Assessing the Digital e mployee xperience by Anna Grome If you want to engineer the digital employee experience (DEX) to support your organization's employee experience and business objectives, you might find yourself asking questions such as: ■ Is my organization's DEX generally a good one? Is it helping us achieve our business objectives? Or does it need improvement? ■ If we need to improve THE ORGANIZATION'S DEX, where should we focus those improvement efforts? ■ If we've already invested in improving the organization's DEX, how do we know if our efforts have made a difference? The way to answer these questions is through assessment. Assessing the DEX gives you insight into how employees are experiencing the digital environment today and where attention might be needed for improvement. The level of rigor for assessment is ultimately up to you and your organization. A more rigorous approach requires more time and resources, but it can give you greater confidence in the validity of the insights and in the decisions that stem from the assessment. Yet, even relatively informal assessment methods can provide useful and directionally relevant insight into questions about your organization's DEX. If you're not sure where to start with assessing your organization's DEX, we offer some tips here. 1. Define what gooD looks like. Before doing any assessment, it's important to first lay the foundation and define what a good DEX is for your organization. How will we know it when we see it? The principles of an optimal digital experience can be found in scholarly literature from the fields of human factors and cognitive science. It's our job to contextualize those principles to our work environment and align the DEX to the organizational strategy and key business objectives.