Editorial
During a recent vision-setting conversation with a senior leader, she asked a difficult but appropriate question: “How should a Digital Employee Experience team be structured?”
It was so direct and on point, I took a beat to gather my thoughts. In an instant, I asked and answered myself several questions:
Have I spoken to anyone who leads a team titled “Digital Employee Experience (EX)?”
Not exactly. I’ve talked to many folks trying to bring attention to the digital employee experience. That may have to be close enough.
Do I have any idea what their team structures look like?
Not a clue.
Are there well-documented best practices for Digital EX teams?
I’m not certain, but I don’t think so.
Returning to our conversation, I could only reply, somewhat sheepishly, “That’s a great question. I’ll have to do some research and get back to you.”
Breaking New Ground
As I’ve alluded to in previous articles, we are breaking new ground in the digital communication technology space, across multiple dimensions. As we define a new function with a unique set of capabilities and special business knowledge, we must also determine how we can best apply that knowledge to add value to our business.
Upon researching Digital Workplace Teams and Digital EX Teams, I found… well, not much. Gartner did have an article from 2019 (ancient in digital terms) about who should be on a Digital Workplace team; however, it’s so generic it’s not that valuable five years later.
Essentially, it summarizes the key leadership roles to the CIO, an HR Manager and a Facilities manager. Clearly, Gartner took the “Workplace” portion of Digital Workplace to heart. Unfortunately, this didn’t really help me all that much, and I couldn’t find much else out there to compare.
This supports our assertion that we’re breaking new ground.
Related Article: How I Built a Digital Workplace Practice From the Ground Up
Scoping the Digital Employee Experience Team
To be fair, no one can prescribe a one-size-fits-all team that works in all circumstances. But if we articulate the key pillars of responsibility – that is, the things the Digital EX team will be responsible for — we can infer a minimal set of roles needed to manage those responsibilities effectively.
Based on my experience and conversations with peers, I’ve compiled a list of commonly agreed-upon responsibilities and bucketed them into four major pillars:
- Strategy and Vision: This includes, as the name implies, setting the strategic vision for the team at the Enterprise level; as well as building cross-functional partnerships, roadmaps and providing direction to the team, among other duties.
- Community, Proficiency and Change: Think of this as the human layer between technology and processes. It includes driving behavior change, adoption of technology, consulting the business on how to use digital tools and promoting best practices. This is where the focus on Experience comes to fruition.
- Content and Tool Management: This begins with technology administration, including Intranet platform admin, unified communications platforms, collaboration platforms and so on. It includes managing architecture, content and data hygiene, taxonomies and UX expertise.
- Dashboards and Metrics: The wide range of tools across most enterprises provide metrics individually. Someone needs to understand where to get the data we need, and how to pull it together into one source to gain real value.
Here’s a visual representation, with a little more detail:
Digital Employee Experience Strategic Pillars
Related Article: You Need to Improve Your Digital Employee Experience. Do You Have the Resources?
Envisaging the DEX Team
How do these pillars map into a team, you may ask? If you agree with the above buckets, then at a minimum we can align one person with each of the above pillars. That would be four people, one dedicated to each pillar.
The exception may be dashboards and metrics. In today’s world of cinching tight budgets, it would be a luxury for many of us to have a fully dedicated data analyst. Therefore, we could recommend leveraging a shared resource to stitch together the data we collect from the disparate array of tools that make up our digital workplace. After all, data analysis is an industry agnostic skillset. It’s up to the DEX team to determine which KPIs are necessary, and work with the data analyst to figure out how to get it.
Given this adjustment, our team might look something like this:
- Strategic Leadership and Governance: The senior leader of the team who sets the enterprise vision for the DEX based on business need and strategy. They consider the big picture and partner with the senior leadership of key partners, including IT, security, HR, facilities, operations, and more. They also advocate for DEX in related governance and innovation processes and define Key KPIs.
- Community, Training and Proficiency Management: This is often the missing ingredient – the “Digital Workplace Shepherd” that acts as the human layer between technology and process. They drive digital workplace technology adoption and counsel the business on how tools work and how to best use them. This role is so important (and so often missing) that I previously wrote a full article detailing and making the case for it.
- Content and Tool Management: your content management expert and platform Administrator. They support integrations and maintain healthy content and management. processes. They also manage the decentralized group of content managers, if applicable. This person needs to understand how data drives metrics and support clean processes to ensure data value and accuracy.
Scaling the DEX Team
By starting with our strategic pillars, we can scale the team up from here as necessary based on business needs. For example, perhaps you need multiple content and tool managers due to the sheer volume of content generated across your business.
Or perhaps you need multiple community managers to keep track of a large or ever-changing decentralized group of content creators. Taking this “template” approach based on our strategic pillars, your team could be as small as three people, but scale up as much as needed to support your business.
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In Conclusion
As is so often true in life, there is no “silver bullet” solution to our question, “How is the ideal Employee Digital Experience team structured?” We can, however, identify common steps we can all take to determine what structure will work.
- List out the key responsibilities and expectations for the DEX team.
- Organize those into common sense groupings (this is where you apply your experience and expertise).
- Map these strategic pillars into roles.
Feel free to use the above recipe as a starting point and add your own ingredients or modify as you see fit. Most importantly, don’t be afraid to try something different.
Remember, we’re breaking new ground.
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