It has been more than 60 years since Marshall McLuhan told us that the medium is the message. The decades that have passed since then have done nothing to diminish the truth of McLuhan’s prescient statement. For today’s employees, the medium for most information is the digital interfaces the company provides. There’s an interface for the intranet, for email, for internal social networking and collaboration, for emergency alerts, for calendaring, and for all manner of resources employees need to get their work done.

What message do these interfaces send to employees? If they’re unified, consumer-grade, and make it easy to do the job, the message is one of caring. If they’re confusing, difficult to navigate, and result in frustration, employees can perceive that message as one of dismissal or even contempt. It certainly signals that the company doesn’t care.

Who should own the digital employee experience (DEX)? A number of recent commentaries have argued that internal communication should be at the helm, which may be counterintuitive in many organizations where anything digital is IT’s responsibility. We explore the case for internal communication’s DEX role in this short midweek episode.

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Links from this episode

• From Baby Bottles to Employee Portals: Catching Up on the Internal Comms Shift Toward DEX


• ‘Employees feel capable and connected’: the vital role played by good technology in job satisfaction


• Digital employee experience: why internal communications should care


• Driving Employee Experience: The critical role of internal communications


• 5 Core Components of a Stellar Digital Employee Experience (DEX)


• How to Build a Winning Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Strategy


• 7 Steps to Improve Your Digital Employee Experience (DEX)


• A Blueprint That Binds: The First Principle of Digital Employee Experience

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 28.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

@nevillehobson (00:00 )

Hi everyone and welcome to Four Immediate Release. This is episode 473. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz (00:07 )

And I’m Shell Holtz. In the mid-90s, when intranets were still a novelty, I remember being asked by clients, shouldn’t IT own the intranet? I mean, it’s the technology. It’s sitting on servers, right? And my answer then is the same I’d give today if someone asked whether IT should own the digital employee experience. No, it shouldn’t. And here’s why. Digital experience, DEX, isn’t a text function. It’s a people function.

And that makes it a communication function. And I’ll explain in more detail right after this. So what do we mean by DEX exactly? The folks at Step 2 define it as the sum total of digital interactions within an employee’s work environment. That includes the tools they use, the systems they navigate, and the way those tools make them feel. Frustrated, empowered, ignored, engaged. The emotional response to the digital workplace matters.

A report from the Guardians Digital Workspace Reimagined series points to research showing that when technology works seamlessly, employees feel more capable, more connected, and more engaged. But when it doesn’t, when systems are confusing, slow, or fragmented, it undermines productivity, it increases burnout, and erodes trust. In other words, all that stuff internal communicators are supposed to be helping to prevent.

For years, we’ve treated tech as the exclusive domain of IT and experience as the domain of HR. DEX occupies a space that’s weirdly in between, but the tools themselves don’t create the experience. It’s the communication that does. As NextThink notes in its blueprint for DEX strategy, digital friction is often the result of inconsistent onboarding, poor internal messaging, or an absence of user feedback.

you know, things that communicators deal with all the time. Let’s consider just a few of the moments internal communicators already touch. Tool rollouts, you teams migration drama, that was all on us, right? Crisis response platforms, knowledge hubs, portals, intranets, resource centers, company-wide surveys, training and onboarding flows, and every digital touch point where an employee needs to find, understand, and act on information.

Those aren’t IT problems, they’re communication problems. And the solution isn’t just better user interface, it’s better communications design. The digital experience is the employee experience these days. Haystack’s research on DEX found that poor search, slow load times, confusing navigation, and content irrelevance are among the top frustrations employees have with their digital tools.

But it’s not the existence of those problems that should concern us. It’s the absence of a communication strategy to fix them. A lot of organizations still treat digital like a delivery mechanism. It isn’t. It’s the environment itself. In a LinkedIn essay, a fellow named Richard Aze, and I hope I’m pronouncing that right. It’s spelled A-Z-Z-A-E, wrote this. said, and by the way, the name of his essay was from baby bottles to employee portals.

He said the communicators need to think like experienced designers. That means looking at every step of a user’s journey, from logging in to locating critical tools and asking, does this build confidence, trust, and clarity? If it doesn’t, it’s not just a bad experience, it’s bad communication. So what do we do about it? Let me run through five quick things that communicators can do to step up and take ownership, or at least partnership, in DEX.

And the first is to get a seat at the DEX strategy table. That means partnering with, collaborating with IT, HR, facilities, and ops to advocate for employee needs. You don’t need to know how to code. You need to know how people feel. Second, conduct experience audits, not just content audits. Where are people getting stuck? What’s hard to find? What confuses them? Look at journeys, not just assets.

Push for user-centric intranet and app design. That means fewer org chart-driven pages and more task-driven layouts. Nobody should need to have to figure out where to go to find the information they need. It should be intuitive. Advocate for feedback loops. ScreenCloud and Populo both stress this. DEX isn’t static. User analytics, sentiment analysis, and real-time feedback are necessary to continually refine the digital experience.

@nevillehobson (04:33 )

You

Shel Holtz (04:49 )

And finally, make DEX a KPI. If your team isn’t being measured on the usability and impact of digital tools, you’re flying blind. Start tying your work to adoption, retention, and satisfaction metrics. I remember an HPR article from maybe 15 years ago. was something like the 10 IT decisions IT shouldn’t be allowed to make. In this case, think collaboration with IT is the key.

But turning this over entirely to IT-Nevel, it strikes me as being no different than turning the design of a magazine over to your printer, wh