Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management shines a spotlight on how well an organisation enables its people to work with technology. There are now some excellent DEX tools available; however, “DEX” should not be thought of as just a data-gathering and remediation tool. Much like ITSM, DEX is the combined effect of philosophy, culture, processes, communication, support, and leadership. And of course, technology based on automation, remediation, AI and more.
When DEX works well, employees encounter fewer barriers to being successful in their work. Technology “just works”. Decisions are clearer, collaboration is easier, and service outcomes improve. Time is saved, and IT is not blamed for poor business outcomes. Instead, IT is praised for enabling business success. When DEX is poorly executed or not considered at all, frustration grows, performance drops, and hidden costs accumulate. These costs rarely appear in a budget line, but they affect productivity, retention, customer satisfaction, and IT’s credibility.
It’s well established now that organisations that focus on employee experience see measurable improvement in how work flows, how change is adopted, and how IT is perceived. Those who ignore it often discover their biggest operational risks come not from technology, but from how people perceive IT
What Digital Employee Experience Actually Means
Gartner defines DEX as: “the quality of a workforce’s daily interactions with the technology they use, focusing on how intuitive, efficient, and supportive it is for them to perform their job.” However, we should remember that improving an employee’s digital experience is the outcome of DEX activities.
DEX is not just ‘making things perceived as better’ but is a whole-IT mindset and activity set designed to continually identify and deliver a range of positive experience-improving outcomes over time.
Strong DEX delivers measurable outcomes:
- Saved time
- Higher productivity
- Better engagement
- Lower cognitive load
- Faster adoption
- More predictable service
- Improved retention
Good experience removes friction. It allows people to focus on the work that matters rather than working around avoidable obstacles. This is why DEX connects directly to organisational performance.
Why IT Leaders Should Care
A poor technology experience reduces productivity across the entire organisation. Frustration and slow processes increase turnover and recruitment costs. Excessive friction creates failure demand and unnecessary support effort. Poor perception of IT damages trust and slows collaboration. Change becomes harder, slower, and more costly to implement. Customers notice when frontline staff are working around poor systems.
And above all, time is wasted. Time lost in IT; time lost across the business.
Let’s look at a fictional example.
Bob works in sales. His Windows laptop is 2 years old; it’s a bit slow, and Zoom calls are sometimes laggy. He’s had some critical business sales calls fail because Zoom crashed. He has worked out that he needs to reboot his laptop before every important meeting, just in case. He thinks it’s irritating, but has worked out something that kind of works for him. Once or twice a day. A 2-minute reboot.
But this is a big company; there are 500 salespeople worldwide.
And… they all do this, every day… Shall we “do the maths”? 500 people, 2 to 4 minutes rebooting every day during the working day is 1000 to 2000 minutes a day, which is… between 250,000 and 500,000 minutes a year of valuable sales time spent rebooting. 8,333 hours, 1190 working days of valuable sales time a year lost to rebooting to avoid bad Zoom calls.
Does it make sense yet?
Experience is not a soft metric. It’s a direct measure of how well IT enables the business to operate. And a poor digital experience costs time, money, reputation and ultimately career success. If employees can’t work well, it’s ITs problem to solve.
Signs Your Digital Employee Experience Is Failing
Organisations often recognise the symptoms long before they label them as experience issues.
1 – High Levels of Failure Demand
Support teams spend significant time correcting repetitive issues that should not have occurred in the first place. This is one of the clearest signs of poor DEX.
2 – Repeated Workarounds
Employees devise their own methods to bypass slow, unclear, or inconsistent processes. This creates risk, inconsistency, and hidden cost.
3 – Persistent Backlogs
When incident or request queues continue to grow, the underlying issue is often poor experience, driving unnecessary tickets.
4 – Slow Devices or Inconsistent Performance
Even minor delays in login, load times, or application responsiveness have a measurable impact when multiplied across the workforce.
5 – Onboarding Takes Too Much Effort
If new starters struggle with access, equipment, permissions, or support, poor DEX is already embedded in the organisation.
6 – Change Resistance Appears Early
People resist change when they don’t trust the technology, the process, or the support structure. This slows adoption and increases long-term cost.
7 – Engagement Drops Quietly
Formal CSAT scores may look positive, while informal feedback paints a very different picture. This gap almost always signals experience issues.
A word of caution. Don’t be fooled by the high user satisfaction score from your ticket-resolution survey. That is not the true digital employee experience, or a true measure of employees’ perception. What you have there is feedback from a tiny proportion of people who a) respond to ticket resolution surveys, and b) also can be bothered to contact IT in the first place.
The Real Cost of Ignoring Employee Experience
When DEX problems are ignored, costs accumulate in areas that are rarely measured directly:
- Lost time from slow systems and avoidable rework
- Increased support costs due to repetitive incidents
- Reduced service quality caused by frustrated frontline teams
- Lower retention and higher recruitment costs
- Delayed projects due to weak adoption and unclear communication
- Leadership time spent addressing operational noise rather than improvement
- Reduced credibility for IT when users feel unsupported
Also, all the above stop a focus on the innovative, the transformational, the business-positive improvements that IT could be bringing to drive business success.
These costs affect performance, culture, and the organisation’s ability to change at pace. They undermine improvement programmes, increase operational risk, and put pressure on already-stretched teams.
Ignoring DEX doesn’t make the problem manageable. It makes the impact harder to track and recover from.
What to Do
It’s not too late. DEX is still quite new as a concept. Early adopter IT leaders have been championing the value of DEX for some time, but only recently have the terms around DEX been widely established and accepted.
Forrester’s End User Experience Management Wave was first published in 2022, with Gartner finally accepting and promoting DEX with its first Magic Quadrant in 2024, and announcing DEX as a strategic priority for IT leaders in 2024.
With this ‘newness’ comes a slow, creeping industry understanding, but also some uncertainty and confusion. IT may claim ‘oh yes, we are now focussing on DEX’ as they roll out a new incident-resolution satisfaction survey from their ITSM tool, show some new satisfaction dashboards to leadership and talk about moving beyond SLAs to XLAs.
This is not DEX; it is not the employee’s technology experience
But this casual “us too” approach is falling far short of addressing the problem, let alone seizing the opportunity. Modern organisations rely on consistent, performant, predictable technology. When that experience is poor, the impact is significant and widespread.
So, take it seriously. Digital Employee Experience isn’t optional. It’s one of the strongest indicators of how well an organisation supports its people and how effectively it can operate. Poor experience creates waste, risk, and frustration. Strong experience enables better performance, better collaboration, and better outcomes.
If these signs feel familiar, a structured DEX assessment can help you understand what’s working, where friction is occurring, and which changes will have the greatest impact.
Without the right structure, philosophy and IT culture, new DEX investments may still fail. The tools are great, but you need the people ready. To use an analogy, the knives are sharp, but you need to be sure your cooks in the kitchen can use them to make the magic happen.
This article was written by Ian Aitchison.
BRC works with organisations to assess current experience, identify barriers, and create practical improvement plans. Get in touch to discuss how we can help you.