisation. This will help ensure employees adopt the technology more successfully, and leaders are more likely to see a positive ROI on investments.
2. Improving digital employee experience with Vgreet
Vgreet for Employees Self Service is an employee help point that connects all facilities and resources for the people using the workspace – making them quickly visible, accessible, and ready on demand. The technology offers access to all resources employees need, ensuring no one feels excluded or hindered.
The solution provides easy access to:
- Indoor wayfinding for new starters
- Employee help desk
- Room and desk booking for hybrid workers
- Access to smart lockers
- Video concierge capabilities to call the reception desk or the IT team.
A Case Study: Vgreet for Employees
A world-leading corporate real estate organisation recently implemented Vgreet for Employees in their head office. The team had previously implemented several different check-in processes to cope with the influx of people arriving at their office, all of which were heavily reliant on manual tasks. This decreased the productivity of reception staff and prevented them from having an optimal check-in process for their people. They also required an access point for their different workplace technology resources.
Overall, implementing Vgreet for Employees helped to remove 80% of their manual processes from their front of house team, as well as deliver productive workflows for both their external and internal visitors.
In next week’s blog, we’ll discuss why employee experience initiatives often fall short, watch this space for Part 2.
