Editorial
As fascinating as those of us who work in the digital employee experience space may find it, if we’re being honest, we're only a little more than an afterthought for many other people in business.
We are an expense, after all, and rarely generate revenue. However, like replacing one’s roof, investing in your digital employee experience may not be sexy, but it's critical to a functioning enterprise.
If you're anything like me, you spend as much time creating business cases to obtain funding as you do actually doing the work you want to do. And often, we fail to get that budget we believe is so necessary.
With that in mind, here are some things you can do, right now, without having to ask for money.
1. Start a Monthly New Software Request Review Meeting
If this is already happening where you work, well done! But don’t feel bad if it isn’t. Ask your Desktop Service friends what they do with all the requests they get from random employees who want to install or deploy new applications. Do they have a clear process for considering, approving and/or declining those requests, or do they swirl in limbo?
The IT professionals I’ve spoken to — especially those who work directly with users — liken new app requests toa chain they drag around in their minds, each request a new link that grips indefinitely (or at least until it fades from the mind of the requestor). This is largely because the IT teams may not know who has final authority to decline the request.
The result is a frustrated requestor who wonders what ever happened to their request, along with an IT professional who feels abandoned and unheard.
By proactively scheduling and leading a cross-functional team to address and discuss these issues, you will begin to create allies among your IT colleagues, and also escalate the discussion to the visibility of leaders who you are trying to influence and make more aware.
Related Article: 5 Ways to Measure the Value of Your Employee Experience Function
2. Socialize and Educate Senior Leaders on the Concept of DEX
The concept of DEX is so new, most senior leaders haven’t heard of it. But, if you find the right leader to discuss what DEX is – starting with the downstream systems, and then moving upstream to the foundational issues that create them – you’ll paint a picture they can relate to and understand. And once they understand the need for a holistic vision and strategy across your digital ecosystem, they’ll champion that vision in their subsequent leadership conversations.
This doesn’t happen overnight. We may need to have many conversations before they internalize the vision and see it for themselves. It takes a lot of repetition and a fair amount of course correction.
But it costs you nothing, and will make your life easier when you finally get around to asking for funding to achieve the vision. So, get started now, if you haven’t already.
3. Focus on Improving Just One Thing
You probably have a virtual laundry list of issues that need tackling. But if we try to do everything at the same time, we’ll accomplish nothing. So it’s on us to prioritize the areas we can improve.
That means making hard decisions, including where to put our energy.
My advice? Just pick something. There’s really no wrong answer here. Of course you should pick a problem that will give you the maximum return for your investment of effort, but don’t paralyze yourself analyzing which problem that is. Pick one and put as much effort as you’re able into improving it.
For example, we’ve been focused on improving what we call proficiency: how well our users know how to use our tools. We know this is a need at our company, and in general (see my previous article on why Your Digital Workplace Needs a Shephard for a deep-dive on that subject), so it’s a logical target.
What’s more, we have ways to measure our work. In our case, we provide best practice advice like encouraging the use of @mentions in posts and chats. We use analytics tools, in our case SWOOP Analytics, to benchmark and track usage of @mentions to see whether our advice is sticking.
Review your data, adjust your approach, repeat.
Related Article: Don't Let Your Company's Tools Sabotage the Employee Experience
4. Coattail Successful Channels
To deliver the proficiency advice described above, we look for existing opportunities to reach employees and ride their coattails, so to speak.
In our case, we partnered with our People Development and IT teams to get involved in Orientation. IT was stretched thin on resources to deliver what was pretty much a meat and potatoes training for new employees.
The original training walked new employees through ultra-basics like “What is OneDrive?” We modified our approach to address more sophisticated best practices, such as the use of @mentions in posts and chats mentioned above,including details of the different types of @mentions they can use in each channel.
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We also show them neat tricks like the Send to OneNote feature from Outlook meetings, the Move to Teams feature from Emails, along with a demonstration of other Microsoft 365 tools, like Lists and Planner.
Our goal is to make them curious and encourage them to become best practice champions in the legacy teams they’re joining.
5. Start a Network of Champions (and Start with the EAs)
Once a quarter or so, we hold a Digital Workplace learning session with our Executive Assistants (EAs). The trend began when a few of the more tech-savvy EAs started asking questions about teams and invited us to one of their monthly group meetings to answer questions. It was so successful we decided to make it a regular meeting series.
Each session starts with a theme. Sometimes we stay on track, other times we veer off into a different subject based on the questions and mood of the group.
We recently had a session on Distribution Lists. Sending an email may sound simple, but it can be a significant source of stress for EAs, who are often tasked with sending messages to large swaths of the organization, but not everyone. You’d be amazed at just how challenging it is for them to get it right. Between limits to the number of recipients and challenges with labels, there are any number of ways to get this wrong, and every EA has a horror story to tell.
We started by explaining how Dynamic lists work. We then covered where they could find them, how they could tell who’s on each one, and how they can best handle the ad-hoc requests that don’t target a common audience.
By the end of that call, every participant told us how valuable it was, and asked us to come do a session with their entire organization.
It feels great to help our colleagues and ease their stress, especially when we’re adding value to the business at the same time.
Related Article: Work Smarter and Save Time With a Few Simple Changes
Helping Colleagues, In Big Ways and Small
As Digital Employee Experience (DEX) leaders, working on moving the big obstacles and making the major changes are and should be our primary focus. At the same time, it’s important we remember what most likely got us in our role in the first place – a passion for helping colleagues work better, easier, with more fluidity and fewer technical obstacles.
It’s on us to make sure we don’t get so obsessed with creating perfection that we miss the simple, and often no-cost, actions we can take to improve the ways we work together.
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