Delivering Exceptional User Experiences
Providing your workforce with seamless work experiences across the digital ecosystem requires a deep understanding of the remote-work model, coupled with a strong, targeted strategy. Let’s take a look at several key aspects of the employee experience, including onboarding new employees, providing seamless access to the applications your employees need, addressing connectivity challenges, supporting your employees’ preferred devices, helping your employees help themselves, and reducing the burden of managing multiple account passwords.
Onboarding New Employees Remotely
Onboarding new employees can be extremely time-consuming, particularly if an employee has multiple devices, requires a different type of applications, and works in a home office or other remote location. Yet, onboarding is a critical first milestone in every employee’s journey. To make the onboarding experience a positive one — even for your non-tech-savvy new employees — you need to enable a touchless and seamless remote onboarding experience.
Unified endpoint management (UEM) enables your IT organisation to introduce rapid, automatic, self-service, and on-demand capabilities for first-time setup. Instead of going through an expensive onboarding process, you can do simpler and cheaper provisioning that minimises a lot of pre-employee-handover steps. You can push out all the necessary configurations and software via a secure connection to any Wi-Fi network, wherever the employee happens to be.
Ensuring that new employees have access to the devices, applications, and other tools they need to be productive on day one is crucial to the new employee experience. A poor experience creates an indelible first impression for new employees about the company and its IT department.
Providing Seamless Access to Apps
Providing easy access to applications and data is one of the top issues identified by employees as critical to a positive experience. Modern management enables you to deploy public, internal, or bulk-purchased apps to devices automatically or to an enterprise app catalog for on-demand installation. With the modern management capabilities of a robust digital workspace platform, some software may be installed as part of the onboarding process, some may be later pushed to users, and some may be made available on demand via a unified app catalog.
Apps that are pushed to devices as part of the onboarding process typically include those that everyone in the organisation needs. Other apps pushed out in the onboarding process include those that are tied to a particular user profile, such as apps used by employees in engineering or finance. Apps that only certain users may need or want can be made available via an enterprise app catalog.
The app catalog gives your users a one-stop shop to view and download applications. Access to individual apps is based on settings you establish in the Unified Endpoint Management console.
Addressing Connectivity Challenges
With the rapid rise of cloud- and web-based apps, Internet connectivity has become a key focus point to the overall user experience.
Enterprises generally can’t do much about their employees’ home Internet service, but they can ensure connectivity back to the corporate data center and cloud-based resources is as seamless by optimising application delivery and providing robust security that does not negatively impact network performance.
For instance, virtual private networks (VPNs) often require users to manually start a VPN client to access corporate resources. This can introduce significant performance bottlenecks due to encryption and VPN gateway congestion.
Software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) devices and, increasingly, cloud-delivered secure access service edge (SASE) solutions, enable a more seamless and optimised networking and security experience at the edge.
Supporting Flexible User Choices
Supporting your employees’ preferred devices is increasingly important for the distributed workforce in which organisations have less visibility and control of their employees’ personal devices being used in their home offices.
Whether corporate-owned or bring your own device (BYOD), organisations need to support a growing number of devices and OS platforms and versions. IT teams need to scale support and operations to ensure device health, compliance, and security that extends beyond the corporate office to the home office.
Particularly at the start of the global pandemic, many businesses found it necessary to allow their employees to use different personal devices including personally owned desktops or laptops, monitors, printers, smartphones, and other home office equipment, to perform work and stay productive at home.
Even as businesses are now able to deploy more standardised, corporate-owned devices for their employees’ home office, user choice is still an extremely important factor to consider in the overall employee experience. Keys to supporting flexible user choices and delivering an exceptional employee experience include the following: