What is the digital employee experience?

To realise why the digital employee experience is important, we’ll need to discuss what it is.

Simply put, the digital employee experience refers to your employees’ digital interactions in their work environment. It’s the technologies they have access to, it’s how IT enables them to communicate in new ways, it’s work processes that are enhanced by digital solutions, and everything in-between.

Do employees care about the digital employee experience? Yes they do!

According to a 2019/2020 digital employee experience survey conducted by IT consultancy Step Two, 42% of employees consider the digital employee experience to be either “Extremely important” or “Very Important”.

When including respondents who answered with “Somewhat important”, this figure goes all the way up to 81%.

Your employees care more about their digital interactions than you may think, and positive experiences in this area will mean:

• Happier, more satisfied employees
• Enhanced productivity
• Better employee retention
• An increased ability to attract top talent into your organisation, especially tech-savvy individuals
• …and much more

The role of data, AI and Machine Learning in the digital workplace

The growth of digital interactions in workplaces has come about, in a big part, because of the rising importance of data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

With big data comes big amounts of information that employees need to read, understand, input and analyse. All this comes at the expense of time – time that used to be spent on other aspects of the job, but now, is dedicated to (increasingly expansive) media monitoring efforts, form processing, client screenings, and hundreds of other data-intensive tasks.

Thankfully, AI solutions have come to the rescue with their ability to read and understand data, check information against multiple data sources, monitor numerous news channels at once, and more.

This leaves teams with time to work on everything else that’s important, and significantly boosts productivity within organisations that embrace these innovative solutions.

Improving the digital employee experience

What can you do to improve the digital employee experience in your organisation?

Step 1: Analyse your workflow
For a start, take a step back and look at your workflows and processes. Are there any steps that are duplicated by multiple persons or teams? Pay special attention to the amount of manual work that’s being done – especially time-consuming checks and monitoring that’s done on a regular basis.

These not only slow down your processes, but can be expensive. This is especially so, when professionals (being paid professional salaries) are spending hours eyeballing information from multiple data sources – checking for errors or looking for possible compliance issues.

Step 2: Determine the areas that need improvement
Now that you have a good view of your workflow, determine which areas can be streamlined with digital solutions. Focus specifically on areas that can either be automated, or simply made a lot faster, with technology.

Step 3: Create your shortlist
Next, create a shortlist of digital solutions that play well with your systems and employees. This means looking for solutions that can integrated with your existing systems and provide a level of user-friendliness that’s suitable for your employees – after all, the digital solution you eventually choose will be there to empower your employees (and not cause more stress).

Step 4: Implement your digital solution
Once you’ve chosen your technology provider, work hand-in-hand with them to ensure that the solution they provide will be well-integrated and easy-to-use. Finally, implement your chosen solution in a way that’s as hassle-free as possible, enabling efficient onboarding of employees.

Enhancing the digital employee experience with Handshakes

Handshakes offers customisable solutions which create efficiencies through automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies.

Solutions such as Handshakes Fuse and Handshakes Seer empower the digital employee experience by enhancing employees’ productivity, while minimising the amount of manual work and errors that take place – leading to a more satisfying work environment and happier employees.

Whether you’re neck-deep in data and could do with AI’s help with processing text (even PDFs) from various sources, or looking for an intelligent solution that can handle all your media monitoring for you – even reading articles from obscure news sources and documents – our team can develop a solution that meets your exact needs.

And your digitally-savvy employees will thank you for it!