Mr. Employee Experience

From Nexthink to Employee Experience: The change in focus on the end user's IT experience

When some of us, about 7 years ago, started working with Nexthink and talk about the importance of "End-user IT Analytics" and that the IT department should have a greater focus on the end users, there was generally very little talk about Employee Experience. Recently, this has changed dramatically and today analysts like Gartner, Forrester and others release regular reports where (Digital) Employee/Workplace Experience (EX/DEX/WX/DW - dear child has many names...) is at the top of the list of initiatives that should be focused on. The suppliers are of course not late in responding to this and suddenly EX/DEX/WX/DW is talked about in more or less every presentation, webinar, etc. that you listen to.

However, there are, of course, reasons for the increased focus on EX/DEX/WX/DW and ultimately, of course, it is about money.

So what do you do to improve employee experience?

Employee Experience is a broad concept and consists of many factors even outside of IT (see Gartner's illustration next to it). To clarify that it is the IT usage that is meant, the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is sometimes used. "DEX is an employee's holistic experience with the digital workplace that IT provides; allowing them to be productive and engaged."

Another illustration titled "Defining the Digital Workplace" (from the report "The State of the Digital Workplace, 2019 Q2 Edition" published by SMG/CMSWire &Digital Workplace Group) can also be seen next door.

Of course, with employee experience covering so many parts, a larger initiative needs to be broken down into many sub-initiatives. Some recommended "To-Dos" (from the report "The State of the Digital Workplace, 2019 Q2 Edition" published by SMG/CMSWire &Digital Workplace Group) can be seen next door.

What can we do? Synerity help with employee experience?

Since the start of the Synerity (and even a couple of years before that) we have missioned for Nexthink which we continue to think is a fantastic solution to gain increased insight into how IT is used and works for end users and thus can form the basis for various improvement initiatives of employee experience.

More recently, we have also started working with HappySignals, which is a specialized solution for measuring and following up Employee Happiness in connection with Service Desk cases. HappySignals is easy to get started with and has a number of advantages versus what is often offered within the framework of several ITSM/ESM solutions.

The focus on Employee Experience is also an important part of the adoption and development of our customers' Cherwell Service Management solutions. Of course, the idea is both that end users should get help with their cases effectively and that the experience when contacting the Service Desk, regardless of channel, is as positive as possible.

Poorly designed and/or incomprehensible Self-Service portals, knowledge databases that are not up to date and/or are difficult to find relevant information in or lack of automated feedback on status on cases are just some common areas where employee experience in connection with contact with service desk is not what it should be...