How to measure your digital workplace satisfaction

Introducing the Employee Experience Index (EXI)

Aleksandra Domagala
Lead User Experience Consultant at Capgemini Poland

Pandemic change of the work conditions, the growing value of user-centricity, and many organizations need to continuously improve their attractiveness to led us to the creation of the Employee Experience Index. 

Current turbulent times changes IT focus

During the last months, we observe a growing interest in the subject of user experience quantifying. Also, this tendency has significantly grown cause the Covid-19 pandemic has drastically changed our work conditions. Some of us are more satisfied with the chance to work from the familiar environment, others complain about countless distractions and the lack of border between our private and professional life. Each company approaches pandemic and future, post-pandemic work conditions differently, proposing various versions of a hybrid environment to their employees.

IT infrastructure, devices, applications are indisputably elements that should work reliably no matter where the employee works, in the office building, or at home. These are all elements that may significantly decrease the comfort of work and disrupt even more the extremely thin line between our private and professional life. Hence, employee experience is no longer exclusively the concern of Human Resources but IT departments also start to figure out how to improve the experience of the workforce. The question of whether our company is “a great place to work” in those turbulent times where other aspects grow in importance took a completely different meaning. The overall interest in the digital workplace and its experience measurement skyrocketed.

New and holistic ways needed for experience measurement

IT tickets resolution time, satisfaction from the IT Service Desk, disc capacity is no longer sufficient and relevant sources of the information regarding employees and their overall experience regarding workplace, and precisely, from the technology they are provided with. IT needs to know much more to undertake strategic directions and roll out relevant projects. There are many questions, e.g. do employees feel comfortable, do they feel that they collaborate effectively, do they thank that they use technology in a new environment efficiently. All these “soft” elements of experience should be measured as well. But how to measure something that seems to be completely non-measurable?

These questions led our team to the concept of the Employee Experience Index (EXI). Based on previously conducted projects, hours of discussions with business stakeholders and different experts we named core elements that should be incorporated in the EXI. The mechanism that we were creating was supposed to have all these characteristics:

1. Measures “soft” experience changes explained by “hard” metrics from the systems.
2. Measures an overall employee’s experience – contrary to immediate and changeable opinions which are typically expressed in the common work-related surveys.
3. Be based on an advanced model that enables the prediction of experience changes in the future. Although complex, results must be presented in a way that is easy to understand by a differentiated audience.
4. Presents experience score divided to e.g. different locations, types of users (personas), or other elements, based on the business needs.
5. Be technology agnostic, meaning that the solution might be used in completely different setups.
6. And to have a strong scientific background.

I can truly say that we set ourselves very high expectations. After many months of work, our team consisting of specialists from different domains succeeded. Now, EXI is ready, gathers information continuously, in real-time, data is presented on easy to read dashboard. The final model not only presents how experience fluctuates but also predicts how it will change in the future. But of course, each company’s IT ecosystem is distinct, and people are very different, so will be EXI. One fits for all doesn’t work here for sure, so we tailor it to organizational context to bring the most value.

And finally, what I must honestly tell you. As a user experience professional, psychologist, and just as an ordinary person trying to deal with all highs and lows of working remotely, I am really glad that we created this solution. I strongly believe that EXI will help companies gauge their employees’ experience, resolve workplace-related problems, and help employees to go through these hard times better.

For further details please check out our Capgemini Connected Employee Experience.

Thank you for reading. For more information and employee experience trends around this topic, you can reach out to me via my expert’s profile.