What is digital employee experience (DEX)?
Digital employee experience (DEX) is the overall quality and effectiveness of an employee's interactions with digital technologies and tools within their workplace. It covers everything from how easily employees can access their applications and data, the speed and responsiveness of devices, to the intuitiveness of software interfaces and the quality of IT support. As most modern work now heavily involves digital tools, DEX focuses on creating seamless, productive, and satisfying technology experiences that empower employees to do their best work, no matter where they are.
A strong DEX helps reduce frustration and downtime, lowers helpdesk requests, and fosters employee engagement by making technology an enabler rather than a barrier.
A strong digital employee experience involves:
- Easy-to-use software
- Reliable and well-performing devices and applications
- Seamless access to needed information and systems from almost any location
- Effective digital collaboration and communication tools
- Proactive IT support and issue resolution
- Enhancing DEX is crucial for employee productivity, engagement, and retention
The new era of digital employee experience
Employees now expect enterprise technology to be as intuitive, fast, and reliable as the consumer apps they use daily. A positive DEX means empowering individuals with personalized experiences that match their device preferences and job requirements, whether working in the office, remotely, or in hybrid environments.
With the growing complexity of digital tools, there is a strong emphasis on integration, orchestration, and AI-powered automation to proactively address issues and streamline workflows. As digital workplaces evolve, organizations recognize that enhancing DEX is crucial to attracting talent, improving productivity, and maintaining a competitive advantage.
A high-quality or mature DEX strategy can increase productivity by minimizing IT issues and friction points. This allows employees to focus on value-creating work. When employees experience seamless tech increases engagement, which can lead to higher effort, reduce turnover, and help eliminate bottlenecks for better customer focus.
DEX has become a critical component of flexible work environments like remote and hybrid work. It can be essential for attracting top talent and supporting business continuity.
DEX can also reduce security risks by discouraging employees from seeking insecure workarounds, which supports better compliance. It also strengthens organizational agility, allowing faster responses to business changes and opportunities.
Neglecting the digital employee experience can result in frustration, security vulnerabilities, and decreased productivity.
Can you measure DEX?
Measuring DEX is essential for understanding and improving how employees interact with workplace technology. Measurement is both qualitative and quantitative. Regular surveys like pulse and eNPS gather subjective data, pain points, and collect contextual feedback about digital interactions. DEX tools and DEX solutions allow companies to monitor how employees are using tools, like login frequency, time spent on applications, click paths, and common errors that can reveal adoption issues. Digital employee experience platforms can track response times, transaction success rates, and overall digital workflow efficiency.
Companies with a mature DEX strategy can track device and application reliability, network speed, crash rates, downtime, and error rates to assess the underlying health of digital systems. Application and network performance monitoring ensures that digital tools meet speed and reliability expectations.
Metrics around DEX include employee satisfaction scores, eNPS scores, application performance and uptime, ticket resolution times, usage and adoption rates, error rates, and crash frequency.
The business impact of digital employee experience
Studies indicate organizations prioritizing DEX and digital workplace initiatives outperform their peers in revenue growth, employee satisfaction, and operational resilience.
A well-executed DEX strategy delivers:
- Increased employee productivity and engagement.
- Lower IT support costs through automation and issue prevention.
- Enhanced attraction and retention of top talent.
- Greater agility for hybrid and remote work.
- Improved security posture without compromising user experience.
How companies utilize digital employee experience
- Frictionless communication: Imagine a company that can roll out a dedicated internal communications app where over 90% of employees can now connect to essential information to be more informed. This ‘hub’ of updates can include sections for onboarding, training, and crises communication. Employees can now self-serve for information and connect to others quickly when searching for information.
- Transformation at scale: A company prioritized letting employees have tool choice when launching new platforms and allowed for a faster and higher adoption rate.
- Proactive issue resolution and IT optimization: With proactive endpoint monitoring, real-time remediation, and application optimization, a company can reduce software costs, improve compliance, and minimize support tickets. This not only improves internal performance but also external customer service satisfaction as employees can serve customers faster.
Digital employee experience is not just about technology; it’s about enabling real business outcomes. Streamline workflows, better communication, and preemptive and intuitive IT support can lead to better productivity, innovation, retention, customer satisfaction, and profitability. Intentional investment in DEX can translate to measurable business value and a more resilient, high-performing organization.
Why is digital employee experience essential?
As the digital workplace becomes the norm, employee success now hinges on seamless technology experiences. Poor DEX leads to frustration, disengagement, higher attrition, and lost productivity. By contrast, positive experiences empower employees, foster innovation, and enhance collaboration.
With hybrid work and flexible workstyles here to stay, investing in DEX is no longer optional but a strategic imperative for sustainable business success.
- Digital employee experience is linked to an organization’s competitive position, growth, and employee sentiment. There is a strong correlation between the employee’s digital experience and the annual growth level of an organization.
- Positive employee experience makes an employee more likely to recommend their company if they have a great digital experience. This experience includes finding the right apps, having the right apps, and being able to work anywhere easily.
- While most IT departments believe they are delivering the tools to employees to perform their jobs, less than half of HR and workers feel they do not have the right digital tools. IT could do more to improve the employee experience.
- IT teams understand that digital employee experiences are becoming a top priority within organizations, but they find that there is a lack of funding, time, and understanding needed to meet employees’ needs.
- Employees want to be included in digital employee experience decisions. The employees’ top priorities include remote work, finding and installing apps, and improving onboarding efficiency.
How to get started with digital employee experience
Begin by assessing current technology usage and employee feedback. Choose platforms that unify app delivery, provide comprehensive monitoring, and support automation and AI insights.
Omnissa Workspace ONE is an example of a digital workspace platform that delivers exceptional DEX by offering more secure, unified access to virtually any app on most devices, simplifying IT management, and enabling fast support.
Building a strong digital employee experience is a core pillar of modern digital transformation, unlocking the full potential of the workforce and positioning organizations for the future.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Employee productivity gains like tracking reduction in downtime, increases in completed tasks, or improvements in outputs per employee are important. Metrics like average time saved per incident and percentage reduction in IT-related productivity blockers are also valuable. Measuring reduction in help desk ticket volume, mean time to resolution (MTTR), and the adoption of self-service and automation, which can reduce manual intervention, can be a great metric. Employee engagement through employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), sentiment analysis, or engagement can be used to quantify improvements to the work environment. DEX can also monitor how frequently tools are adopted and monitor high usage rates, which can indicate a high alignment which means a good return on investment. DEX can also measure how quickly new hires can become productive, digitally ready and measure time to value.
| Employee productivity | Downtime reduction, tasks per FTE |
| IT costs savings | Lower MTTR, reduced ticket volume |
| Employee engagement | eNPS, sentiment score |
| Tool or process adoption | Usage rates, self service % |
| Onboarding speed | Time to productivity |
| Customer / business impact | CSAT, revenue per employee |
Yes, Omnissa DEX (digital employee experience) is designed to integrate with Horizon virtual desktop and apps. This integration allows enterprises to capture, analyze, and act on real user experience metrics from Horizon environments within the Omnissa Intelligence platform. Experience Management for Horizon collects telemetry from Horizon infrastructure and user sessions, enabling IT teams to monitor key experience indicators—such as logon duration, session performance, and application health through a dashboard. This integration supports analytics, scoring, and automated remediation workflows across both physical and virtual desktop environments, with out-of-the-box support for Horizon as a core virtual platform whether on-premises, hybrid, or cloud hosted.
Yes, Omnissa DEX works across all major operating systems including Windows and macOS, providing digital employee experience management for endpoints running these platforms. The solution supports telemetry collection analytics, and remediation on both Windows and Mac devices with specialized agents and applications for each operating system. For Windows devices, DEX is built into the Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub, enabling comprehensive experience data capture whether devices are fully managed or enrolled in Hub Registered mode. For macOS, DE requires Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub and the Digital Experience app to collect telemetry. Omnissa DEX also supports a broad range of other platforms like iOS, Android, Chrome OS, Linux, and IoT devices for insights into diverse device fleets.
