This blog post is based on the first episode of a three-part webinar series, Defining The New Digital Worker, which can be viewed in full here. The event featured some of the industry’s biggest experts and influencers on the topic, including Brian Solis, Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce, and digital anthropologist and author; Chris Hall, Vice President, Global IT at KEMET; and Alysia Eve, Director of Product Marketing, Citrix Workspace.

Workplace technology, including “digitization” and the digital workspace, has become a major focus of employee experience for its role in encouraging higher levels of productivity and engagement for businesses globally. However, within any conversation about workplace technology, it is crucial to be mindful of the human beings the technology environment is being designed for. One might argue that over the past few decades, largely due to the pace of innovation and transformation within workplace technology, the humanity of the conversation has been overlooked by some.

Brian Solis, global innovation evangelist at Salesforce, says, “Over the past 40 years, we have used technology to scale up and automate and become more efficient, but at the sacrifice of human experience. How employees feel correlates directly to how they perform at work, and how customers feel as a result. When employee engagement is strong, revenue goes up, along with loyalty and advocacy. These human dynamics are super important.”

With attention shifting to employee experience, organizations are starting to look deeper at the human side of the business, finally seeing employees as individuals and not as widgets in a machine.

Defining Employee Experience

From a technology standpoint, Chris Hall, Vice President, Global IT, KEMET (an existing Citrix customer), says employee experience is about “getting the workplace technology experience inside of the enterprise to mirror that of the consumer world. Fighting the urge not to go back to old systems.”

However, employee experience is not only about technology, and according to Alysia Eve, Director of Product Marketing, Citrix Workspace, the discipline extends into four main areas: IT tools; workflows and processes; business environment; and culture. Ultimately, she says, “it is about enabling the individual to feel like they are making good progress every day, and able to leverage the tools around them to do that.”

Digital anthropologist, Brian Solis, says that above all, employee experience is about “applying the same optics of customer experience to the employee” and that employee experience “is the sum of the experiences an employee has with their organization. Not just one moment, but all moments together.” For the most part, he says, we have left that to chance. “But now, employee experience can be and should be designed, much like customer experience . . . and you are designing for human behavior,” Solis explains.

Employee Experience Is High Up the Business Agenda

A recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by Citrix, found that employee experience ranks as a high or top priority for 73 percent of businesses. However, according to Brian Solis, progress in employee experience has been mixed, with some organizations rising to the challenge faster than others. He cites Zappos and Southwest Airlines as two companies doing a good job of employee experience. “We know their workers are extremely happy because all of their internal metrics prove it, and this in turn spills over into customer experience and customer satisfaction,” he says. “If we can design for employee culture to be optimal, then everybody wins. That is why employee experience is starting to gain such momentum.”

Additionally, today’s workplace is typified by generational diversity. For the first time, we have four generations working together and gradually a new fifth generation, Generation Z, is entering the workplace. “Younger employees have never lived in a world without Facebook or Instagram. This new generation coming into the workforce demands a better user experience and they won’t stick around if they don’t have it,” says Chris Hall, Vice President, Global IT, KEMET. “We want to start building a workplace environment that retains those workers . . . while not alienating other generational groups.”

The Role and Importance of Business Culture

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is a phrase originally coined by American business consultant Peter Drucker. According to Brian Solis, employee experience needs to begin with culture. “Culture is the strategy,” he says. “It must articulate where we are going as an organization, communicated via semiotics and based on values that create the employee norms and behaviors you want to see. Culture prefaces all that we do around technology, and why, and gives it a purpose.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on company culture, which in turn has impacted the way businesses must embrace employee experience. “It has created so much more flexibility, and now organizations have to try and digitize their culture too,” says Alysia Eve, Director of Product Marketing, Citrix Workspace. “How do you design a culture that isn’t bound by an office but extends far beyond it? From a technology standpoint, how can you leverage the tools you have to deliver that culture effectively and be consistent?”

How to Measure Employee Experience

Usage figures can show us how well employees are embracing their new digital workspace, but what they won’t always tell us is how positively the technology is being received and whether it is only being used because work dictates it. These discreet and softer metrics are much harder to obtain, particularly at a human, individual level.

A successful partnership between IT and HR is also critical in not only delivering a positive employee experience, but also in measuring it. The equation and metrics will look different for every company. Chris Hall, Vice President, Global IT, KEMET, says that for a company to understand whether they are being successful with their employee experience, “We will need access to lots of employee metrics, so that our [IT] analytics can be properly understood”.

Brian Solis believes the measurement of employee experience is a philosophical question, requiring more than traditional operational metrics. “Because it is so inherently personal and human, we need a new set of experience metrics,” Solis says. He advocates journey mapping for employees, placing metrics around each moment in their journey. “We need to look at measures of feeling and sentiment, in terms of how people would talk about their experience . . . if we weren’t in the room. Expression is the most honest way in which people will share their experiences.”

The Future of Work and What It Will Look Like

Today’s version of remote work is an extreme scenario that never could have been predicted, and as offices reopen, it seems unlikely we will ever return to work as it was. And so, as we look ahead to the future of work, businesses will need to expand what they mean by employee experience. “This is the time for iteration and innovation and the future of work is the combination of human-centred experience design for employees,” Brian Solis says.

Additionally, as Solis points out, every company will need to become a digital health company for the foreseeable future, adopting regular employee health screenings, providing access to PPE, following safety protocols, monitoring people flow, and more. “The physicality of experience design will now play a hugely important role in employee experience,” he says.

Solis sees the future of work, and business, playing out in three stages:

  1. Survive: Business continuity is critical, as organizations find new ways to collaborate and work from home. Survival is the focus, but this scenario will be temporary.
  2. Alive: This phase will be about businesses finding their footing in this new normal. It will allow them to reopen in some way and think about how it can make this the best experience for employees and customers.
  3. Thrive: Decision makers must think about how good each moment in the employee journey can be. Some of the best innovations happen under duress and this phase is for businesses to figure out how to thrive in this “novel economy,” based on how they treat and engage employees. They will also be measured on this.

Conclusion

Businesses cannot succeed without people, and as employee experience takes center stage, the future of work is set to become incredibly human. The COVID-19 situation has certainly helped to bring humanity and empathy back to the conversation of work.

In the path toward digitization of the workspace, there is the danger that we might begin to over-complicate the scenario with too much technology, when the focus should be to ensure the technology experience is as intuitive and simplified as it can be, to reflect the consumer world. There is much that technology can do to benefit employee experience, but it is not going to lead the charge. Instead, it will be the enabler to delivering an enhanced employee experience, for the new digital worker.