Resolving tickets alone aren’t enough to reduce downtime for busy employees. Help desks also need to proactively prioritize DEX, too
It goes without saying that most employees these days depend heavily on technology. And it follows that when a disruption occurs, it can mean slowing down or stopping an employee’s productivity.
But the nuances of exactly how important digital employee experience (DEX) is often get overlooked.
In Lakeside Software’s recent Digital Workplace Productivity Report 2022, employees across industries reported that technology disruption costs an average total of about one hour of productive worktime a week. This doesn’t necessarily mean that workers are completely offline for an hour a week, though — they’re likely spending that time on system reboots and troubleshoots instead of on focused work.
These small moments of lost productivity add up, but there are steps organizations can take to reduce downtime and lessen the number of disruptions in employees’ work.
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The Employee Cost of Downtime
The cost of downtime can be difficult to quantify, but sources suggest it’s significant. Gartner1 once estimated that the cost of system-wide downtime is about $5,600 per minute.
In addition to the financial costs, employee morale also takes a hit when systems or devices are down. For an average total of an hour a week, employees are pausing their work to reboot their devices, restart software, or watch loading screens in frustration — all while their workloads continue to grow. It’s no surprise that this would become irritating.
This frustration explains why nearly 54% of employees say that digital experience at work is important or very important when deciding whether to stay with a current employer, according to Lakeside’s 2022 global survey results. This suggests that quality of DEX could be a significant factor for employee retention. If employees do decide to seek a more efficient working environment, the cost of replacing them can be up to three times the position’s salary.
It clearly benefits an organization to make sure its employees experience as little downtime as possible. The question then becomes, how?
Help Desks Alone Aren’t Enough
The traditional approach to improving uptime is to deliver better help desk service, and this isn’t a bad place to start. It undoubtedly is important to be more responsive to tickets and to improve mean time to resolution (MTTR).
But these help desk improvements don’t go far enough. Resolving help desk tickets can’t be the end of the story because, depending on the industry, an average of 27% to 53% of employees never report IT issues, according to Lakeside research.
This is often because end users try to create their own workarounds or fix the problem themselves before filing a ticket and waiting for assistance from IT. In many cases, users may even choose to suffer in silence if they can’t fix the issue on their own.
That’s why the help desk on its own can’t solve every problem. Organizations also need a full, holistic view of digital employee experience to understand what issues are occurring, their root causes, and how to fix them.
How to Prioritize DEX for Reduced Downtime
Prioritizing DEX can yield significant benefits for enterprises struggling to reduce downtime. In fact, on average, organizations that prioritize DEX lose only about a quarter of the productive time (30 minutes per week) compared to organizations that don’t (128 minutes per week), according to Lakeside’s Digital Workplace Productivity Report.
What, exactly, does prioritizing DEX mean? By tracking, understanding, and optimizing digital employee experience, which is the quality of users’ interactions with workplace technology, organizations can put end users at the heart of critical IT strategies that improve productivity and provide better business outcomes.
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A digital experience management solution or similar technology can provide the granular level of IT visibility that teams need to understand what end users experience while using devices and apps. It also provides real-time and historical data on the performance of hardware, software, networks, and other endpoints, giving help desks an estate-wide view of the most common issues impacting users. This kind of holistic knowledge can help IT teams proactively identify, address, and even prevent digital friction and disruptions to help improve DEX over the long term.
Remote remediation, for example, is a vital strategy for maintaining quality digital employee experiences among hybrid workforces. Once an issue has been identified, the help desk can work quickly to resolve the problem — through automations, updates, patches, etc. — without having to physically troubleshoot a device and inconvenience end users. Not only does this streamline help desk operations, but it can even help stop issues before they have a chance to impact employees and their work.
Help Employees Work at Full Capacity
Digital employee experience is essential for employee productivity, satisfaction, and even retention — not to mention for the bottom line. Making your IT team more proactive with good DEX management can help you keep your employees working at their full potential without disruption.
Reduce Downtime with Lakeside
Discover how Lakeside’s Digital Experience Cloud can optimize your IT environment and drive more proactive help desk solutions. Request a customized demo today.
1. Gartner, “The Cost of Downtime,” Andrew Lerner, Gartner, July 16, 2014.↩
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
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