We’ve spoken before about how the traditional office environment is stepping down to make way for the laptop. To quote 1E CEO and Founder, Sumir Karayi, “[the laptop] represents, almost in their entirety, what the office once stood for: a place for work, collaboration and communi­cation.”
Employee’s computers – and other devices – have become the place where value is created, how they interact with your business. As such, it’s safe to say that the move to hybrid and remote work has transformed your employee’s devices into critical assets in terms of availability, performance, and security. And, if they’re not working, your employees lose their primary connection to the rest of the organization.
But it’s worth noting, your employee’s devices are operated by your employees. Each one of them is individual, interacting with technology in a different way, and expecting varying degrees of adoption of technology to meet their needs. This can create friction which reduces employee engagement – and there are huge implications for your business with reduced employee engagement!
It is important to provide employees with a frictionless digital experience, enabling them to work without being held up by unresponsive or slow devices and applications. This will work to ensure that they remain highly engaged and that productivity is higher. Also, they are more prepared for discretionary efforts and more likely to go the extra mile beyond their job responsibilities. The “this is not my job” attitude is disruptive and leads to low morale in teams.

Step out of the shadows to reduce costs

An engaged employee, with the right tools for their job, reduces your security risk as they will have no need to go and look for unauthorized tools. This is commonly referred to as ‘Shadow IT’ and is a big driver of security risk in an organization. Reducing the security risk and providing the right tools for the job will overall lower your IT costs.

Engagement > Attrition

A company that has a high engagement rate with their employees will ultimately experience less attrition and retain top talent more easily – something that is very important if you hope to avoid ‘The Great Resignation’. Despite the disruption caused by the pandemic, a recent study has shown that 41% of workers are considering moving roles. Why? Because the move to hybrid and remote working has changed employee expectations. Employees place higher value on flexibility and a good employee experience (that includes their digital experience!) and the best people will only work where they like it. Ensuring you deliver a good digital experience and keep your people engaged and satisfied will not only reduce attrition, but also improve your company’s reputation in employee reviews, enabling you to attract more good people.

A new approach is needed  

So, what does the future look like? Well, a new approach is needed that puts the employee at the center of the digital user experience. Traditional Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) tools have focused on monitoring a mountain of system analytics and only give an indirect insight if an employee’s experience is good or bad. 
DEM needs to go beyond that and include the employee by measuring the real experience of the individual user. As each user is different, even if all provided with the same resources and technology, they may be having very different digital experiences.   
Imagine that my personal devices include the latest and greatest equipment and when I click on an application it opens instantly. Comparatively, for work, I am given a computer that takes 1-2 seconds to open an application. My personal experience would be bad. On the other hand, if I am not so much into IT and my home computer takes 5 seconds to open an application, my experience of the work equipment doing it in 1-2 seconds would be pretty good.  
Now, to get a more accurate measure of my user’s experience, I need to combine both quantitative analytics with qualitative sentiment data into an intelligent data evaluation, providing a more holistic view. Combining the data points from our example, the quantitative data shows the average application start time is 1-2 seconds. The sentiment-oriented data reveals that one user rates this as a good experience and one as a bad experience. Overall, this gives us a better insight into how we can help the user with the poor rating. Now that we have all the information, the next step your IT department wants to take is to remediate the problem in real time, without interrupting the user’s work. 

Real-time User Sentiment 

1E is redefining the DEM space with a deep understanding of what contributes to the employee experience in four critical areas: 

  • Users require a stable work environment that will not hinder their work. In this area, we need to ensure that the device is working and not crashing because of hardware problems. Also, all the software should work without glitches and applications should not crash.  
  • Once the environment is stable the next important area is performance. The performance needs to be adequate and tailored to the user. For example, some users work with one application at a time and are fully focused. On the other hand, some have 20+ applications running and constantly switch between them. Devices need to be able to handle the different working styles.  
  • In addition to the working style as we have already outlined above, users are expecting different responsiveness from their systems based on what they are familiar and comfortable with. But this one is hard to gauge if we don’t have a fourth important aspect…  
  • …The user’s sentiment about their work environment. 1E Tachyon introduced this fourth area to measure a user’s experience more accurately and put the other areas into perspective. This is done via surveys that are sent directly to the user’s desktop where they can give personal feedback. 

In this way, surveys can be sent asking a user if they are generally happy with their work equipment, if they experience slowness in the application or if they are crashing often, and even if they feel hindered by inadequate equipment. 
Based on this feedback IT can correlate this with the other areas and take remediation actions that will improve the work environment, reduce digital friction, and  improve employee engagement overall across the organization. 

You can learn more about 1E Tachyon Sentiment in this edition of #TachyonTuesday or on our YouTube channel. To talk to us about the benefits of Tachyon Sentiment get in touch today!