What IT Service Desk Managers Need to Know About Employee Experience

One of the hottest IT service management (ITSM) trends right now is employee experience and employee experience management. It’s still an evolving area, with the associated best practices formulated from ongoing organizational successes, but this isn’t a good enough reason for IT service desk managers to sit back and wait for more formalized help on employee experience management. Instead, you need to appreciate that improving employee experience takes time and requires cultural change. So, even if you expect the need for improved employee experiences in 12 months or even two years, within your organization, there’s a need to begin the investment in its improvement now.

This starts with understanding the “what,” “why,” and “how” of experience management and to help this blog outlines what IT service desk managers need to know.

From the what, to the why, to the how, this blog by @Joe_the_IT_Guy shares everything IT service desk managers need to know about employee experience. #servicedesk #EX Share on X

The “what” of employee experience

As the name suggests, “employee experience” is related to employees and, as such, what it means to one organization’s employees might differ from what it means to another’s. So while the “what” of employee experience can be explained using generic definition statements, what it means to your organization will depend on your employees and what matters most to them. It’s therefore vital, when seeking to improve employee experience, that the agreed and shared understanding of what employee experience is for your organization is in place as early as possible.

There are, of course, generic definitions that can be used as placeholders until your organization can clarify what employee experience means to it and its employees. For example, in a 2019 blog, Forrester Research stated that “Psychological research shows that the most important factor for employee experience is being able to make progress every day toward the work that they believe is most important. But when presented with this option, managers will consistently rank it dead last. Clearly, we have a gap.” Making employee experience, from the employee perspective, very much about being able to be productive.

Whereas Jacob Morgan, a best-selling author and speaker on employee experience defines it as “…creating an organization where employees WANT, not NEED to show up to work, by focusing on three environments which are culture, technology, and physical space.”

There are many other definitions of employee experience available on the Internet and in the growing number of publications related to the topic, but it’s important to remember that employee experience success will depend on defining what’s most important to your organization and its employees.

It’s important to remember that employee experience success will depend on defining what’s most important to your organization and its employees - @Joe_the_IT_guy #EX #servicedesk Share on X

The “why” of employee experience

While some might say that employee experience is about happier employees, or more engaged employees, or more productive employees, the “why” of employee experience is ultimately about better business operations and outcomes.

Taking it down a rung (on the “why” ladder), the need for employee experience management – based on the collection and analysis of experience data – is, in many ways, caused by the inadequacies of the traditional IT performance measures that focus on operational aspects of IT service delivery and support. Where they gauge what’s being done rather than what’s being achieved through what’s being done. Whereas experience measurement and management capabilities allow service providers to better understand what’s working well and what’s not, from an end-user perspective, and to address the identified issues based on what matters most to them.

Once employee experience management is embedded within an organization, future investments in IT can then be driven by what will have the biggest impact on business operations and outcomes based on what’s helping and hindering employee productivity.

The “how” of employee experience improvement

Employee experience data can be used to drive improvements in any area of your IT operations and services, allowing your IT organization to not only focus on the identified issues but also to prioritize the improvement efforts on what matters most to employees. So, this could be related to the devices, applications, or services that are provided to employees to do their jobs or the IT operations through which IT services and support are provided.

A good example of this is deciding where best to apply automation investments (assuming that not everything can be automated at once due to financial and/or change capacity limitations). Here, experience data can be used to focus the addition of new automation on what will have the biggest impact on employee productivity and, consequently, business operations and outcomes.

But this necessitates IT service desk managers understanding another “how” – the “how” of employee experience measurement.

Not sure where to apply your #automation investments? This blog by @Joe_the_IT_Guy shares how experience data can help. #EX Share on X

The “how” of employee experience measurement

There are various approaches to experience measurement and management available:

• Experience management solutions that focus on capturing employee feedback on IT’s performance (which is sometimes called “sentiment analysis”)
• Technology-based solutions that monitor the IT infrastructure to assess IT performance from an employee perspective
• Solutions that do both

Each solution type delivers an experience score but the calculation of this differs by solution.

However, the experience score alone is only half the story. Because knowing that something needs to be improved is not enough, there’s also the need to understand what matters most to employees. Otherwise, as with more traditional continual improvement efforts, there’s a danger that well-intentioned improvement activity is focused on the wrong things.

For experience management to be sustainable it requires the successes born of experience data – the related improvement investments – to slowly change the organizational culture - @Joe_the_IT_Guy #EX Share on X

The bottom line for employee experience management – making data-driven decisions and cultural change

A key to successful employee experience management is the data that’s captured. With this, informed decisions can be made around what to improve. For example, and continuing with automation, your IT service desk or wider IT organization can rise above automating what’s easy to automate to address what will make the biggest difference to employee experiences and then business operations and outcomes.

But this is still only the beginning. For experience management to be sustainable it requires the successes born of experience data – the related improvement investments – to slowly change the organizational culture. From the status quo, which is perhaps focused on service level agreements (SLAs), to a focus on employee experience and what has been termed “employee-centric IT.” This might sound odd at first, even for IT organizations that have already moved from being technology-centric to service-centric, but through the successes achieved with experience management people will realize that being employee-centric is ultimately being business-centric.

Thoughts? Please share with me in the comments.