Creating a meaningful, fulfilling and enjoyable employee experience (EX) means focusing on everyday moments that matter, such as leader and peer interactions, giving and receiving appreciation, growth and development opportunities, and so on. And a great EX must be supported by a first-rate digital employee experience (DEX), which is the ecosystem of technologies and processes that underpin everything the employee does, sees and encounters digitally.

With the power to either improve or degrade the employee experience, is your DEX up to the job or is it failing your workforce? If you need to turnaround a poor digital experience, this needn’t require huge investment and a complex IT project, you might just be missing an agile intranet!

The importance of DEX
Any digital tools and technologies used to enhance how employees interface with the company comes under the DEX umbrella, and as hybrid working becomes commonplace, so will DEX. Forrester’s The Anywhere-Work Guide For Tech Pros, 2022 highlights that with many hybrid working employees continuing to rely heavily on technology to connect them to their company’s culture, co-workers, and customers, the importance of DEX will only grow. It’s therefore crucial that a DEX strategy is put in place to support the everyday employee experience.

This is what your DEX should be doing!
Any digital employee-focused strategy should be led by HR in partnership with IT, as HR understands what a great employee experience looks like, and best understands the increasing expectations of flexible workers. The digital solutions must support daily work activities while helping employees to feel fulfilled in their role. And any barriers to achieving this must be overcome. For instance, there are risks associated with implementing too many different IT solutions to improve EX just as there are risks of having a stark IT framework in place. After all, when faced with an array of standalone apps rather than an integrated platform, employees are likely to find tasks time-consuming and frustrating, proving detrimental to engagement levels, staff loyalty, organisational culture, wellbeing, and so on.

It’s therefore in HR leaders’ interests to focus on implementing an all-embracing and robust IT platform, such as an agile intranet, that can enable the following:

Workplace flexibility – In the ‘work anywhere’ culture that’s now forming, employees need a versatile and user-friendly platform that allows them to work effectively from any location – the office, the home, and even the beach. From enabling quick and easy access to information and documents, through to providing colleagues with push notifications when they need to be made aware of something new or important, the use of a mobile intranet will ensure work can be completed effortlessly and from anywhere through mobile devices.

A strong sense of organisational purpose – Purpose is becoming increasingly important for today’s worker as they need to feel that they are contributing to a greater good, rather than just lining shareholders’ pockets. An IT platform that enables the sharing of success stories, charity and community updates and volunteer opportunities, for example, reinforces this vital sense of purpose.

Connection and collaboration – With remote collaboration here to stay (as stated by 78 percent of CEOs), employees need the tools to easily connect and collaborate with leaders, colleagues and the wider organisation. With in-built functionality such as document management and workflow, and with the ability to integrate with apps like Microsoft Teams, a central IT platform allows employees to share work, brainstorm, and ‘socialise’ digitally, all without leaving the core system.

Trust and empowerment – The best modern leaders trust their teams to do a good job without needing to micromanage them. This approach relies on employees demonstrating autonomy and initiative, and this is only possible when they have all the necessary resources to hand. The right IT system can support empowerment by enabling instant access to all (permitted) documents, policies, guides, staff directories and support materials. Plus, version control highlights each document’s journey, identifying who made changes and gave approval, and when. Ultimately, by placing all the necessary information and resources into employees’ hands, they’re more able to make decisions without constantly seeking advice and reassurance from management.

Learning and growth opportunities – To ensure equity of opportunity, every employee must be given access to learning and development opportunities. From online courses through to secondments and volunteering opportunities, the chosen IT platform must be flexible enough to become the ‘go to’ for personal and professional advancement.

Appreciation and recognition – Employee appreciation is linked to higher job satisfaction and is key to a positive employee experience. And giving and receiving recognition doesn’t have to happen face-to-face, it can be easily done in a meaningful way through online recognition tools and via ‘star of the month’ blog posts, for example. In fact, as ‘Great Place to Work’ highlights, “using the intranet to promote the good behaviours of individuals, can help instil a regular culture of employee recognition.”

Belonging and community – Everyone wants to feel that they belong and as Gartner says: “Belonging is a key component of inclusion. When employees are truly included, they perceive that the organisation cares for them as individuals — their authentic selves. HR helps make that happen.” An organisation’s IT platform can nurture a sense of belonging by giving everyone a voice. And by enabling meaningful conversations and interactions via blogs and vlogs, this helps to reduce stigma and will more likely lead to a culture of inclusion.

Putting DEX at the heart of employee experience
Employee experience and DEX go hand-in-hand, with a great EX reliant on the right technologies to keep people connected and thriving within the new world of hybrid working. As Minten and Lustig state in their ‘Digital Employee Experience’ book, “DEX tackles the digital component of employee experience by putting the human at the heart of things”. It’s this focus on putting the employee first in all things DEX-related that means HR must drive forward an organisation’s digital employee experience strategy, ideally using an agile IT platform, such as an intranet, to help deliver an exceptional experience for all employees, wherever they are!