5 Tips to Improve Your Organization’s Digital Employee Experience

Flexibility empowers people to do their best work. Today, millions of people around the world work remotely, and we wouldn’t want it any other way. We’ve discovered that having more flexibility to work wherever and however we want frees us to bring our best at work and in life. And for businesses, flexible work styles lead to happier, more productive employees and more opportunities to attract and keep the best talent, no matter where people live in the world. But there are also increased support costs for them to consider. This blog will discuss five ways organizations can improve the digital experience to enhance employee productivity and reduce the cost of flexible work styles.

What is Digital Employee Experience?

Digital employee experience (DEX) is the usability and perception of digital tools people use to perform their jobs. But, as we all know, working remotely doesn’t always work. Apps break, laptops freeze, video calls lag, Wi-Fi quits. Technology doesn’t always work the way we need it to, especially when you’re connecting remotely. This can be frustrating because all anyone wants to do is get things done without technology getting in the way. But, as we all know, working remotely doesn’t always work. Apps break, laptops freeze, video calls lag, Wi-Fi quits. Technology doesn’t always work the way we need it to, especially when you’re connecting remotely.

This can be frustrating because all anyone wants to do is get things done without technology getting in the way. IT teams often struggle to keep up with the demands of remote workers and are held back by outdated, technology-centric tools that were designed to lower the cost of devices, not to lower cost of supporting employees working remotely.

What is Digital Employee Experience Management?

Digital experience management is different from device management. Device management is more of a technology-centric approach to managing endpoints, while digital employee experience management is a people-centric approach to managing the usability and perception of a device and its associated technologies. Think about taking your car in for service. You want to change the oil, rotate the tires, or do a tune-up. Car maintenance is like device management, where you are lowering the cost of the car over time.

Digital employee experience management is like driving the car. If you drive a two-wheel-drive car off-road in the desert, you wouldn’t have a good experience with the performance of that car, and chances are you’d get stuck in the sand. DEX management can detect whether you’re about to go off-roading in a two-wheel car in the desert, warn you and IT that this would be a bad idea, and automatically call a tow truck when you get stuck.

5 Tips to Improve Your Organization’s Digital Employee Experience

#1: Improve Digital Employee Experience Monitoring Home Networks

Every location presents different networking challenges, which makes ControlUp’s Digital Employee Experience management platform the perfect solution for viewing the health of your employees’ home network (or the networks for any place they choose to work). Whether your employees are running Windows, macOS, or Linux, ControlUp supplies out-of-the-box network metrics to help you quickly assess the network health of your employees’ endpoints.

ControlUp collects data about remote networks and can give recommendations based on what is happening. For example, a Wi-Fi signal strength of 60 percent can reduce overall performance by 80 percent. ControlUp is intelligent enough to measure the Wi-Fi signal strength and then notify users to move closer to their router to improve their digital employee experience.

ControlUp digital experience monitoring gives IT visibility into the last mile of networks for physical endpoints and virtual desktops. Our Digital Employee Experience management platform collects network metrics of endpoint devices running virtual sessions on Citrix, VMware Horizon, Azure Virtual Desktops, or on physical endpoints like Mac, Linux, IGEL, and Windows devices.

#2: Improve Digital Employee Experience Monitoring Physical Endpoints

Most remote workers have a physical device, such as a Windows or MAC laptop, that’s managed by IT with device management, security and compliance, and digital rights management security. Endpoint management manages the device but doesn’t capture the employee’s usability or their perception of the device or its apps and other technologies.

ControlUp’s digital employee experience tools understand the employee experience on physical endpoints wherever they are located. Data collected from ControlUp’s DEX solutions help IT detect any issues negatively affecting the digital employee experience to improve or fix problems quickly and get people back to doing the work they enjoy. ControlUp’s DEX management tools even automate fixes for recurring problems, so they’re resolved before help desk tickets are ever created. A typical example includes alerting the user to get closer to the Wi-Fi router to increase the signal strength and reduce latency issues affecting line of business applications or unified communications tools, like Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

#3: Digital Employee Experience Monitoring Unified Communications

Unified Communications (UC) tools—think Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Webex—are among the remote workforce’s most mission-critical applications. Monitoring and optimizing a UC call is a critical digital employee experience management priority. When employees have issues with Unified Comms, work stops. But is the problem with the service provider, the home network, the local device, or user error?

ControlUp’s digital employee experience management software for unified communications supplies a 360° view into the UC digital experience. For instance, when a call or meeting goes wrong, ControlUp knows whether the problem is with the UC service, the local network, VDI, or the endpoint device. ControlUp also understands, fixes, and optimizes UC-reliant peripherals like misconfigured microphones and speakers, VDI client optimization, and performance tuning to ensure the UC solution is always running optimally.

#4: Digital Employee Experience Monitoring SaaS Applications

When SaaS apps are slow or unavailable, business grinds to a halt and IT gets flooded with help desk calls. What’s needed is automated synthetic transaction testing to proactively alert IT and employees when SaaS and web applications are slow or unavailable.

ControlUp’s digital employee management tools synthetically test SaaS apps to alert IT and employees to potential issues. For example, network resources, such as an internal website, might be slow or unavailable at the end of every quarter (gotta get those sales numbers in, right?) This experiential data is critical to users who depend on the website at those times. With ControlUp’s experiential data, IT can provision more resources for servers during peak load times.

#5: Digital Employee Experience Troubleshooting & Remediation

When a device or an application slows down or breaks, IT needs the tools to fix the problem fast. ControlUp makes troubleshooting easy by raising issues in our dashboards and reports so you can remedy the problem with action scripts from a community-driven library or your scripts in production today. Scripts can be run manually or triggered automatically with definable thresholds to solve a problem or gather more information.

With ControlUp digital employee experience management tools, you can create a self-healing environment with an early warning system that sends notifications or executes a custom action to make IT aware of a problem. Afterward, custom actions are a powerful, repeatable solution IT can use to fix any device or application issue. ControlUp DEX management can run scripts you already have, or you can choose from a library of ControlUp community-driven actions.

But sometimes we need someone to show us what to do. ControlUp digital employee experience products allow IT to remotely control user sessions to help solve problems, no matter where they work​ or the operating system (e.g., Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc.) they use.

Remote work is here to stay. ControlUp makes the lives of IT admins (and the remote workers they support) as simple and stress-free as possible by:

1. Identifying problems on home (or unmanaged) networks
2. Making sure the physical endpoint device is providing a great user experience
3. Ensuring Unified Communications calls are meeting employees’ expectations
4. Knowing when SaaS applications slow or fail before the help desk gets overrun with calls
5. Making it possible to fix any device, no matter where they are

ControlUp delivers smart, easy-to-use solutions built for IT teams to make remote work more flexible and reliable, making it possible for them to deliver and manage a genuinely great digital employee experience, so people can be productive. In short, ControlUp powers the work-from-anywhere world.

Jeff Johnson

Jeff is a product marketing manager for ControlUp. He is responsible for evangelizing the Digital Employee Experience on physical endpoints such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. Jeff has spent his career specializing in enterprise strategies for client computing, application delivery, virtualization, and systems management. Jeff was one of the key architects of the Consumerization of IT Strategy for Microsoft, which has redefined how enterprises allow unmanaged devices to access corporate intellectual property.