Digital innovation and employee experience: making the connection

Executive Summary 

Digital transformation is redefining how people interact with each other, ultimately changing business processes and the nature of work itself. For that reason, senior leaders serious about transformation must not only equip employees with the right technology tools but provide them with convenient, seamless, relevant and personalised experiences through every stage of their work lives.

In this MIT SMR Connections Executive Conversation article, Mike McDaniel, president, Modern Workplace at DXC Technology, and Ryan Steinberger, senior vice president at Pfizer Digital, discuss transforming the employee journey. They take on a range of related topics including recasting the IT support model, adopting new norms for collaboration and establishing new pathways to engagement and empowerment.

“Employee sentiment is becoming the new currency for DXC as we serve our customers and our colleagues,” McDaniel says. "Traditional IT metrics don’t work for digital experiences. IT processes have generally been measured not on the employee experience as a whole but instead on a narrow perspective — ‘Did I fix your problem?’ — and on operational metrics such as ‘How fast did you answer the call?’ or ‘What’s your average handle time?’ Today, none of that has anything to do with true employee sentiment — that is, how did the employee feel when going through the help desk process? That’s where we have to do better.”

McDaniel and Steinberger consider steps to make the connection between digital innovation and employee experience including:

• Empowering employees to do their jobs on whatever systems they are using
• Delivering personalised, consumer-like digital support experiences using AI, automation and self-service
• Ensuring that remote participants have an equitable experience on par with being there in person, potentially using the metaverse
• Affording them flexibility about where they do their work and how they do it, depending on business needs

Given that people spend a lot of time at work, “we want to make sure that people enjoy what they do, the environment they work in, and the people they work with,” Steinberger says. “It’s pretty hard to do that if you’re providing people with a poor work experience. That’s why we try to create the strongest digital experiences for our people, to help them do their best work every day.”