The workplace has transformed dramatically over the last few years, driven largely by accelerating digital transformation. The rapid pace of workplace change has impacted employee engagement.
Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace found that 62% of employees were “not engaged” at work and, even worse, 15% were “actively disengaged.” That’s more than three out of four employees (77%) who have low engagement, which Gallup says costs the global economy neartly $9 trillion USD (trillion with a “t”).
Impacts of Employee Engagement
At the individual level, Gallup found that lower employee engagement is associated with poor mental health and (unsurprisingly) higher rates of employee turnover, as well as with significantly lower employee productivity.
When employees are unhappy, they tend to either leave organizations or not work as well in driving customer satisfaction – so a poor employee experience can translate into poor customer experiences.
On the flip side, Gallup reports that when organizations and teams have higher levels of employee engagement, it results in better individual and business outcomes, including a:
- 23% increase in business profitability;
- 10% increase in customer loyalty;
- 70% increase in employee well-being; and
- 14% increase in employee productivity.
Driving a Better EX: Challenges and Opportunities
Making improvements in employee experience is increasingly complicated, due to a number of evolving factors:
1. A long-term workplace trend toward remote and distributed teams, which the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated.
2. Greater recognition of the importance of employee retention from both a financial and company culture standpoint.
3. Deeper understanding of the impact of employee experience on customer experience (and revenue).
4. Intensifying competition for top talent, especially in industries like technology, financial services, life sciences, and healthcare.
5. Accelerating digital transformation efforts, including the adoption of AI.
6. Rising expectations among employees, especially younger ones, for a more personalized and seamless workplace experience.
Bridging the Gap on EX and DEX
The challenges listed above have left some organizations behind the curve and playing catch-up on employee experience.
For IT and HR teams serving internal stakeholders, for example, the need to work in distributed ways and serve internal customers working in distributed ways, has placed a premium on digital capabilities that create connections and streamlined, automated processes via digital tools and channels.
How can you improve your digital employee experience or DEX? Any DEX improvement initiative should begin with:
- understanding the DEX problems you confront, which typically involve hardware, software, processes, and how employees subjectively feel about the support they receive (i.e., employee sentiment, which can be measured via surveys);
- understanding the “costs” those DEX problems are creating at the individual and organizational level in terms of disruption and engagement issues. and
- taking appropriate (and iterative) actions based on evidence that moves your DEX towards “better.”
For example, if your internal systems and apps aren’t robust, integrated, and seamless enough, you can expect employees to inundate your call center and human agents, who can quickly become overwhelmed and, over time, burned out. That’s a terrible DEX for everyone involved.
As one business executive on the front lines of IT support said recently: when self-service tools are insufficient, users are “pretty angry . . . and that takes a toll on agents” who get treated like human punching bags. The result is employee burnout and a downward spiral of dissatisfied support agents and frustrated internal users who’ll both flee your company.
Self-service tools can reduce the burden and prevent churn for IT, HR, and other internal support employees. Chatbots, for example, can quickly answer FAQs/questions and thus divert traffic away from overburdened agents.
Buttom line? Having the right technology platform in place is a key component of improving your digital employee experience, shifting it from slow and reactive to a proactive stance of user support.
Know What DEX Success Looks Like
It’s essential to know what DEX success looks like. When your DEX is going right, here’s what that looks like:
- You have increased visibility into seen and unseen IT, HR, and admin issues that can disrupt employees and cause downtime.
- You can proactively solve issues before they impact employee experience via self-help tools and proactive support management. Your support teams and platforms have the capacity to identify the root causes of issues, perform remediation, and automate solutions before incidents diminish DEX.
- You can provide employees with the tools they need to be productive. Your teams can achieve cost-effective technology deployment by equipping users with the tools they need to accomplish their unique goals and responsibilities.
- You have improved communication between employees and internal support providers. Your teams can collect employee sentiment feedback and correlate it with technical data for a more holistic understanding of DEX.
Human Support + Virtual Assistants
AI is increasingly coming to the aid of DEX, providing capabilities that fuel self-service tools, responding more effectively to user inquiries (via chatbots, for example), and driving even better engagement. These “intelligent” platforms take workload away from your IT and HR reps, liberating people to perform higher-functioning tasks (which enhances engagement and drives better business outcomes).
Self-service tools can also work 24/7 and seamlessly across channels and departments, escalating more complex interactions to human agents for resolution, while also providing agents with full contextual data about the interaction and even “following along” with the escalated “agent + customer” interaction in order to provide necessary data and support when needed.
The more workload self-service tools take on, especially in doing simpler, repetitive tasks, the better your human agents perform and the more engaged your support employees and internal stakeholders will be.
A Great DEX Makes a Great CX
Supporting your employees with great digital tools that help them deliver better support is a no-brainer for EX and CX alike. Your employees want to deliver high-quality service to users, and digital tools empower them to do so even as they work remotely. Engaged and empowered employees drive your bottom line and create consistently positive experiences/DEX.
When you support your talent, your people will stay and drive your business forward. Digital tools liberate your talent to perform the high-value tasks they do best, while self-service and automated tools handle routine tasks – and distribute traffic load away from your employees. That’s a scalable, agile and future-proof solution to enhancing employee engagement and enhancing DEX.