Part 2: The value of a digital employee experience

In the first blog post, we focused on the value that a good digital employee experience can create. It's about better productivity and efficiency, more satisfied employees and increased engagement. And that the basis for achieving this is to have a clear strategy. We divided the strategy into three categories: people, ways of working and technology.

Now it's time to take a closer look at how you and your colleagues can create these values through a great employee experience – and we're using the same three categories.

People – engaged employees

We start with the people and how you can think about engaging your employees.

Invite and involve

Encourage your employees to contribute with communication, information and news on the intranet. With ready-made templates and some support from the editors, anyone in your organisation can be active in internal communication. Your colleagues will feel engaged. And did you know that organisations with highly engaged employees are 13-18% more productive?

Involve new colleagues early in internal communication. And remember management too. Demand and help management to be active and visible in the digital workplace. If they are, others will follow.

More faces than internal communicators are needed in the digital workplace. It also saves you time – with a user-friendly interface that allows more people to communicate easily in the digital workplace, one internal communicator saves three hours a week.

Map the lifecycle

Map the entire employee lifecycle. You remember: from the first contact to the last day of work. But what does that journey look like in your organisation? Find out, so you understand the needs of all employees – then you can create the absolute best digital experience. It will be even better, easier and more fun to do this if you involve IT, HR and other departments to drive the work forward together.

Assign responsibilities and use ambassadors

The role of the ambassadors is to speak for the needs of the end-users, but they should also inform, advise and guide them, when needed. A good idea is to create a pilot group composed of different roles in the organisation. Their task will be to analyse the impact of the digital features, such as what benefits and concerns exist and what you need to optimise.

Why should you do this? Because improved usability can only be achieved if you put your employees and their needs at the center.

Working practices – working more efficiently and productively

Let's continue with three tips on how working practices can help you achieve your goal of simplifying your work and that of your colleagues.

Feedback

Encourage colleagues to provide feedback on an ongoing basis and then use it to improve the digital employee experience. After all, your employees are the ones with the solutions.

Provide training

Have digital solutions become more intuitive? Yes, they have! And most of us are more tech-savvy than just five years ago. But no, we don't understand everything at once. Without proper training at the start, there is a risk that your employees will not be able to navigate the new applications and will not use them. Set aside time for training and offer different types of training formats for different needs and skills.

Make it easy to find your way around

Remember to always sharpen the search function. Aim for the intranet to be the 'single source of truth', where all information is gathered. Even then, you will have come a long way. Find out what your employees are looking for on the intranet to optimise and shorten search paths. According to our study, an office worker saves 30 minutes a week by easily finding their way around the digital workplace. If your employee works in the field, they save one hour a week.

Technology – creativity and innovation

Last up is technology. These four tips will help you achieve your goal of finding improvements, new solutions and new features in your organisation.

Measure, monitor and improve

Find a way to regularly measure, monitor and improve. By accurately measuring user behavior on an intranet, you can improve the digital employee experience. Set goals and milestones – and activities to achieve them.

Also, take advantage of other measurements already carried out in your organisation. Most likely you are conducting an employee survey? Their results can be useful in improving the digital employee experience.

Reduce the number of systems

During the pandemic, many organisations invested in several different collaboration systems. It quickly became clear that multiple systems contribute to a lot of frustration. Use one platform to streamline communication.

Your organisation will have a central place to gather knowledge and documents – and you can build bridges to other platforms and systems such as knowledge banks and external customer and citizen platforms.

It will pay off. Our actual working time creating value is 2.53 minutes per day. The rest is spent in meetings, searching for information, recreating material and just that: switching between tools...

Personalise

Did you read about the personalisation engine in my first post? The right information, to the right employee, in the right device, at the right time. Generative AI is the key. But make sure to prioritise features that really help your employees, not just impress them.

Think mobile first

Customise all digital features to be user-friendly on mobile. Think of how often we're on our phones – and the goal, of course, is to make the digital experience at work as good as the one outside work.

To sum up

I hope that after reading these two blog posts, you have a clear strategy for how you can create a powerful digital employee experience and the value it brings.

How can be summarised in ten points:

1. Invite and engage your employees to contribute to communication, information and news on the intranet
2. Map your employee's entire life cycle
3. Assign responsibilities and use ambassadors
4. Open up to feedback from colleagues and use it to improve the employee experience
5. Provide training
6. Make it easy to find the right one
7. Measure, monitor and improve
8. Reduce the number of systems
9. Personalise
10. Think mobile first

And this is the value your organisation gets:

People

• Engaged employees
• Improved internal communication
• Better organisational culture
• Reduced staff turnover
• Attracts new talent

Ways of working

• Easier and more efficient work
• More productive colleagues
• Improved experience and satisfaction of customers, citizens and members

Technology

• Increased collaboration across internal departments
• Better knowledge sharing
• Encouraging innovation

At Sitevision, we will continue to talk about the digital employee experience going forward – stay tuned!