CIO's Guide to Employee Experience Management

Employee Experience becoming a top priority of CIOs

Employee experience has become a top priority for CIOs and HR leaders alike. In fact, research company Gartner and many other publications and analysts are now listing Employee Experience (EX) as one of the top priorities for 2020. ITSM.tools asked from 20 vendors and analysts about Trends for 2020 and most of them listed Employee or Customer Experience.

But why is it related to CIOs and not just HR managers? Because IT touches employees' everyday work even more than HR with their perks, benefits or facilities with their nice office walls and lounge chairs. CIOs can be in the driver's seat of leading IT and Service Management with Employee Experience.

Main Benefits for CIOs are:

Prove Business Value of IT by increased end-user happiness and productivity
Enables IT to deliver an end-user experience above average and continuously improve it
Managing outsourced partners with XLA (Experience Level Agreement) instead of SLA
Make data-driven decisions and eliminate gut feelings with real-time Experience Data
Align the whole IT department to focus on developing areas that will make end-users happier and more productive

With the benefits of this level, it's hard to ignore Employee Experience's importance.

It's about the cultural change of IT

steps to employee experience management maturity diagram Really, what we are talking about here is changing how IT role's are more about making employees, the end-users, more productive and not just focusing on keeping the lights on. Cloud platforms have moved these administrative jobs away from IT departments, allowing IT people to focus on experience and productivity, which leads to creating business value.

This change doesn't happen in one night and that's why approaching Employee Experience might feel like a daunting task for CIOs and IT teams.

Steps to Employee Experience Management are:

Understand the experiences by measuring them continuously
Share those results, as bad as they might be, with everyone
This allows you to focus and agree with partners and vendors on how to improve things and finally set Experience Level Agreements (XLAs)
Finally you can transform your IT culture to be Employee-Centric

From these steps, we have seen that our customers have been able to improve their employees' productivity by 26%.

Fellow CIOs are already doing it

You are not alone with this challenge, but for comfort, here are two stories from two CIOs who already started this journey. Listen to these interviews and see how motivating the Employee Experience journey can be.