Managing the digital experiences of an entire workforce isn’t easy. But that’s what today’s IT professionals are tasked with: as DEX has become an essential priority in our increasingly digital workplace, IT jobs now require service teams to deploy the strategies that ensure employees remain productive, engaged, and happy.
But what about IT workers themselves? What about their employees experiences?
After all, IT workers are employees too! This might sound obvious, but it’s too often neglected when we talk about the relationship between IT and employee experience. And the quality of IT employees’ experiences is just as important and multilayered as the experiences of the workers they provide service to.
So today, we’re giving the employees in IT some much-needed shine. If you think the ideal IT job couldn’t possibly exist, read on.
Businesses must consider the impact IT has on employee happiness – including IT employees themselves.
Let’s face it: a lot of IT professionals have a thankless role. When they do a great job, they often don’t get credit for the part they play in keeping the workplace flowing. Otherwise, most employees only really think of IT when something goes wrong – and if those problems happen frequently, it’s IT who ends up bearing the brunt of the criticism.
Consider that just 32% of employees say that their corporate technology is working efficiently. The other 68% likely experience a lot of technology-based headaches, and too often the blame falls on IT’s shoulders.
In reality, frequent technological issues don’t happen because IT workers are performing poorly, working too slow, failing to communicate, or ignoring employees’ needs. These problems keep occurring, in most cases, because an IT department doesn’t have access to the tools they need to properly manage DEX.
When IT workers have access to real-time experience data and deep visibility into employees’ day-to-day experiences, they’re able to proactively solve problems before they occur, communicate effectively through targeted engagement messages, and automate solutions so that the technology employees use is continuously improving. The result? Employees have smoother experiences and become much happier at work.
But that’s not the only benefit. The ability to effectively manage DEX is just as much of a game changer when it comes to IT employees’ happiness.
5 Ways Improving DEX Also Improves IT Employees’ Experiences
When a business fails to understand, monitor, and improve DEX, there’s a negative impact on the entire organization – including IT teams, who become swamped with support tickets and an employee base that increasingly loses patience with them.
Now let’s look at the bright side. Here are the benefits IT teams enjoy when they do have access to powerful DEX management technology:
1. Improves their reputation with leadership.
When employees suffer technological issues that impact their productivity, there’s a tangible impact on the business’s bottom line. Executives see these results and often develop a negative perception of IT – they invest money in the department and don’t understand why so many problems still occur.
On the other hand, within organizations that utilize DEX management strategies IT workers have a much better reputation. They’re able to deploy initiatives that make employees more productive and, as a result, make the business more money. And they have access to tangible experience data that proves how effective these DEX initiatives are – data that they can bring to the C-suite and rightfully earn a seat at the table when it comes to technology decision-making.
2. Frees time for more innovative and creative projects.
IT professionals are exceptionally smart individuals: they have tons of great ideas to improve workplace technology, study and adapt to the latest innovations in the industry, and build projects that will truly excite the employees they work with.
Unfortunately, IT workers who are constantly playing catch-up don’t get the opportunity to act on those ideas. Without proactively managing DEX, they’re faced with a steady stream of issues to solve – and just about every one of those issues is urgent and complex.
The horizon truly expands, then, when manually solving repetitive issues gets taken off of IT workers’ plates. Proactive IT teams can detect these issues and deploy automated solutions that prevent them from reoccurring. This frees up a massive amount of time – time that these intelligent and creative professionals can spend on innovation projects that actually make the workplace better.
{Read More: 1 Click Fixes Save $20k and 380 Service Desk Hours}
3. Reduces burnout across IT teams.
We’ve spoken at length about employee burnout and its consequences. It’s cited as the #1 challenge facing today’s organizations by 36% of HR leaders. Burnout has a negative impact beyond reducing employee happiness, as it can also hurt an organization’s ability to retain talent.
IT workers are perhaps more susceptible to burnout than any other role. The past few years have put an unprecedented strain on support teams, as they’ve been tasked with keeping the workforce up and running through a period of major upheaval. IT leaders report up to a 50% increase in support tickets since the start of the pandemic. For IT workers who don’t have the tools they need to keep up with constant change, any given day can become an uphill battle of pressure and stress.
Automating the menial issues that plague employees every day alleviates much of this stress on IT departments. They’re no longer faced with an endless pile of tickets that need to be resolved. And they no longer have to worry, when they log in to work, whether today will deliver a new disaster that throws them into crisis-solving mode. As a result, they’re able to set healthier personal schedules, focus harder on the tasks in front of them, and provide great service that doesn’t come at the cost of their own wellbeing.
4. Enables closer relationships with the employees they work with.
In the outdated mode of IT support, service workers are largely invisible to other employees – except for when there’s a problem. The majority of IT interactions go something like this:
Employee: “Hi, there’s a problem with Outlook and I can’t access my email.”
IT: “I’m sorry to hear that. Looking into this for you now.”
Then IT solves the problem, and that’s it – until that employee runs into another issue.
An effective DEX management strategy completely changes the IT-employee relationship. For one, the above interactions take place much less frequently, as IT’s able to solve this sort of issue before it even impacts the employee. Instead, it’s often the IT worker who initiates contact with the employee to tell them about an issue they already prevented on their device.
DEX-driven IT professionals are also able to engage with employees outside the realm of issue remediation. They have deep visibility into how each employee’s device and applications are performing. This visibility enables them to reach out to employees with educational, personalized messages that offer tips and teach them best practices to get the most out of their technology.
These kinds of personal, helpful interactions facilitate much better relationships between IT and employees. They make IT workers feel like they have a positive impact on their colleagues’ work lives. And they show employees how much their peers in IT really care about helping them be as productive and happy as possible.
5. Redefines the purpose and mission of an IT department.
All of the above benefits – from reduced burnout to improved reputations – positively affect the day-to-day experiences of individual IT workers. But becoming DEX-driven also has a big-picture impact on the foundational purpose that drives an IT department as a whole.
In a reactive support model, IT’s mission is to solve and prevent as many issues as possible, as fast as possible. If they’re able to innovate and improve the digital workplace on top of that, great – but when urgent issues occur every day, they become the department’s only true priority.
A DEX-driven IT department operates with a much deeper purpose: architecting a thriving, one-of-a-kind digital workplace filled with productive and engaged employees.
They’re able to become more agile and efficient as they develop and deploy innovative solutions. They work more closely with HR and other departments to manage employee experience from every angle. And they gain more influence among decision-makers, leveraging their unique insights to make DEX a company-wide priority.
I’m sure we can all agree that’s a much more invigorating mission than solving the same problems over and over again. So whatever your definition of a “comfy” IT job might be, one thing is clear: with DEX management technology, the IT worker’s dream of a satisfying, rewarding, and inspiring job becomes a reality.
{Find your comfy IT job on our DEX Jobs Board}
