You’ve heard us and the industry talk about Employee Experience a lot, especially since the beginning of the pandemic. I lead the product management team focused on Employee Experience at VMware, and today I will share our thoughts on Digital Employee Experience (DEX).
In modern IT organizations, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and their teams are responsible for employee experience. They must balance experience, security, and privacy as the three core pillars in delivering an amazing employee experience. But how do you measure whether you are successfully delivering an amazing employee experience?
The pandemic has accelerated the remote-first and hybrid Anywhere Organization modalities, which add to the already complex enterprise work environments. Technology disruptions have always happened and will continue to happen. But a technology disruption now is a business disruption for an Anywhere Organization. For example, an employee cannot simply walk down the hall to pick up a replacement when the laptop battery dies. So, how do you proactively monitor and observe your digital environment to resolve incidents that have the biggest impact on employee productivity?
When incidents happen, most of the early investigation time is spent in manually analyzing what changed in the environment, which component(s) may be the culprit, what IT teams need to be involved, who are the impacted end users, and what is needed to transparently notify the impacted users of issue status. Teams start the early investigation with a finger-pointing exercise when troubleshooting hairy issues that touch multiple components. It is only after the finger-pointing is over that the teams reach a point of innocence when the finger pointing stops and focus shifts to root cause analysis followed by remediation. How can you reduce the mean time to innocence and mean time to resolution within your organization?
Change management to roll out new services or remediate widespread issues requires a village. The helpdesk teams represent the front line to assist employees. It was a much easier world when employees walked to the IT Genius Bar to drop off the device, pick a cup of coffee and pick up the device once the issue was resolved. An Anywhere Helpdesk needs more sophisticated tools for efficient remote support. How do you effectively enable your helpdesk teams to quickly diagnose and resolve user issues in an anywhere workplace?
The gateway to work in an Anywhere Workplace is through digital devices. Devices may be physical or virtual. Physical devices can be desktops (Windows, MacOS), mobile (iOS, Android), tablets, Chromebooks, and other devices such as VR headsets and IoT endpoints. Virtual devices constitute VDI (virtual desktops) and virtual apps. Employees get work done on physical and virtual devices through SaaS apps, native apps, and virtual apps. How do you provide a secure and contextual workspace to employees to get their work done from any device?
I have asked five loaded questions so far.
- How do you measure whether you are successfully delivering an amazing employee experience?
- How do you proactively monitor and observe your digital environment to prioritize incidents that have the biggest impact on employee productivity?
- How can you reduce the mean time to innocence and mean time to resolution within your organization?
- How do you effectively enable your helpdesk teams for remote support?
- How do you provide a secure and contextual workspace to employees to get their work done from any device?
Digital Employee Experience, or DEX, is the solution that can help answer all these five loaded questions and this article will showcase the solutions with product demos.
So, what is Digital Employee Experience and how does it help you solve employee experience challenges? In an ideal world, you always have eyes on the pulse of your organization. Digital Employee Experience is the pulse of an organization that empowers employees to do their best work and be productive. More empowered and productive employees lead to great customer experiences, resulting in higher top line and bottom-line business growth. Monitoring the technology gaps that hinder people from accomplishing their objectives is key to successful digital transformation. Remote work is not just a benefit anymore but something all organizations need to embrace and efficiently deliver as part of their Anywhere Workspace. A Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solution is a must have for an Anywhere Workspace.
Let us see this in action with real product demos for each of these questions.
How do you measure whether you are successfully delivering an amazing Digital Employee Experience?
A single data point cannot help you measure whether you are successfully delivering an amazing Digital Employee Experience or not. An employee’s experience score must consider the user’s experience on all their devices (desktop, mobile, virtual). The score must consider the experience of the user interacting with all types of apps (native, SaaS, virtual). Given the future of hybrid workstyles, an Anywhere Organization must pay special consideration for enterprise resource access (such as VPN, WiFi, certificates, SSO, network performance, etc.) within the employee experience score. Most importantly, the experience score must take qualitative data, like user sentiment, into account. The collection of these quantitative and qualitative data points can help an Anywhere Organization measure their Digital Employee Experience score.
Workspace ONE Digital Employee Experience Management (DEEM) provides a comprehensive Digital Employee Experience score. IT admins have full transparency to see how the score is calculated and can personalize the weights for the scoring algorithm to match their organizational needs. The demo below shows Workspace ONE DEEM experience score in action.
The industry as a whole is moving towards measuring outcomes. CIOs and IT organizations can best measure outcomes using Experience Level Agreement (XLA). Rather than running a survey once a year to only look at a select few helpdesk tickets to measure XLA, Workspace ONE DEEM experience score provide a continuous way for an organization to measure employee experience and track XLA.
How do you proactively monitor and observe your digital environment to prioritize incidents that have the biggest impact on employee productivity?
Monitoring the technology gap is critical to providing a delightful Digital Employee Experience and it starts with observability. IT Operations are sometimes inundated with alerts. It is quite difficult and time consuming to separate the noise from the ‘smoking gun’ (or main issue). Workspace ONE Digital Employee Experience Management (DEEM) provides the right set of out of box dashboards for IT Operations to quickly analyze the data and associated impact. An app crash associated with a certain device type becomes easy to spot. A system crash associated with certain OS / patch level or device driver incompatibility can be investigated instantly. The dashboards can be easily customized by Operations, Helpdesk, and IT teams. Custom dashboards can still utilize amazing visualization tools to quickly identify issues. The demo below shows out of box and custom dashboards for Workspace ONE Digital Employee Experience Management.
As you can see in the demo, Digital Employee Experience and Experience Management with Workspace ONE spans beyond the Windows operating system. In addition to desktop, Workspace ONE can also provide observability for mobile devices.
How can you reduce the mean time to innocence and mean time to resolution within your organization?
There will be technology failures in all environments. The failure may result from a configuration change, new product introduction, product defect or architecture flaw. The failure may be caused as a result of activities by different teams or different components in the stack. Workspace ONE can provide observability via dashboards to proactively monitor the environment. When a failure happens, the data can help you reduce your mean time to innocence by providing the required telemetry from different components all in one place. The Operations team can easily create incidents in the IT Service Management system (like ServiceNOW) directly from Workspace ONE. All the relevant events associated with the incident can be correlated. Users with impacted devices can be notified via Intelligent Hub or Slack notifications. Devices managed with Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) solutions can be more easily remediated. Workspace ONE UEM can also take advantage of automated remediation. The demo below shows how operations and IT teams can work together to decrease mean time to resolution (MTTR) for incidents.
How can you effectively enable your helpdesk teams for remote support?
The current IT Helpdesk is reactive in nature. Users initiate helpdesk tickets that may flow through three tiers of a helpdesk before getting resolved. There has been a big “shift-left” initiative in R&D teams across development, dev ops, and other areas. Workspace ONE is bringing the same shift-left mindset to the IT Helpdesk with our Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solution by helping provide insights and automation to remediate issues before the issue has a major impact to end user experience. Some remediations may require end user disruption, like system restarts. Instead of disrupting the end user’s work without warning, Workspace ONE balances security and usability by providing transparency and control to the end user. Proactive detection and remediation of issues becomes the first line of defense preventing helpdesk tickets.
The demo below highlights how the end user experience changes from reactively opening a trouble ticket to proactively being informed that an issue impacting them was successfully resolved.
The Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub app also provides intelligent support tools for end users to self-service issues like password rotation, access to VPN, WiFi profiles, adding new devices, recommended FAQs, and KB articles, etc. The video below highlights how IT organizations can reduce the helpdesk call volume for the most common problems.
While automated remediation and intelligent support tools will reduce helpdesk tickets, organizations should expect that more complex tickets will still follow the helpdesk path. Workspace ONE provides helpdesk personnel data and tools to troubleshoot problems quickly. If the issue requires a helpdesk technician to see what is happening on a user’s device, Workspace ONE Assist provides remote support across Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Horizon VDI. The demo below illustrates how the helpdesk technicians can troubleshoot and remediate issues more quickly with Workspace ONE.
How do you enable secure and seamless access to any app from any device?
Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub provides end users the ability to access any app on any device. Instead of entering their password fifty times a day, Intelligent Hub can provide secure and seamless access with single sign-on (SSO). The consistency of a unified app catalog experience across Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Web is second to none. IT admins can easily curate the experience for various groups by entitling a distinct set of apps for separate groups of users. IT can also group applications into customizable categories to provide the best end user experience. The experience is brandable to your company’s brand guidelines. The demo below shows the engaging Intelligent Hub experience to access any app on any device.
In summary, Workspace ONE Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solution benefits employees, IT, and helpdesk teams. Companies that have deployed a Digital Employee Experience solution see a reduction in helpdesk costs, increase in employee NPS scores, and increase in employee productivity. I believe that investment in Digital Employee Experience is critical for organizations to embrace and efficiently manage an anywhere workforce.
To learn more about Workspace ONE DEX, please visit www.vmware.com/solutions/digital-employee-experience.html.
