HR provides the input, IT realises the optimal experience
With DEX, it’s all about the employees, they should be central. That is where the HR department comes in, since it’s also responsible for the overall employee experience. HR has to ensure an optimal employee journey, which starts with onboarding. The digital aspect of employee experience continues to grow in importance every year and is fortunately becoming a priority for more and more HR leaders.
The bits and bytes are of course IT’s field of expertise, but nobody knows HR processes and the needs and requirements of employees better than HR itself. Traditionally, HR and IT are not used to working together, but when it comes to DEX, they have to be.
This produces synergy. From the people side, HR knows how to please employees. And with the support and input from HR (as well as from communication, as we will explain shortly), IT can design and optimise the IT landscape to maximise adoption vis-à-vis technologies. What are the consequences? Employees can work as easily as possible and the organisation performs as well as possible.
It is in fact also a very logical collaboration. After all, IT deploys digital infrastructure as an asset to keep the organisation running, HR does the same but with people as assets.
HR, communications and IT as DEX dream team
When DEX becomes an organisational focal point, HR, communication and IT can form a dream team. HR thereby acts as a feeler among current and future employees. When hiring new people, HR can inquire about their technology wishes and requirements. For existing employees, periodic surveys are a proven method to keep a finger on the pulse.
Communications is also an important stakeholder, traditionally being mostly in charge of the intranet. The intranet is often fully or partially integrated into the modern workspace. Besides the intranet, other social and collaboration tools also contribute to effective and adequate internal and external communication. It is therefore good to closely involve the communication department in optimising the DEX, as it simply has the most expertise in this area.
New insights from HR and communications should be submitted to IT as quickly and clearly as possible. Finally, it is of course of great value when the various team leaders keep the HR, communication and IT departments informed of any requirements and changes.
It is then up to IT to distil requirements from this and see how best to realise them within the current infrastructure. Want a next-level digital employee experience? Then form a DEX task force. Such a task force (which meets on a regular basis) should include people from HR, communication and IT, but also team leaders and end users from other departments.
Adaptive is the key to adoption
If you cram all applications, communication and information into one working environment it becomes far too much and employees will become irritated sooner rather than later. So the workspace has to be easy to adapt to specific groups and individuals and automatically adjust itself to simplify working. Result: everyone only sees the applications, tasks and information relevant to them.
