When employees see their company’s technology stack, does it enable them or hold them back? That’s a question many enterprises must confront. Often, the digital employee experience is chaotic and unorganized.
That leaves employees unable to reach their potential. It can curb innovation and ideation. However, this can be controlled and improved over time.
The solution is more than just having tools in place. It requires companies to give the same amount of focus to the employees' digital experience as it does to its customers. Instead of making employees navigate multiple disparate back-end systems, many companies are looking to unify these applications into one easy-to-manage platform.
To navigate the complexity of digital worlds, break down the problem into three parts:
What the digital employee experience is
Current challenges impacting the experience
How to improve and simplify it with digital workspaces
What Is the Digital Employee Experience?
The digital employee experience describes any digital activities within the work environment. Those activities are vast and varied, depending on roles. It encompasses how users work with digital assets, from workflows to interactions and ease of use.
Employers have high expectations of employee technology proficiency. On the other side, employees have expectations as well. That’s because they engage with technology as a consumer and an individual. They want the tools they use at work to be just as easy and effective as the ones they use in their personal lives.
When it comes to employee expectations, often they are waiting for workplaces to catch up. It’s reflected in a trends recent report that found 71 percent of leaders believe their employees are more digitally mature than their organizations.
Does the Digital Employee Experience Matter?
From a leadership perspective, it certainly should. Businesses have made huge investments in digital transformation objectives. These goals are not only about having the tools in place. It requires a cultural shift. Adoption and usage are critical if the company is truly going to transform.
To prioritize the digital employee experience, remember that employees are internal customers. Serving them better experiences makes them happier and more engaged. That often translates to higher productivity and less turnover. It can lead to processes that run optimal.
Streaming Digital Workspace Experiences
Perfecting the digital employee experience often comes down to having a clear strategy around accessibility. Employees must have access to technology consistently...no matter where they are. It’s critical to use technology that supports remote workers and fits a company’s IT operations, especially how they rely on their own private data center or public cloud services.
COVID-19 is a reframing of the future of work. After the pandemic forced millions of people to work from home, modern technologies such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) kept them connected. Employees showed they can do their job virtually.
Organizations that had a clear strategy and technologies that gave employees reliable access to business apps and data handled the initial shock from the pandemic lockdown. Those that planned ahead and could scale these digital experiences to employees are showing how business can get done even when offices are closed around the world.
Many rely on VDI or DaaS to give employees remote access to business applications and data – and quickly scale access to more employees as the company grows. With VDI, virtualized applications and desktops run on a company’s data center and are streamed to employee computers. DaaS does the same thing except everything is streamed from a public cloud provider such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform.
Both of these digital workspace technologies simplify IT operations and management. They remove the need to roll out applications to hundreds or thousands of employee computers. Instead, business applications and updates happen in the datacenter (VDI) or cloud service (DaaS) rather than every employee’s computer.
To improve the digital employee experience, organizations are treating employees like customers and putting in place technologies that stream business applications and data from a data center or cloud service. Companies with a clear strategy, virtual workspace technology and an eye on the future help employees reach their full potential.
Michael Brenner is a keynote speaker, author and CEO of Marketing Insider Group. Michael has written hundreds of articles on sites such as Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, and The Guardian and he speaks at dozens of leadership conferences each year covering topics such as marketing, leadership, technology and business strategy. Follow him @BrennerMichael.
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