Enter Digital Employee Experience: Is Your Business Ready for the Big IT Change?

Nexthink is a Business Reporter client.

IT’s role has grown from supplying and overseeing IT equipment to creating and maintaining the entire work environment.

Over the past year, you’ve read articles, seen news and talked with colleagues about how the pandemic has changed the way we work. And the truth is, organizations are still figuring things out. Internal structures are changing, expectations for where employees work have evolved and technology requirements are still a work in progress.

One of the biggest changes to the workplace over the past two years has been within IT departments as the digital transformation that organizations had been working toward became an immediate priority to enable businesses to continue operating while working remotely. Digital readiness was no longer a nice-to-have, and it quickly became the connective tissue for employees to connect across the world. Let’s look at how this has changed the role of IT within an organization.

Understanding today’s expectations of IT

While IT has always been a key player, its role has transformed from a problem fixer to an architect of the workplace. Today, we no longer rely on brick-and-mortar offices to develop our workplace culture, and our offices live in hardware and software; our water coolers have become messaging channels and our conference rooms have become video calls. It’s not just our productivity that’s dependent on our technology, but also our company culture. The daily digital show for organizations everywhere is made possible by IT, the producers.

But to fulfill today’s demands, there needs to be a cognitive shift in the traditional roles and responsibilities of IT. In a recent study, 94% of IT professionals agreed that the roles and responsibilities of their job have moved away from simply provisioning IT equipment. Since the shift to remote and hybrid working, IT is now largely focused on providing solutions that promote employee collaboration and productivity.

IT’s ownership of new tasks, such as developing working-from-home practices and training, supporting employee communication platforms and developing sustainability projects and policies, had been seen by 99% of respondents in this study. Many of these tasks are essential to day-to-day business operations, and most workers (58%) believe HR and IT are responsible for the workplace in equal measure. This means that IT is a critical component in employee experience and has an impact on overall retention rates.

IT and the Great Resignation

A record 4.5 million US workers switched jobs at the end of 2021. This staggering change occurred for a number of reasons, but according to one recent report, HR and IT leaders ranked poor tech service as the third most influential factor for employee turnover and burnout. That is how much of an impact IT has on organizations today.

Today, digital experience and employee experience are synonymous. It is IT’s job to create productive and positive work environments whether employees are working from home, in the office or both. For organizations still navigating the new role of IT, and how IT can be more impactful throughout the entire organization, here are a few tips:

Expand visibility of employee IT pain points and needs

By understanding how employees are leveraging technology and where their challenges arise, IT leaders can help maintain productivity and create better digital employee experiences.

Incorporate automation

It’s possible to anticipate some common IT problems. For these instances, having automated responses for problem solving can create a more seamless tech experience for employees and IT leaders.

Establish experience-level agreements (XLAs) to fill the gaps that service-level agreements (SLAs) can’t

XLAs enable IT leaders to establish goals based on the quality of experience they’re delivering to employees. Measuring and tracking XLAs helps IT leaders identify and solve high-priority issues first and ensures positive digital employee experiences.

Deploy two-way communications and survey technology for employee feedback

Enable employees to notify IT as soon as an incident occurs using two-way communication tools. This allows organizations to scale fixes across all impacted employees for greater efficiency.

While digital transformation was a gradual evolution pre-pandemic, today it is now or never. How employees experience technology can make all the difference in employee retention. It is up to IT and business leaders to embrace the new role of IT, or risk getting left behind.

You can read more about IT’s new role as the “architects of flow” and how organizations can kick-start their transformation in Nexthink’s recent e-book: IT in the Evolving Workplace.

— Yassine Zaied, Chief Strategy Office, Nexthink

This article originally appeared in Business Reporter. Header image: iStock id1338265862