Enhancing the Employee Digital Experience
To recruit and retain top talent, organizations must create a streamlined, secure digital experience that helps workers achieve their goals.
With the market for skilled employees as tight as it’s ever been, organizations across industries are seeking any possible edge to find and keep talented workers. Compensation and benefits are important, of course, but managers are also finding that employees — especially younger employees — have little patience for subpar work environments and experiences.
After the shift to remote work over the past couple of years, “work experience” and “digital experience” have become essentially synonymous. To create a consistently excellent digital experience for their employees, organizations must deliver on these four key points.
Device Lifecycle Management Can Present Challenges
Most organizations can no longer handle the manual configuration of laptops and mobile devices. There are simply too many workers using too many devices in too many locations.
Zero-touch onboarding and enrollment features, enabled through mobile device management (MDM) and unified endpoint management (UEM) solutions, simplify device deployment and improve the end-user experience. Not only do IT shops save time and hassle, but employees are able to get up and running on their new devices as soon as they receive them. Device as a Service is one option that helps organizations to streamline device lifecycle management, including maintenance, break/fix and even device retirement.
Organizations Must Prioritize Application Delivery
Workers need to be able to easily — and instantly — access the digital tools that help them do their jobs. Through MDM and UEM tools, organizations can create unified app portals that bring together their entire application environments, including custom apps and cloud software. Corporate data and apps can then be protected through conditional access and compliance policies enforced by these solutions.
Many organizations are now pursuing app modernization initiatives, improving the performance and agility of their applications. App modernization can also help organizations to cut costs, speed up their time to market and take full advantage of their multicloud ecosystems.
Identity and Access Management Can Address Security Concerns
Several years ago, when most employees used only a handful of apps over the course of a workday, it may have been acceptable for them to individually log in to each one. Now, with workers switching back and forth between multiple apps all day, single sign-on (SSO) is a must.
The ability to authenticate against and log in to all their apps at once will not only make employees more productive, but more important, it will boost job satisfaction by preventing aggravation and frustration. Modern MDM and UEM tools can also enable other aspects of identity and access management by combining a unified app catalog with SSO to deliver a great employee experience that’s consistent on any device.
Employees Need Access to a Secure and Connected Workspace
Security, of course, should be baked into all IT initiatives. But especially in an era when the lines between the workplace and the home are being blurred, organizations must take proactive steps to ensure the security of both their corporate systems and their employees’ resources. For instance, VPN connections and virtual desktop infrastructure can help to create secure connections between employee devices and corporate networks.
Security training is also important and can help employees avoid falling for common attacks, such as phishing attempts and “man in the middle” attacks. For many organizations, services from a trusted partner like CDW are an important component of their efforts to boost cybersecurity and improve the employee digital experience as a whole.
Story by Michael Pallarino, a senior field solutions architect on the CDW Digital Workspace Team. He has more than 17 years of experience in enterprise mobility and end-user computing, with a strong background in consulting with organizations on digital workspace strategies and best practices that deliver compelling value and competitive advantages. As a subject matter expert on the latest digital workspace solutions, Michael provides clients with pre-sales consulting, comprehensive project planning and technical guidance on solution implementations. His primary goal is to help organizations enable their mobile workforces, cut costs and improve their end-user experiences. Michael’s technical expertise includes unified endpoint management, mobile device management, virtual desktop infrastructure, cellular networking, Device as a Service, mobile security and other digital workspace technologies.
