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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

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...