Flexxible recognized in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Employee Experience Management (DEX) Tools and the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for DaaS
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The speed of digital transformation worldwide has caught many business leaders off guard. Suddenly, concepts like digital employee experience (DEX) and advanced workplace technology are a must-have rather than the “nice-to-have” features that they were painted as just a few years ago.
Chief Information Officers (CIOs) tasked with overseeing this rapid change have been hit by several important issues including:
Yet, as digital progress accelerates, CIOs must stay ahead of emerging technologies that optimize workforce potential. Tools focused on enhancing the digital employee experience are becoming key to achieving this goal.
This guide looks at everything organization leaders should know about digital employee experience management as it grows in importance, including why it’s important in today’s remote business environment and the challenges that come with it.
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Digital employee experience refers to the experience employees have while using new technologies, digital tools, and platforms in the workplace.
This umbrella term includes a broad range of professional features, ranging from the end-user experience they get from software and apps to how well they can integrate digital tools into their daily workflows.
The boom in hybrid and remote work following the pandemic has pushed DEX to the forefront of the modern work environment, acting as the glue that keeps employees connected and productive.
Organizations must adapt to this shift in workplace dynamics. If not, they risk depriving their workforce of new digital technologies and falling behind rivals that embrace them.
Digital employee experience has become a bedrock of modern business operations in light of the hybrid and remote working boom.
Team members are now scattered across multiple locations rather than in one office and employees depend on digital tools to access resources and collaborate.
However, companies are finding the shift to a unified digital ecosystem difficult. Users and applications are more spread out, which leads to performance challenges as they become disconnected.
DEX fixes this by bringing an organization’s tools and devices together while also streamlining workflows. It gives employees more independence, cutting down on the back-and-forth with IT, so everyone can work faster and more efficiently.
The best DEX solutions do this with minimum disruption to business operations. As Bill Gates once said “The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life”, and a great digital employee experience mirrors this principle by operating quietly in the background.
When done well, DEX does wonders for productivity, slashing downtime while helping employees remain engaged and focused.
What’s more, as companies compete for the best talent, providing a robust DEX with smooth onboarding becomes a competitive advantage in employee hiring and retention.
It shows potential hires that the company values efficiency, productivity, and the overall employee experience — key factors for a successful workplace culture.
The digital employee experience (DEX) is the secret sauce for modern businesses, especially with remote and hybrid work becoming the norm.
When on point, it smooths out workflows, slashes downtime, and ensures employees stay engaged and productive, no matter where they’re working from.
No wonder Gartner predicts that 50% of digital workforce leaders will have a DEX strategy and tool in place by 2026, up from 30 percent in 2024.
To better understand the motives behind this, we can break down the DEX's value to businesses into two categories: hard value, which refers to cost-related metrics, and soft value, which focuses on employee benefits that ultimately contribute to hard value.
A well-oiled digital employee experience strategy is more than just a feel-good move — it directly drives cost savings and enhances organizational efficiency. Here’s how.
Bottlenecks caused by repetitive IT tasks drastically hinder employee productivity.
Organizations can use DEX to reduce these roadblocks and create a more efficient workday for everyone.
A major source of delays is IT support for basic issues like password resets or software updates that take up support teams’ time.
Login performance is another problem area that often gets overlooked. In organizations with complex infrastructure and legacy applications, it can often take employees up to 10 minutes to get “productivity ready”. This mounts up to a huge loss in efficiency when multiplied across a company.
DEX allows organizations to pinpoint how and where this time is being wasted. It then automates simple IT tasks and logins so that support staff can focus on more complex issues (like Level 2 and 3 tasks) and frontline employees can work more autonomously.
This boosts productivity across the board as employees spend more time engaged in their core tasks and less time waiting for IT interventions.
Meanwhile, IT teams can direct their efforts toward higher-value work that directly contributes to business goals.
Automation also slashes the cost of support tasks as the lesser need for manual intervention means companies can allocate fewer human resources to first-line support. More budget is then available to invest in strategic initiatives that drive business growth.
How to measure this metric
It’s quite easy to see the difference DEX makes here through the reduction in support queue lengths, faster resolution times, and fewer interruptions.
Organizations can track how much time and money is saved per support ticket and compare it to previous benchmarks to clearly see the productivity boost.
DEX lets organizations better track and manage application and license usage by identifying underused or unnecessary software. It automatically flags these applications, allowing the IT team to remove them from the system and reduce software costs.
Automating routine IT tasks like license renewals and version updates means the company only pays for what it truly needs. They are more likely to be compliant with software licensing agreements, which require that the number of licenses aligns with the number of users or devices accessing the software.
How to measure this metric
The bottom line here is that a reduction in software footprint directly translates to a lower IT spend, something that you can see directly on the company accounts.
The digitized business world means the devices an organization uses are its lifeblood, so prolonging their lifespan is essential.
DEX helps to increase their longevity by monitoring device performance in real-time to flag up when a device is suffering from dangerous performance declines, or nearing the end of its useful life.
Business leaders can use this knowledge to plan more strategic device refresh cycles, so that laptops, mobile devices, and peripherals only get replaced when necessary.
How to measure this metric
The spend on device replacement is the obvious one to look out for here, but DEX also provides data on device usage patterns, performance trends, and repair histories that make asset management more effective.
Keeping staff happy is crucial to success, yet many organizations fall at this hurdle.
“Employees have greater expectations from the tools and services their employers provide them with now,” said Jan Erik Aase, partner and global leader of ISG Provider Lens Research. “If your organization lacks a DEX strategy, and employee experience isn’t improving, then from their perspectives, it’s actually getting worse.”
Here’s how DEX helps organizations rectify employee-centric issues.
A great digital employee experience (DEX) directly builds employee satisfaction by reducing workplace friction that chips away at morale.
Employees get access to self-service capabilities so that they don’t need to waste time on support requests and instead get to the root of the problem. Streamlined digital tools and workflows make the working environment much easier to navigate and cut out many frustrations that drive remote workers up the wall.
Staff are much more likely to stay in organizations with user-friendly technology and reliable IT support, according to 90% of the organizational leaders interviewed by Ivanti.
How to measure this metric
Organizations can stay on top of their workforce’s moral levels by collecting employee feedback through regular surveys. This way they get to act upon common pain points and continuously tweak certain aspects of the digital workplace experience to get better results.
They can also measure device performance via troubleshooting resolution times, or user-reported issues to make sure they’re providing employees with the smooth user experience that they need.
Innovation also gets a much-needed boost from a well-thought-out DEX strategy.
The aforementioned bottlenecks choke creativity: once they’re gone, employees are free to focus on problem-solving and high-value work, rather than get bogged down by everyday technical issues.
DEX empowers teams to make strategic decisions that directly impact innovation. This might involve developing new product features, or even brand-new products or services.
In turn, companies can better align their business processes with the digital transformation taking place right now so that they reach faster to market demands and drive growth.
How to measure this metric
Measuring innovation capability involves tracking project delivery times and the number of disruptions eliminated due to better employee support systems.
Some of the notable improvements include employee sentiment, feedback about their digital workplace experience, and how quickly issues are resolved through real-time data.
Integrating digital employee experience software within your organization can come with difficulties, like with any large-scale tech overhaul.
Here are some challenges to look out for.
“Shelf-ware” refers to software that’s bought but not used and this is the fate that can befall digital employee experience management tools if they are not aligned with existing tech stacks and endpoints across the enterprise.
Employees, too, may struggle to grasp how they work, particularly if they’re used to legacy systems.
The challenge here is for organizations to have a well-thought-out implementation plan, which includes clear messaging about the tools’ capabilities and ongoing support to make sure employees use them to their full potential.
Regular feedback loops and employee engagement exercises help to measure how well the tools are being used and spot any gaps in usage.
Without these, organizations risk missing opportunities for improving the digital workplace and leave expensive DEX tools gathering dust on the shelf.
DEX tools can only really work as part of a cultural shift toward automation across all of the organization’s touchpoints.
This goes beyond simply deploying the tools and requires embedding them within the firm’s strategic objectives and day-to-day operations.
For example, an organization might implement a DEX solution to automate software updates and reduce IT help desk tickets. However, without a company-wide push to educate employees on how the automation process works, provide clear workflows, and align better IT support with broader business goals, the solution may face resistance or underuse. Employees might continue relying on traditional support channels out of habit, making the switch pointless.
Without a broader cultural shift, even the most advanced DEX tools risk falling short of their potential.
At the start of a project, the organization must be clear on why it needs DEX tools and the benefits it aims to achieve.
Once they know the why, they can then build a DEX strategy around it and tie it in with the organization’s broader goals.
The alternative — deploying DEX tools for niche or unclear use cases — can lead to diminished confidence in them over time.
Many organizations suffer from fragmented support systems stretched across diverse IT environments.
A DEX deployment must unify an organization by providing the right collaboration tools to make efficient coworking possible. It must also meet every employee where they are, be it on a mobile phone or laptop, or via the systems they use.
It must also be targeted to the needs of different personas so that everyone gets the right resources based on where they are and what they do.
Employees who feel the tools aren’t for them will disengage, leading to low adoption rates.
No matter which industry you work in, outdated IT systems hold back progress.
This is bad news for organizations relying on legacy systems which create an IT burden through bottlenecks, high error rates, and a poor employee experience.
FlexxClient was created to help businesses get the most out of their technology. Our team draws from a deep well of expertise in digital workspaces to make your IT systems simpler, faster, and more efficient.
Flexxible helps organizations unlock the full potential of their IT infrastructure via:
Employees sitting around waiting for IT to resolve basic issues shouldn’t be happening.
FlexxClient’s automated remediation triggers fixes for common problems without the need for human intervention. Its self-service support actions also empower employees to fix routine problems on their own.
First-line fix rates go up, time-wasting goes down, and your staff gets back to work quicker.
This self-healing technology also reduces the burden on high-level IT teams. Shifting resolutions left means your experts can tackle big-picture problems.
The result? A stronger, more capable IT department that’s ready for anything.
Waiting for end-users to report issues leads to bottlenecks.
FlexxClient’s real-time monitoring detects performance issues before employees even notice them and can send out instant alerts across workflows.
Our custom dashboard lets you clearly see device resource consumption, user sessions, and running applications.
CPU, RAM, GPU, network latency, and disk usage charts give you a full overview of system performance, while detailed tables highlight the applications and processes consuming the most resources at any given time.
FlexxClient’s custom dashboard
Users can also give live feedback that allows IT teams to make quick adjustments and custom dashboards make it easy for everyone to see the current state of play across the entire digital workplace.
We know that standing still is dangerous, which is why we grow with your organization.
Flexxclient’s employee experience software adapts to an expanding team by automating an increasing number of support tasks without requiring extra resources.
We guarantee the same high-quality service whether you’re managing multiple offices or a global team.
As Gartner points out in its Magic Quadrant for DEX Tools: “Flexxible has a sophisticated geographic strategy (and) the ability to flex its solution capabilities and customer engagement approaches”.
Flexxible’s ability to adapt its solutions to meet diverse customer needs makes it a trusted choice for your organization when future-proofing its IT infrastructure.
Find out how FlexxClient will maximize your workforce’s productivity and help your organization grow. Book a demo today to find out more.
* Gartner®, Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Employee Experience Management Tools, Dan Wilson, Tom Cipolla, Stuart Downes, Autumn Stanish, Lina Al Dana, 26 August 2024 **Gartner®, Magic Quadrant™ for Desktop as a Service, Stuart Downes, Eri Hariu, Mark Margevicius, Craig Fisler, Sunil Kumar, 16 September 2024
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