By Hank Marquis

The Digital [Human] Experience Formula

Are you leveraging the Human Experience Formula (HEF) to create positive Digital Employee Experiences?

In digital workplaces, IT must understand their digital employees' expectations and matching perceptions and how their experiences measure up—by workgroup!

Virtually no IT organizations are measuring experience expectations, though. And most measurements of digital employee perceptions include but a fraction of the five determinants of satisfaction.

If yours is like most IT organizations, you measure digital delivery's operational technology attributes to monitor the technical characteristics required for an application to function. If you're measuring satisfaction (NPS, CES, etc.), you also get a vague sense that something might be wrong, but you're unsure what. Which leads you back to your technical metrics, and the loop repeats.

Measuring the technology of IT service support and delivery is essential. There are specifications for it, and it has a name: Quality of Service, or QoS. But it takes more to understand and create positive digital employee experiences than QoS.

What's missing is insight into the digital employee looking outwards into IT. That outside-in perspective has a name, too: Quality of Experience (QoE) or simply QX. The Human Experience Formula is a concept that describes how people gauge their satisfaction with an experience to their expectations; it's how you measure QX.

Human Experience = Perception - Expectations

Experience is humanistic. Researchers and scientists calculate human e(X)perience by subtracting (p)erception from (e)xpectation: X = p - e.

You should too. You can use this formula to measure different types of human experiences too. It works for Customer Experience (CX), User Experience (UX), and Digital Employee Experience (DEX).

From a DEX point of view, by understanding people's expectations in a given workgroup and their perceptions of their Experience, you, as an IT service provider, can better assess the quality of your user, customer, and digital employee experiences. It can change your QoS efforts and lead you to clear policies for specific groups of employees based on facts and their needs.

Unfortunately, many organizations are still not leveraging the Human Experience Formula to create positive digital employee experiences.

A vital part of meeting expectations is knowing them and accepting that you cannot judge Experience by technical QoS metrics alone. The so-called "speeds and feeds" of yesterday's IT organization are not what employees today care most about — technology mostly works today. Employees today focus on how that technology and its delivery help them achieve results they care about.

You also have to shape expectations to ensure you deliver a positive digital experience. Shaping includes communicating honestly about what they can expect and not over-promising. Explaining why your service delivery is as it can go a long way.

Too many IT organizations assume their customers and digital employees are technical neophytes and hide or even fib about what delivery to expect and why it is as it is. This belief is less accurate and more harmful every day. Employees are not digitally naive. They are co-creators of enterprise value.

Along with the technology, please give them the necessary tools and training to complete tasks most effectively with what they've got. Ensure their feedback is taken seriously and acted upon, and include them in all significant planning activities. Use the Human Experience Formula to measure employee satisfaction and to meet — and shape — employee expectations.

By leveraging the Human Experience Formula, you can better understand your employees' expectations and ensure that you, your teams, and your partners create a positive experience.

Creating a positive digital employee experience is essential for organizational success. Employees working with good DEX can achieve 37% more daily. In contrast, bad DEX can drop employee productivity by over 30%.

Please comment or reach out and let me know what you think, I'd love to talk with you!

Best,
Hank

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