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Want to Keep Your Employees? Prioritize Their Digital Experience

Mike Marks
Riverbed

Companies have historically relied on tools that warn IT teams when their digital systems are experiencing glitches or attacks. But in an age where consumer loyalty is fickle and hybrid workers' Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is paramount for productivity, companies cannot afford to retroactively deal with IT failures that slow down employee productivity.

What if, instead, companies considered proactive solutions to their digital experience that provided greater visibility into the potential pitfalls of their IT systems? Rather than reactively dealing with the aftermath of digital downfalls, companies can take matters into their own hands by assessing how their employees are reacting to the applications in play.

With 74% of Millennial and GenZ workers taking over the workforce, employees have an increased expectation on the efficiency of their digital work experience. The digital landscape is quickly evolving, and companies have to keep up if they want to deliver a digital experience that improves employee productivity, customer experience, and business performance. Below are three ways that real-time employee feedback allows for greater IT effectiveness, uncovers what's working well, and flags potential pitfalls.

Creating Tailored Solutions for Employee Feedback Helps Proactively Improve a Company's Digital Experience

Tailored surveys that span across devices and locations can provide companies with targeted areas of IT optimization and improvement. Companies need to also consider an employee's digital buy-in and how that affects productivity and retention. Employee buy-in is a key component for successful digital transformation within a company.

By implementing real-time feedback that pairs qualitative telemetry with contextual user data, companies can gain a more accurate assessment of how their applications are performing and where they can improve. Prioritizing real-time feedback ultimately leads to a better employee experience, customer satisfaction, and optimal business outcomes.

Integrating Real-Time Employee Feedback Tools Like XLAs Aid in Employee Digital Buy-in

Implementing experience-level agreements (XLA) that integrate both employee and customer insights can help companies assess users' levels of satisfaction and identify trends. XLAs add significant value to companies by providing insight into the employee digital experience through quantitative feedback and qualitative metrics.

The key differentiator between a traditional SLA (service level agreement) and an XLA is that XLAs not only provide transactional metrics of a department but also provide IT and LOB leaders with metrics on the level of satisfaction and preferences users have with a given application. Additionally, XLAs help business leaders analyze trends in the context of their overall processes and provide guidance on improving policies, prioritizing investments and identifying skills gaps.

Optimizing the Employee Digital Experience Will Lead to Better Business Outcomes

Companies need to first assess their business goals, particularly around customer success, and then determine how a stronger employee digital experience is helping or hurting their bottom line. Companies must consider how to practically integrate real-time employee feedback that helps them gain visibility into the employee digital experience and proactively address potential IT problems and solutions.

Proactive engagement with employees allows greater insight into digital acceptance and overall satisfaction with the IT experience. Furthermore, knowing how the day-to-day operations of the digital experience are affecting employees allows companies to know where to improve their IT systems and applications. What companies must understand is that placing a high value on digital visibility and employee success is critical to retaining top talent.

The Way Forward

As companies seek to implement actionable steps toward real-time feedback, they will begin to improve employee satisfaction and productivity that leads to optimal business success. Additionally, providing tailored solutions for employee feedback serves to create a more positive and streamlined experience for their employees. When employees are happy, companies realize increased customer success, and this combination is key to yielding positive business outcomes for companies both now and in the future.

Mike Marks is VP of Product Marketing at Riverbed

The Latest

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...

Want to Keep Your Employees? Prioritize Their Digital Experience

Mike Marks
Riverbed

Companies have historically relied on tools that warn IT teams when their digital systems are experiencing glitches or attacks. But in an age where consumer loyalty is fickle and hybrid workers' Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is paramount for productivity, companies cannot afford to retroactively deal with IT failures that slow down employee productivity.

What if, instead, companies considered proactive solutions to their digital experience that provided greater visibility into the potential pitfalls of their IT systems? Rather than reactively dealing with the aftermath of digital downfalls, companies can take matters into their own hands by assessing how their employees are reacting to the applications in play.

With 74% of Millennial and GenZ workers taking over the workforce, employees have an increased expectation on the efficiency of their digital work experience. The digital landscape is quickly evolving, and companies have to keep up if they want to deliver a digital experience that improves employee productivity, customer experience, and business performance. Below are three ways that real-time employee feedback allows for greater IT effectiveness, uncovers what's working well, and flags potential pitfalls.

Creating Tailored Solutions for Employee Feedback Helps Proactively Improve a Company's Digital Experience

Tailored surveys that span across devices and locations can provide companies with targeted areas of IT optimization and improvement. Companies need to also consider an employee's digital buy-in and how that affects productivity and retention. Employee buy-in is a key component for successful digital transformation within a company.

By implementing real-time feedback that pairs qualitative telemetry with contextual user data, companies can gain a more accurate assessment of how their applications are performing and where they can improve. Prioritizing real-time feedback ultimately leads to a better employee experience, customer satisfaction, and optimal business outcomes.

Integrating Real-Time Employee Feedback Tools Like XLAs Aid in Employee Digital Buy-in

Implementing experience-level agreements (XLA) that integrate both employee and customer insights can help companies assess users' levels of satisfaction and identify trends. XLAs add significant value to companies by providing insight into the employee digital experience through quantitative feedback and qualitative metrics.

The key differentiator between a traditional SLA (service level agreement) and an XLA is that XLAs not only provide transactional metrics of a department but also provide IT and LOB leaders with metrics on the level of satisfaction and preferences users have with a given application. Additionally, XLAs help business leaders analyze trends in the context of their overall processes and provide guidance on improving policies, prioritizing investments and identifying skills gaps.

Optimizing the Employee Digital Experience Will Lead to Better Business Outcomes

Companies need to first assess their business goals, particularly around customer success, and then determine how a stronger employee digital experience is helping or hurting their bottom line. Companies must consider how to practically integrate real-time employee feedback that helps them gain visibility into the employee digital experience and proactively address potential IT problems and solutions.

Proactive engagement with employees allows greater insight into digital acceptance and overall satisfaction with the IT experience. Furthermore, knowing how the day-to-day operations of the digital experience are affecting employees allows companies to know where to improve their IT systems and applications. What companies must understand is that placing a high value on digital visibility and employee success is critical to retaining top talent.

The Way Forward

As companies seek to implement actionable steps toward real-time feedback, they will begin to improve employee satisfaction and productivity that leads to optimal business success. Additionally, providing tailored solutions for employee feedback serves to create a more positive and streamlined experience for their employees. When employees are happy, companies realize increased customer success, and this combination is key to yielding positive business outcomes for companies both now and in the future.

Mike Marks is VP of Product Marketing at Riverbed

The Latest

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...