4 steps for building a new DEX strategy

This move to hybrid work has transformed the role of the digital work experience in most businesses. In the past, it was a useful tool that connected a small number of remote workers with a primarily on-prem workforce. Today, it has become the central home where every employee connects, collaborates, and completes their work. 

Yet this transformation has been a bit shaky. According to Gartner, 47% of employees report high friction in their digital work experiences, and 34% experience this friction several times a week. High-bandwidth business applications are now being run through VPNs on unreliable home networks, organizations have lost visibility and control over the status and performance of these apps and the endpoints they run on, and when something breaks employees either suffer in silence, create a shadow IT workaround, or launch helpdesk tickets for simple, avoidable problems. The result? 

• Chronic and acute performance issues are left unseen and unresolved, leading to large-scale downtime.
• Employees encounter performance issues and unsatisfying experiences, leading to lower engagement and retention rates. 
• IT help desks are barraged by tickets for systemic issues and cannot focus on higher-lever strategic responsibilities. 
• IT leadership and the C-suite lack the ability to systematically identify issues in their experiences and to then improve them. 

To solve these problems, organizations must update their DEX strategy to meet the needs of today’s large-scale hybrid workforces. To do so, they can follow four simple steps that address the core challenges a modern DEX strategy needs to overcome.

Step 1: Find and fix problems — proactively

Employees will inevitably run into problems with their endpoints and applications that lead to reduced performance and unsatisfying experiences. A modern DEX strategy must be able to proactively identify and remediate these technical problems before they result in downtime, helpdesk tickets, or other preventable issues. 

To do so, a modern DEX strategy must be able to:

• Monitor for performance issues across endpoints and applications in real time
• Scan an application or endpoint and detect if it has encountered any issues
• Remediate issues as soon as they are detected — remotely
• Remediate issues without interrupting an employee’s workflows
• Determine if performance issues are localized or systemic
• Remediate issues at scale, on every asset they might appear on 

Step 2: Increase employee engagement and satisfaction

A lacking DEX strategy can lower a workforce’s engagement and satisfaction. After all, employees now spend most — if not all — of their work time leveraging some aspect of their organization’s DEX strategy. A modern DEX strategy must be able to monitor and measure how employees feel about it and identify where it can be improved.

To do so, a modern DEX strategy must be able to:

• Quantify and qualify how employees feel about it
• Learn where it can be improved to make the biggest impact
• Measure how changes to the DEX impact engagement and satisfaction
• Collect, quantify, and report on employee sentiment for senior leaders
• Proactively close the relationship gap between employees and IT

Step 3: Reduce the burden on IT helpdesk

The move to DEX-enabled hybrid work has put a big burden on the IT helpdesk. It’s flooded them with routine support tickets and taken their focus off higher-order responsibilities. A modern DEX strategy must reduce the number of helpdesk tickets, accelerate the resolution of issues, and increase IT’s bandwidth for bigger projects.

To do so, a modern DEX strategy must be able to:

• Resolve application and endpoint issues without hands-on IT intervention
• Empower employees to identify and resolve their own issues
• Ensure employees only receive notifications about relevant issues
• Identify and expedite issues that need hands-on helpdesk support
• Prevent issues from large-scale events like patches and updates

Step 4: Prioritize DEX strategy

Finally, organizations must make their DEX a strategic priority. Otherwise, their DEX might become a heavy investment that doesn’t deliver results and that silently reduces performance, engagement, and efficiency. A modern DEX strategy must be continuously monitored, managed, and improved in a data-driven manner.

To do so, a modern DEX strategy must be able to:

• Build a real-time view of the experience’s performance and sentiment
• Report on the quantitative and qualitative performance of the experience
• Identify what will make the biggest impact on performance and sentiment
• Design targeted action plans to rationally improve the experience
• Create a score for the health of experiences that can be improved over time

Bringing new strategies to life: what to look for in DEX platforms

A modern DEX strategy needs to deploy many new capabilities remotely, in real time, at global scale. To do so, it can leverage a new class of solutions: Digital Employee Experience (DEX) platforms. These platforms were designed to provide every capability an organization needs to monitor, manage, and improve every key aspect of their digital employee experiences from a single, unified solution. 

While DEX platforms are an emerging class of solution, multiple options are already available on the market. When selecting which DEX platform, organizations can evaluate them across a few core criteria. These include the ability to:

Proactively resolve performance issues: A DEX platform needs to measure asset performance in real time, detect application and endpoint issues, monitor performance metrics and thresholds, and resolve performance issues remotely without disrupting normal workflows or allowing downtime. 

Measure and improve employee sentiment: A DEX platform must create bidirectional feedback loops to engage employees by sending custom surveys that measure how they feel about their digital experiences, increase adoption of services, and create a qualitative and quantitative picture of engagement levels.

Reduce helpdesk tickets: A DEX platform needs to solve performance issues before they become helpdesk tickets, and let IT refocus on higher-order priorities, by automating remediation workflows, sending employees self-service workflows to resolve their issues, and identifying patterns to find and fix hidden systemic issues.

Turn DEX into a strategy priority: Finally, a DEX platform must offer a data-driven approach to ensuring DEX strategy delivers value, by running reports for the C-suite, measuring, and tracking the impact of DEX initiatives, performing root-cause analysis of issues at multiple levels, and defining improvable scores for the DEX as a whole.  

Taking the next step to modernize DEX, today

An organization’s digital work experience will only become more important as hybrid work continues to expand, and digital transformations progress. Every organization needs to take the moment to evaluate its existing DEX strategy, to determine if it is meeting the needs of today’s digital environments, and to identify where there’s room for improvement by modernizing its strategies, processes, and toolsets. 

Learn more about Tanium’s DEX solution, available on the industry’s first and only converged endpoint management (XEM) platform.

About Author

AndyC

Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.

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