Three years ago, CIOs were winning accolades from the rest of the C-suite for the way the IT team delivered a digital workplace in a matter of days. However, now its luster has faded badly. While traditional IT performance measures may point to great system uptime, utilization and performance, the human digital experience is far from ideal. In fact, this lack of subjective understanding of the individual employee digital experience is causing serious business problems, from decreased productivity to employee retention and damage to reputation. And yet many CIOs have no idea.
The model has to change. CIOs need to move beyond IT operational measures and gain true insight into the day-to-day human digital experience of each employee. As Dave Page, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, explains from real experience, when 90% of employees’ time is now digital, CIOs must truly understand and improve every employee’s digital experience – or face the inevitable consequences Must face
insufficient experience
CIOs have been living off past success for too long. It was a great effort to expand digital workplace strategies at an unprecedented pace but time has moved on and CIOs have been slow to recognize the problems. Employee expectations of hybrid working are ubiquitous, but each employee’s digital workplace experience is unique. They may all use the same core operational platform, but different Wi-Fi, broadband connections, VPN set-ups, even training, will lead to an individual day-to-day experience. According to a recent Savanta Commerce survey, 89% of employees suffer from poor audio and video quality when working digitally, 53% say it reduces their productivity and 46% find it stressful. In turn, this is creating very significant business problems involving digital inequality, employee disconnect and lost productivity.
This is not a new thing. Widespread deployment has not reduced the quality of the digital experience. or expansion rate. The truth is that companies have never provided a digital environment that provides a good subjective human workplace experience. those employees. Now, digital represents 60% to 90% of their time and the flaw in the quality, credibility and relevance of that digital employee experience is too obvious and too costly.
Worse yet, most CIOs can’t figure out there’s a problem. HR employee survey data is out of date and irrelevant until it is collated and analyzed. The support trouble-ticketing system may indicate a problem — but the IT team has no idea whether the employee complaining to Microsoft Teams is just reporting a minor glitch with the video or actively seeking alternative employment. is looking for.
wrong data
Why is the employee digital experience so inconsistent when CIOs are inundated with IT performance information? Many large businesses routinely collect terabytes of data in order to gain immediate insight into how the infrastructure is operating. They know down to a millisecond how web pages are responding, where network glitches are occurring and memory resources are being strained. The problem is that this information provides zero insight into the day-to-day realities affecting the subjective human experience, well-being, retention and productivity of each employee. And while a bad digital experience can have significant financial costs in terms of lost productivity, employee loss and low morale, it’s a problem that directly affects business profitability.
Yes, they still need to know whether there are millisecond delays on a Web site, whether CPU usage is critical, or whether there are security problems, but CIOs need immediate insight into whether and how such problems are affecting an employee’s productivity or performance. affect connectivity. and its quantitative business impact. The IT department has more engineering data than it can ever use but without some way of understanding what this means for individual employee experience, the data has no business value.
Despite huge investments in data collection tools, CIOs are flying blind — and it’s creating massive business risk. How can CIOs ensure that investment is supporting the employee digital experience when they have no insight or understanding of the current quality of that experience? How can engineers prioritize and deliver remedial activity that makes a real difference? How can businesses achieve the bottom line value associated with improved productivity, improved morale and great employee retention all backed by a great digital experience?
human experience insight
CIOs need to change focus fast. Uptime and system availability and response times are valid measures of system performance but in a world of hybrid working, an inability to prioritize and measure the unique human digital experience will be a fast track to failure. They need a way to identify and understand the unique digital employee experience – in detail and consistently – from an engagement and productivity perspective.
This insight can reveal the digital divide and clearly highlight employees who are struggling with productivity and/or engagement. Combining this knowledge with other business metrics, including payroll and recruiting costs, can support a far more insight-driven business case for investment by the employee, team, department or business as a whole. This can provide a foundation for continuous improvement and collaboration with HR to create an employee value proposition that drives added business value.
conclusion
Organizations can no longer be satisfied that every digital employee has access to systems from any location. It’s not good enough. The quality and genuineness of the daily employee human experience is now at the heart of C-Suite metrics; It underpins employee retention and productivity, board-level environmental and social governance, as well as corporate social responsibility.
To support the future of work, the quality of that digital human experience is increasingly affecting business performance, profitability and competitive advantage, and CIOs have an absolutely critical role to play. It is time to accept that current data resources are insufficient. Stop flying blind and actively seek the insights that will provide a true picture of the digital employee experience.
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