Your Employees’ Experience Is Broad. Your Intranet Needs to Fit
I’ve been active in the world of internal digital communications, service and collaboration since about 2008, and I’ve lost count of how many times in the past 15 years someone has pronounced intranets dead. The same goes for the number of times some application or other — Microsoft Teams is currently one such — has been crowned as “the new intranet.” I firmly believe, though, that there is still a core role for what we call the intranet, in the digital employee experience.
What Is Digital Employee Experience?
Back in 2018, Step Two founder James Robertson coined a definition that has since been widely adopted: “Digital employee experience is the sum total of digital interactions in the work environment.”
In 2021, Tabhita Minten and I expanded on this accurate but somewhat dry idea in our book, writing: “Great digital employee experience is the sum of all digital interactions in a work environment, where the needs and expectations of employees come first.”
Really, digital employee experience isn’t actually about digital at all. And in a way, it’s not about the experience, either. DEX is all about the employee: their experience of digital communications, digital services and digital collaboration. Combined, all those experiences add up to the digital employee experience.
Subjective and Objective DEX
Translating the word “experience” into my native language, Dutch, has an interesting result, because you can translate it two ways:
The first translation, “beleving,” is more subjective: It’s about what the employee is encountering, enduring or feeling. It’s about employees themselves, about what they feel when interacting with digital tools.
The second translation, “ervaring,” is more objective, and relates directly to what the employee is performing, obtaining and achieving. This is more about the experience, and what employees do when interacting with digital tools.
You can gain insight into the more subjective part of DEX by talking to colleagues. What do they think — what do they feel — when using digital tools, when communicating in digital ways, or when collaborating through the digital workplace tools your organization provides?
The more objective part of DEX can be measured: What do people do on the digital platforms that are offered? How well do they do it? How quickly can people do what they want (or need) to do — and how often do things in the digital workplace perhaps go awry?
The combination of qualitative interviews and quantitative measurement is priceless when looking to improve the digital employee experience.
Related Article: 5 Intranet Trends Redefining Employee Experience in 2023
Levels of (Digital) Employee Experience
Both translations of the English word “experience” have something to do with the employee journey. I believe there are three “levels” of digital employee experience you can examine:
- The “macro” journey or employment level: This is most often simply called “the employee journey.” It starts with applying for a job, then carries through the onboarding process, doing the actual work, perhaps growing into a new position, and eventually leaving — for a new job, or into retirement.
- The “meso” journey or job level: This is about an employee's work throughout the duration of the job. You may have certain seasons in your job: you're new, more experienced, or expert level. Certain times of the year might also have a particular effect on your work. When I work with clients, I look at a week or a day in the life of an employee. What does an employee’s work entail throughout a typical day?
- The “micro” journey or task level: This is about performing specific, primary or secondary job-related tasks. Primary tasks are often supported by primary systems such as ERP, CRM, patient data systems, student performance software, and so on. Secondary tasks are often supported by — you’ve guessed it — secondary systems, such as HR software, facility management tools or document management.
You can think of it as an inverted pyramid, with the macro as the broadest, the micro as the narrowest and the meso level in between.
The Digital Workplace and the Intranet
Now, I hear you ask: “where is the digital workplace in all this, let alone the intranet?”
I believe that the intranet is on the lowest, most practical, micro or task level of the digital employee experience. Since the intranet is one of the tools in the digital workplace toolbox, maybe you could then say that the digital workplace is in the middle, at the meso level of the digital employee experience. That leaves the digital employee experience as a whole on the highest, most abstract, macro level.
I understand this model may be over-simplified, but it could help your thinking about the digital employee experience, the digital workplace and the intranet. Of course there are elements of the meso level of DEX that the intranet could support, but there may very well be other (secondary) tools that support these things. The same could go for the macro level of DEX.
Learning Opportunities
The Role of the Intranet
The intranet should play a specific role in the landscape of digital tools. Some people feel the intranet should be the starting point of any digital task, the go-to place for any questions regarding work, and the first tool that employees start with on any given workday.
Others — Clearbox founder Sam Marshall staunchly supports this line of thinking — believe that some employees are better served by working directly with primary and secondary tools, and there is no single starting point for all employees.
While I have worked with clients who preferred designing intranets to serve as something of a digital headquarters — the starting point of the workday — I think digital employee experience should dictate the exact role of the intranet in a given organization.
At the very least, the intranet can be something of a last resort for employees: If you can’t find what you’re looking for in other tools and applications, the intranet should be the place to go. It should offer search and navigation to help you move in the right direction to find what you need.
And Intranet for Everyone
That means the intranet may serve a different role for different types of employees. I Imagine a colleague working in reception or at a help desk, for example: They often have scheduled shifts that don’t run the whole day; they use shared devices; and they have to be constantly available for questions from clients or coworkers. They have little control over their calendar and little time to check the latest company news, to apply for leave, and so on. They may do these secondary tasks outside of work hours, on their personal device from their couch.
Compare that with, say, a project manager: They have a lot more freedom to determine their work schedule, often have multiple devices to use for work, can plan meetings as well as focus time to manage their efforts and energy and may check a company policy or claim expenses at any given moment.
Related Article: Your Intranet is the Core of Your Employee Experience. Build It Right.
For these very different types of coworkers, the intranet may play a very different role, indeed — and those are just two examples. What about frontline workers and management? What about nurses and teachers? What about people in logistics and transport? What about… well, you get the point.
Things like an employee’s line of work, their physical location, their communications and collaboration needs and more all influence their digital employee experience. And their digital employee experience determines how they use the digital workplace, and how they use the intranet.
Improving the Intranet Improves DEX
Regardless of how you look at it, the intranet, the digital workplace and digital employee experience are interconnected. If you work on improvements on one level — e.g., the intranet — you indirectly work on improving the other levels, too.
What helps connect DEX and the digital workplace, and the intranet in particular, is to first focus on the employees' micro journeys or tasks, which you can pinpoint with a task identification survey. You can then facilitate those micro journeys with whatever tool is most suitable, in line with your DEX or digital workplace strategy. That may be the intranet, but it may just as well be other tools.
You also need to measure and test the effectiveness and the efficiency of those micro journeys. Continually monitor usage via data analysis, and periodically perform usability testing. Based on the data and test results, you can improve the task or micro journey by improving the content that’s used to provide information and the functionality that’s used to provide a service. Perhaps over time you can even change the technology or platform being used and, finally, improve the business process to provide the employees with the given service.
And then once you’ve done all that, test the task again, improve again, test again, and so on — all with the aim to improve the intranet, and with it the digital employee experience.
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About the Author
Christiaan is co-founder of TheDayShift, a business consultancy focusing on radical new ways for organizations and professionals to work and collaborate, and the co-author of "Digital Employee Experience: Put Employees First Towards a More Human Workplace."
Connect with Christiaan W. Lustig:
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