Introduction
The mandate of today’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) grows broader every year. Early CIOs of the 1980’s were fiercely technical and responsible for overseeing IT resources and staff, but several decades of digital innovation have repositioned today’s CIOs as strategic business leaders with a raft of responsibilities.
One of the most important responsibilities of the CIO, and one that grows more important year on year, is the digital employee experience. Isn’t employee experience the responsibility of HR? In today’s digitally enabled workplace, IT have more influence over the culture and efficiency of a workforce than perhaps any other department.
For a business to succeed in today’s climate, it’s crucial that today’s CIOs are well versed on employee experience theory and appreciate the important role IT plays in delivering an employee experience that attracts, retains, and nurtures top talent.
This guide is designed to support CIOs to understand their role in creating a world-class employee experience and the technologies that power it.
Why digital employee experience matters more than ever
It’s no wonder that digital employee experience has become such a hot topic as leaders plan for the future of work. Modern life, after all, is digital. We rely on technology to do everything from connecting with friends to getting work done. If our digital tools are not sufficient to support us, it holds us back.
With hybrid work now the norm, digital employee experience (DEX) has become a de facto term for the wider employee experience. As technology facilitates even more of our tasks, processes, and interactions at work, it has come to dictate employees’ perceptions and opinions of their employers.
Where technology now powers more of our work, employees have become acutely aware of the quality of digital experiences that enterprises offer. Powerful solutions are celebrated as facilitators of our work, but shortcomings in digital employee experiences have nowhere to hide.
As technology advances in our personal lives – where self-driving cars have become a reality and everything from social media to streaming services offer personalized, targeted experiences – workplace technology must keep up.
With its increased role in the day-to-day functions of work, a poor digital employee experience hurts organizations more than ever, while an empowering DEX can elevate organizational health and performance to an even greater degree.
But research shows that there is still much progress to be made for our workplace tools to catch up to the seamless digital experiences we enjoy as consumers. The role of the CIO in the 2020s is to close this gap between consumer technology and workplace digital experiences to truly engage employees and empower enterprises to achieve and succeed.
What can you take from this guide?
The following pages will support you in crafting a digital employee experience strategy that powers collaboration, engagement, innovation, and productivity – creating an inclusive and connected working environment where every employee is empowered to contribute to enterprise success.
Discover the most common DEX pain points and the solutions that overcome them and learn how a CIO can become the most prominent change agent within the modern enterprise.
The changing role of the CIO
The role of the CIO, the challenges they face, and their involvement in shaping employee experience is all undergoing change. Understanding what’s needed from CIOs of the future requires that we take stock of the various influences and pressures shaping the role today, and where digital employee experience plays into that.
In the 2020s, CIOs are under pressure to:
- Cut costs
- Drive agile innovation
- Prepare for emerging technologies
- Consolidate technology
- Tighten cybersecurity
- Accelerate automation
- Balance remote and in-person work
- Upskill workforces
- Hire and retain top talent
Throughout all of this, they are also expected to take the helm of transformation projects that affect everything from the culture of an organization to its entire business model.
Enterprises are asking CIOs to strive beyond IT and lead change across the entire organization, altering the culture of the business itself. As a result, Gartner has found that CIOs are now as responsible as HR for culture change.
This comes with the realization, driven by hybrid models of working, that technology plays an ever-increasing role in defining every aspect of our work.
The role of the CIO has changed drastically over the past few years and continues to evolve in the face of new challenges and opportunities. The modern CIO's role is grappling with objectives new and old as their horizon expands beyond that of IT and into culture, enterprise agility, and the experience of work. Leading this transformation and change across entire organizations leaves the CIO with a new set of priorities, not least of which is their employees.
Why EX is the CIO’s mandate
Increasingly, enterprises are looking to their CIOs to act as change agents, orchestrating a fundamental transformation of people, processes, and technology.
Employee experience is where these people, processes, and technologies intersect. EX is no longer just a competitive advantage, it’s a prerequisite for success in the new world of work.
As enterprises seek to learn from the disruption of the early 2020s, the focus for most is to build adaptability and resilience in the face of upheaval and shifting customer expectations. Employees are key to this. A resilient organization – one that adapts and pivots flexibly – relies on the experience and incisive decision-making of its people.
Forrester’s survey of IT leaders in the wake of the COVID pandemic found drastic changes in strategic priorities. The greatest responsibilities for CIOs are now:
- 36% report a significant increase in responsibility for setting up adaptive practices that make their organizations more resilient
- 28% say they are now responsible for leading their organization’s employee experience management
- 29% say they have become more responsible for employee engagement and well-being
CIOs and IT leaders are under mounting pressure to put employee experience at the heart of all technology decisions, “on a work, personal, and wellness level.”
To be effective in this role, CIOs must understand what employees want and need from their experience of work and how these needs relate to business outcomes. Why does employee experience matter and what are the hallmarks of a great employee experience that IT can look to support?
Why employee experience matters
With IT now playing a crucial role in delivering world-class employee experience, it's important to understand the role of employee experience in driving business aims and the place of technology in enabling great experiences of work. How does great employee experience impact enterprise performance and why should CIOs be invested in this inside-out approach?
While the concept of digital employee experience is quickly evolving, there is extensive research on the benefits of great employee experience that can be drawn on to understand why EX matters and what creates great EX.
Jacob Morgan, author of ‘The Employee Experience Advantage’ and an expert in the field of EX, provides a model for understanding the impact of employee experience on business performance.
In this model, Morgan highlights the most important contributors to a world-class employee experience:
- Cool spaces
- Celebrated culture
- Ace technology
Up until the pandemic, cool spaces were a major contributing factor to great employee experience. But now that we are moving to more hybrid and flexible ways of working, providing ace technology is taking precedence, and this is where the CIO comes in.
Looking at the business benefits of getting EX right, we can see a number of outcomes that provide sturdy reasoning for CIOs to prioritize the need for investing in digital employee experience, including:
Improved innovation
Gallup found that 59% of engaged employees say their job brings out their most creative ideas, compared to just 3% of disengaged employees.
Boosted productivity
Productive digital employee experiences can save enterprises up to $42m annually in productivity gains and increase employee productivity by 21%, per Gallup.
Greater profitability and growth
A Korn Ferry study and Harvard Business Review survey found that companies investing in digital employee experience report:
- 5x higher revenue compared to direct competitors
- 2x the average profit for enterprises that invest in employee experience
Happier employees
A better employee experience means a happier employee, which Fast Company reports are shown to:
- Stay with their current employers 4x longer than their unsatisfied counterparts
- Commit up to 2x as much time to tasks
- Show greater resilience to burnout
Enhanced employer brand
A top-tier employer brand is a powerful thing. According to Forrester, companies with mature digital experience strategies are:
- 58% more likely to attract top talent
- Have 62% higher employee retention rates
With these stats at hand, it's clear to see why any enterprise that overlooks digital pain points impacting employees' ability to engage at work is missing a critical piece of the puzzle. A CIO that focuses only on technology to support processes and customer experiences is missing the link between EX and business performance.
When employees are empowered to be more effective, this sets the scene for business innovation in all areas. If employees aren’t supported with the right technology they are hampered from being able to deliver the customer experiences and innovations that lead to sustainable business growth. And that's why DEX matters and why CIOs need to play their integral part in improving employee experience with the best technology.
Top DEX challenges facing CIOs
The business benefits of DEX are by no means guaranteed. In a decade marked by disruption and change, several factors present a challenge to CIOs and the digital employee experience. The most common DEX pain points facing enterprises today include:
- Tool overload
- Employee expectations
- Remote work isolation
- Burnout and engagement fatigue
- Tight IT budgets
- Digital friction
- Ensuring security across all systems
- Barriers to access
Tool overload
Hybrid work has seen enterprises rapidly invest in technology to arm employees with everything they need to remain productive, engaged, and collaborative as they work remotely. This has increased the toll on IT as they try to manage increased digital complexity.
Consolidating technology and simplifying the digital workplace has become a greater priority for CIOs and IT leaders as a result. Forrester revealed that optimizing digital experiences and offering a unified view of digital tools and channels has now become a top priority for more than 80% of C-suite leaders.
Employee expectations
Employees have grown accustomed to a certain level of digital experiences in their personal lives. AI and targeting have allowed services to turn data on user behavior and preferences into personalized experiences that know what content to surface and when we want to see it. This is true of advertising, streaming services, social media, and much more. It seems commercial success is now predicated on how relevant and targeted the customer experience is.
This has seen a gap grow between the digital experiences we enjoy as customers and in the workplace as employees. It is the CIOs job to ensure that enterprise IT lives up to the growing expectations of employees and doesn’t leave them disappointed with a disparity in the quality of DEX they receive.
Remote work isolation
Microsoft’s review of pandemic workforce trends showed that employee networks shrank and teams became more siloed than ever. Gallup found that one in five employees working remotely struggle with loneliness, and that loneliness undermines the mental wellbeing of people and teams.
The challenge for CIOs is to meaningfully connect people despite hybrid work seeing workforces physically separated, widen employees’ networks, and break down the business silos that have formed between teams.
Burnout and engagement fatigue
To counteract this isolation, many organizations decided to up their comms to try and keep their workforce connected. The resulting influx in communications led many employees toward engagement fatigue.
Gallup found that 2020 saw the most significant drop in employee engagement since 2000.
It’s important to select the right channels for the right messages to minimize information overload – CIOs need to find ways for comms to cut through the noise, not add to it.
Tight IT budgets
CIOs and IT departments are consistently asked to do more with less. The 2020s will be no different.
Gartner report that IT spending fell 5.4% in 2020 and only partially rebounded by 4% percent in 2021. This trend is forecasted to continue long into the coming decade as employers grapple with the fallout of a global pandemic.
CIOs and IT departments are going to have to find innovative ways of safeguarding the digital employee experience despite restricted budgets.
Digital friction
Digital friction refers to the unnecessary effort employees have to expend to get work done across multiple systems and tools. Rapid investment in new technology that only supports legacy processes are burdening employees with complex workflows, silently draining productivity.
Gartner reports that digital friction is overwhelming workers:
- 68% of workers spend much of the day toggling between apps
- 28% of employees’ time is spent exclusively on emails
- 20% of employees’ time is spent looking for information
- Employees context switch between different apps and UX 400 times a day
CIOs must find ways to optimize digital experiences across multiple tools and systems, as digital friction threatens the efficacy of any further technology investment. Consolidating micro-experiences and inconsistent UX into a unified solution must be the focus as CIOs seek to maintain productivity and avoid overcomplicating DEX.
Ensuring security across all systems
Rapid digital transformation projects have exacerbated threats to enterprise security as the demand for cybersecurity solutions in the hybrid cloud have increased. Remote and mobile working solutions continue to blur the network’s edge, and CIOs must ensure employees work on monitored and approved IT.
With the opening of new attack surfaces due to the shift to remote work, Gartner’s survey of CIOs and IT leadership found that 61% of businesses are increasing investment in cyber security in the coming years.
Core features of a world-class digital workplace
As CIOs seek to address the pain points above and improve DEX in a future of work defined by technology, many solutions on the market offer hope. Finding the right technology to solve the challenges of the coming decade means defining key areas of focus for your enterprise and identifying which capabilities power game-changing DEX for your employees.
Below, we outline nine key areas of focus that CIOs can measure various employee experience solutions against as they look to support their digital transformation.
1. Seamless integrations
Technology is the engine of innovation, but as more apps are added to an enterprise’s toolbox the impact on employee productivity can be counteractive.
The key to a futureproof DEX strategy is finding the perfect balance between providing access to best-in-class tools and provisioning this access through a single gateway.
Any platform-based business model should allow:
- Salespeople to search across Salesforce databases for opportunities, then access your documents and SharePoint for materials and information to pursue those leads, without switching between systems
- Employees to submit and track IT tickets through platforms like ServiceNow from the comfort of a single digital home
- Integration with communications platforms like Slack and Teams enabling easy sharing of content across channels
- Centralized access to HR systems that don't require additional logins or platform switching
This requires a solution that integrates seamlessly with third-party apps, providing a go-to destination for everything employees need.
A home for the Microsoft or Google stack
It is essential to provide a common gateway to your enterprise's productivity suite to guide its use and leverage its full potential. Whether you're using Microsoft 365 or G-Suite, maximizing the effectiveness of productivity tools is an IT priority that can be enabled through strategic integration with the digital workplace. Microsoft and/or Google tools need a home where they can sit alongside the myriad tools employees rely on.
A centralized hub that integrates tools, resources, and information into a single pane of glass experience is key to driving adoption and maximum value from Microsoft or Google investments. This is where the seamless nature of DEX comes into play, immersing users in a holistic platform rather than linking off to various applications with separate, disjointed experiences.
2. Enterprise-scale security and governance
Ensuring that all enterprise IT is secure is a priority for any CIO, particularly with the rise of remote work and the growing number of apps and tools in the digital workplace.
A singular digital hub simplifies this process. As a common gateway to the wider digital workplace, traffic can be monitored and managed easily. Secure APIs and single sign-on security make integrated access to third-party tools safe. Multiple-factor authentication (MFA) with industry-standard OAuth 2.0, and secure encrypted credential storage ensure that your users are safe to access your platform from anywhere.
In terms of governance, a central platform that enables granular permissions to be applied en masse, using existing user data to simplify the process, provides an efficient route to keeping information secure.
For CIOs reviewing the various solutions available, international standards for enterprise data security, like ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II best practices, are key differentiators to look out for.
3. Frontline mobile apps
Of all employees, non-desk staff have the highest turnover rate and lowest engagement scores. Gallup recently found that disengaged frontline staff:
- Have 37% higher absenteeism
- Lead to 18% lower productivity
- Are 15% less profitable
- And ultimately cost organizations an average of 34% of an employee’s annual salary
On top of this, when frontline staff don't have a mechanism for connecting back to HQ, innovation suffers. In 1989 a study carried out by Sidney Yoshida founded the concept of the Iceberg of Ignorance. The research determined the following:
- 100% of an organization’s problems are known to frontline employees
- 74% of problems are known to supervisors
- 9% of problems are known to middle management
- 4% of problems are known to top managers
As valued business partners of internal communications, IT has the opportunity to redress this balance with technology that solves frontline disconnect. Robust mobile experiences that provide bottom-up communications channels and opportunities to engage with corporate communications and knowledge will be key to alleviating this challenge.
Instead of creating new silos with mobile apps designed exclusively for the frontline, mobile experiences need to work in tandem with desktop digital workplaces. Mobile solutions should enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing by providing an inclusive place where every colleague has equal opportunity to contribute and benefit from the same functionality.
And it's not just frontline employees that benefit from mobile experiences. Delivering consumer-grade mobile experiences – with UX on par with the mobile apps we enjoy in our personal lives – is as crucial to connecting and engaging frontline employees as it is to living up to the mounting expectations of the millennial workforce. Any digital workplace strategy that overlooks mobile access will quickly become outdated as new generations enter the workforce.
4. AI & automation
We are fast headed toward a world where artificial intelligence and the employee experience are intrinsically linked. CIOs are rapidly approaching crunch-time for incorporating AI into the digital workplace to bring the future of work into the present and drive the employee experience forward.
Automation saves enterprises time with capabilities like:
- Automated multilingual translation
- Advanced analytics, prediction models, and user behavior analysis
- User targeting and recommended content
- Intelligent chatbots that connect users to what they need
More than any other aspect of DEX, artificial intelligence represents the unbridled potential of the future of work. With the pace of change in business and technology growing ever faster, employees are coming to expect technology to alleviate cognitive burden and create space for more creativity and innovation.
5. ‘Google’-like enterprise search
The ability to find content from any source, instantly, is the backbone to breaking down silos and improving productivity in the digital workplace. With information at users’ fingertips, time-to-task is significantly reduced, potentially saving enterprises millions.
‘Google’-like search experiences should offer:
- Unique item templates highlighting key insights from different applications and sources
- Targeted search experiences that bring relevant results to the surface for searches tailored to each individual user
- Intelligent filters and refiners to narrow down search results and give context to searches
- Fine-tuned relevancy settings that help you maximize search effectiveness
- Granular control over search criteria, like ranking the importance of certain properties and altering the sensitivity of fuzzy matching
6. Connecting people and content
At its core, good DEX should bring people and communications together. Creating a platform that connects employees to content and nurtures collaboration is critical to fueling innovation and fostering a high-performance culture in the digital workplace.
Achieving this requires two features that employees have come to expect as standard, as digital experiences in the consumer world define employees’ DEX demands.
Bring social media to the workplace
The first of these is enterprise social networks. The features that people enjoy as consumers on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram must be available within the workplace, such as:
- Intuitive reactions and likes
- Commenting
- @Mentions
- #Hashtags
- Dedicated topic feeds
- The ability to share content to other channels
Overcoming remote disconnect and promoting culture in a disjointed hybrid workforce will mean finding ways to reintroduce social connection digitally. These features make it easy for employees to widen their networks, spread ideas, and drive discussion.
Marketing-grade communications
The second feature required to elevate employee engagement leverages the same innovations that marketers use to automate campaigns and intelligently deliver omnichannel communications.
Engagement automation offers enterprise communicators the ability to build, plan, schedule, and measure complex campaigns that meet the growing demands of the modern workforce. Bringing together market-leading analytics and workflow engines, engagement automation provides an automated route to building engagement over time.
7. Flexible platforms offer agility
The start of the 2020s arguably ushered in more change to the workplace than had been seen in the entire decade before it. Drastic change placed a premium on enterprise agility, driven by technology that can be deployed as easily as it can pivot to meet new needs.
It must be able to rapidly develop experiences that meet new and often niche use cases. This can be supported with flexible platforms that leverage pre-built frameworks to offer low or no-code options for development, reducing the burden on IT.
Enterprises and CIOs must strive for organizational agility in the coming decade, prioritizing flexible technology above all else in a move to futureproof DEX and safeguard IT investment from further disruption.
8. Real-time analytics
The digital workplace is a goldmine of employee data, as each interaction offers data on user behavior and preferences. For CIOs to create successful DEX strategies, they need this data to inform their decisions.
Enterprises need to effectively gather data with real-time analytics reporting to learn what employees care about and measure DEX. Data visualization tools and custom dashboards give context to this data and offer benchmarks for success.
9. Targeted, personalized experiences
In a new chapter of work defined by decentralization and innovation, the need for timely, tailored experiences is crucial.
As consumers, whenever we log into apps like Netflix, YouTube, or our social media, we enjoy feeds and recommendations built for us. This has in turn seen a significant increase in the demand for personalization and targeting features from our workplace technology.
To help support relevancy and engagement where one-size-fits-all simply doesn’t work, enterprises must offer DEX that caters to the unique needs of their users. Targeted news feeds must surface content that users will find useful, and allow them to follow topics they care about. Search experiences should prioritize results that are most relevant to the individual. Access to apps and tools should be customizable so that users can adjust their experience to their needs.
The value of an employee experience platform
Enterprises and CIOs alike are acknowledging the need to simplify and optimize DEX, condense various digital tools and experiences into one, and unify the digital landscape. This challenge calls for solutions that can aggregate enterprise technology within one platform, offering a single user experience layer across the many applications a business relies on.
Enter the employee experience platform (EXP), an aggregator solution that consolidates the digital workplace and offers enterprises:
- Consistent user experience for end users across all technologies, including the ability to apply branded skins
- The flexibility and scalability to roll out new tools and technologies without calling for drastic change to systems, processes, or workflows
- A unified platform to monitor and control security and governance
- Ability to centralize all applications and tools employees rely on to boost productivity and knowledge sharing
- Specialized features designed to tackle EX challenges
- A flexible framework that is rapidly adaptable to meet new use-cases and pivot with business needs
What is an employee experience platform?
Digital workplace technologies have grown from point solutions – tech that solves a single challenge – into holistic platforms that meet a wider range of enterprise demands surrounding engagement, productivity, and culture.
Today’s employee experience platform is a natural evolution of the intranet, a hub where employees can connect with each other and access all the tools, information, and communications they need to excel.
EXP’s role in the future of work
IBM’s study of businesses that collectively oversee $3.7trillion in revenue found that 94% plan to move towards platform-based business models.
Reconnecting enterprises
Hybrid working models see workforces physically separated, yet connecting people is critical for enterprises to operate and innovate in a decade defined by disruption and change.
This isolation threatens innovation and employee wellbeing. Opening up these networks and reconnecting people and organizations must be a priority for CIOs moving forward.
Supporting enterprise IT
Enterprise IT face an ever-growing challenge as they manage, govern, and secure the digital employee experience. The number of tools we rely on at work is increasing. And the importance of those tools to support hybrid work has never been greater.
IT is under pressure from both sides, but EXPs offer a solution to both challenges as they consolidate technology by simplifying the digital landscape and provide a common secured gateway for employees to access third-party applications.
Employee experience platforms offer unparalleled security with:
- Single Sign-On (SSO) security
- Multi-factor user authentication (MFA)
- Secure APIs for trusted access to integrated third-party apps
- Secure user credential storage
- Protected client data with 256-bit advance encryption standard SQL databases
- Encrypted data in transit and at rest
- GDPR compliance
- ISO and SOC II certified best practices
- Penetration testing and certification
- Intrusion detection systems (IDS)
- Continuous backups
- Data domicile options (DDO)
IT are often asked to support the rest of an organization with secure technology, but EXPs give CIOs and IT departments solutions that they can rely on for security and governance, making their job easier instead of adding complexity.
Preserving culture through communication
Fostering high-performance cultures and preserving employee wellbeing in a time when workforces are dispersed and people are isolated has emerged as a key challenge for the future of work.
As more digital tools enter the workplace, targeting users with the right channels and strategies becomes more difficult – finding ways to cut through the noise and keep employees informed and aligned will prove key.
Treating app fatigue to protect productivity
Arming people with different solutions to meet every need may sound like empowering employees, but research from Nielsen Norman Group shows that tool overload and app fatigue harms productivity, engagement, and even wellbeing:
- A surplus of digital workplace tools places a cognitive burden on employees, as it takes time for people to access each tool
- Remembering usernames and passwords for different tools is cumbersome and can lead to security risks
- Having too many tools leads to unproductive task switching and induces stress
- Tool overload drives users back to less efficient, analog methods of managing work
- Digital workplace tools are ineffective unless all parties (including team members, leadership, stakeholders, and client partners) have proper access
The harmful side-effects of tool overload highlight the increasing need for a single digital hub with seamless access to everything, from the Microsoft stack to Salesforce and Slack.
EXPs form your digital home
With industries around the world turning to platform-based models, the EXP holds a key role in the coming decade.
For CIOs and IT leaders, EXPs provide practical solutions to various DEX challenges, supporting employee productivity and collaboration, engagement and culture, internal communications, knowledge management, and connecting workforces with a networked enterprise.
The EXP acts as the first port of call for employees. A go-to hub for every need that they log into at the start of the day and access everything they need to get work done in the hybrid age. Whether they’re searching for information or reaching out to colleagues, workflows are made simple when all an employee needs to rely on is the EXP.
Conclusion
The road ahead for CIOs is an exciting one. The next decade will see a convergence of tech innovations, growing employee expectations, and the challenges associated with hybrid work fully realized, and it’s primarily down to IT leaders to navigate a successful route for their enterprises to take.
As CIO’s seek solutions to longstanding challenges like employee productivity, enterprise security, and innovating despite budget constriction, newer challenges will emerge with implications that affect these past pain points.
Tool overload, remote work isolation, employee burnout and engagement fatigue, digital friction, and barriers to employee access will become new priorities as IT are handed the daunting task of empowering and engaging employees without bogging them down with overly complicated digital experiences.
Technology will offer hope. Innovations in the enterprise space will provide opportunities for AI and automation to optimize digital experience, integrations to reduce digital friction, mobile solutions for connecting frontline employees, marketing-grade communications to reach and align, targeted and personalized experiences that engage users, and plenty more features to bring the bright future of work into the present.
The key for CIOs and IT leadership through all of this will come down to using the right solutions in the right ways. EXPs and next-generation intranets will take on a greater role in facilitating and sustaining a new world of hybrid work long into the future.
The world of the future CIO – the problems, opportunities, and expectations they face – is at a critical juncture. Action taken now will define the success of enterprises moving forward. It’s a space undergoing far-reaching change and innovation that will spell out what the future of work will look like for billions of employees around the world, and it’s certainly one to keep our eyes on.