FIR #473: The Digital Employee Experience is the Message

Jul 22, 2025

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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.

Links from this episode

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, which nobody would do.

@nevillehobson (05:31)
No, I agree. But I mean, what you’ve outlined, I remember those days too, back in the 90s, as it would have been actually, even starting in with the 80s. I can remember a conversation when I worked at Mercer in the late 80s with the IT department, who objected strenuously to the introduction of Mac computers into the office for desktop publishing. So control freakery continued. To be fair to IT, though, I would say that they are an invaluable partner.

in the implementation of this successfully in an organization. And the Guardian has a good article that you had in the links, that’ll be in the show notes actually, talking about how employees feel capable and connected due to good technology and job satisfaction. And so having the right tech. And by the way, your explainer of what is DEX is great. But if you’re in…

the computing industry in some form. If you’re in mobile tech, if you’re in IT, DEX, typically the first thing you see if you search on the term is Samsung DEX, which is, ⁓ no, I’m just looking at it. It’s actually digital experience, sorry, desktop experience. And it’s getting a lot of traction, a lot of visibility at the moment because of the release of all the new

Shel Holtz (06:37)
Digital exchange, isn’t it? No?

@nevillehobson (06:50)
mobile devices, notably the Z series fold and flip, that give you this DEX integration with your desktop. And it’s a big deal. It gives you all sorts of features on a mobile device that you didn’t have before now. So that’s a big thing. It also has a specific meaning in the crypto industry. DEX stands for decentralized exchange. So I guess the cautionary note here is not to assume

that everyone will know that it means a digital employee experience without an explainer, a clarity there to avoid anyone being confused. Say, I thought this was Samsung Dex. Hey, I’ve got crypto. It means this. So just for clarity of meaning. But that’s by the way, it’s a very interesting topic. And I think you set out a good assessment of it and the benefits of it. And I would agree with you. I think though.

I suppose my thought is focused on two things. One is it’s the employee experience. That’s the key part. This enables that to happen. The tech enables it to happen. But it’s not about the tech. To me, said similarly, and we’ve talked about this before, is you know, turn on lights, which are the electricity that lets you do all this stuff. The electricity is not the important thing to you. Might be to the attrition, but not to you. So this sort of

falls in that area, I think. But I would also say that, like many things in employee communication and other elements of organization communication, none of this is done in isolation. It requires the kind of connectivity between different parts of an organization to make it successful. But this is people we’re talking about. So you’re going to get people jockeying for control and all this kind of stuff. That’s inevitable, I suppose. And if you’re really, really lucky,

you will have an IT department to truly understands and recognizes their role is to enable you to do these things for the employees. So I remember, unfortunately, as I suspect you might too, too many that don’t do that. It’s a battle. But this is great. I mean, I think the some of the things in the Guardian pieces was what is in my mind, talk about the obvious things much of what you set out.

You know, it enhances engagement, performance and retention. I those things are the kind of common sense things that you think about. Although the flip to that would be that that requires investment in DEX tools and staff training. And so that’s got to be factored into this thing, too, which I suspect is at the heart of some of the issues where, you know, employee communicators set out a plan that sets up we want to do all this. They didn’t talk to the IT department who would have told them.

To do that, you need these six things and there’s a hundred thousand dollar budget required for that. So you need to talk to each other. Each party needs to be open with each other about plans and not focused only on, don’t want those guys interfering. This is my domain and I’m going to make sure I control that, which is what happens. So I think the pros and cons of this, or the pros in particular, are pretty self evident. You’ve outlined most of them, think, Shell. So it’s an interesting thing that

this gap between the tech side and the employee communications, I still seems to exist in organizations today. And I find that really disappointing.

Shel Holtz (09:56)
Yeah, think I hear about the acrimony between IT and communications from colleagues in other companies. I’m not suggesting that IT is an adversary here. In fact, they are your partner. They are absolutely essential. As printers were back in the day when that was our only means of getting content out.

@nevillehobson (10:09)
Good. Yeah.

Shel Holtz (10:19)
to employees and to a lot of other audiences and graphic designers too. I think it is really just a question of sitting down and hammering out who’s responsible for what in that partnership. again, I see a lot of communications departments that simply abdicate the interface for all of this to IT and IT in many cases abdicates that to the vendor.

It’s just the interface that we’re getting. And the fact that it makes it difficult for employees to find and use information is absolutely problematic. And I think that’s a communication challenge. That’s a communication issue. As I say, we controlled the design of the print publications. We, in most cases, controlled the design of websites.

as we created those for our organizations. The service certainly didn’t do the design for you. Some of them may have had contractors that they worked with who would do it for a fee, but they understood that a designer was necessary for that. And I think it’s just defaulting to IT to create the interface for the various

digital tools that employees use to access and use information. And I really think that a partnership with communication would improve that. And most of what I’m seeing in the research and this surge of content about DEX and the communicator’s role in it seems to support that. So I guess what I’m suggesting isn’t that you go to war with your IT department. It’s that you…

@nevillehobson (11:55)
No, no.

Shel Holtz (11:56)
take responsibility for this and start working very carefully and closely with them.

@nevillehobson (12:03)
Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And that’s exactly what I would say as well. It causes easier to do that now. So for instance, you probably you need to look at this way, in my view, that you need to think you’ve got to make a case to the IT department for what you’re doing. That’s not about you ask for their approval. That’s not that’s not what it means. It’s being very transparent. This is what we have in mind. And you’re not going to be saying this is what we’re going to do. This is we have in mind. And you lay out what your plan is. And you have tools that will help you know

to present that and what to ask your IT colleagues. ChatGPT will be a great tool to use for this to construct your case that you make to discuss with them and you have a discussion with them. And if you’re lucky, you’ve got a colleague on the IT side who has similar mindset thinking of how to go about this and you’ll coincide and things should be quite smooth, right?

Shel Holtz (12:51)
Yeah. and it’s the same with rolling out new IT tools. I’ve worked with organizations where communicators didn’t even know a new tool was coming. And IT just rolled it out. They flipped a switch and said, here it is, everybody. This is the new tool. Here’s a link to the user manual. And that was about it. As opposed to a marketing campaign to drive adoption and support and help people understand why the change has been made, you know, that’s marketing, that’s communication.

@nevillehobson (13:02)
Yeah, yeah.

Shel Holtz (13:17)
That’s why partnership is so

@nevillehobson (13:20)
Exactly. So you both sides need to have clarity there. That would avoid that kind of thing. One other point to mention that the Guardian piece talks about, and I agree with this, I remember this being a kind of a matter to be sure you address on every single bit of involvement I’ve ever had with introducing technology to organizations over last 20 years or so, which is the simple reality today, employees expect work tech to match the quality of their personal tools.

And that too often isn’t the case. mean, I remember not recently, within the last year, let’s being in a company talking about a project we were working together on, they just happened to observe looking around their office and everyone had these clunky old, I you could tell the thick laptops with huge like two inch bezels all around them. I mean, that’s late 90s even, you know, it’s really ancient technology.

And people always complained there about these slow networks and getting IT support was a nightmare. So they had a big problem with that, which is where you get people doing things that, you know, they’ll wait till they get home to work on documents because they got a better computer at home. And now, of course, that isn’t the case. There’s no there’s no but but nevertheless, that’s still a big expectation of people that they expect the tech to match the quality of their personal tools because most people have good quality personal tools.

Shel Holtz (14:34)
Absolutely. And in fact, where I work, we just recently migrated from the internet platform that was in place when I started there back in 2017, which had a clunky interface and their mobile solution was just awful. It was almost an afterthought. And how important mobile is in the internal communication space these days. And we have migrated a new tool that has a consumer grade.

mobile app. now we’re in the process of driving adoption of it because people aren’t in the habit of checking mobile for their internal communication needs other than maybe email. But the people who start using it have reported really liking it. And it’s because it’s as good as what they’re accustomed to using for external purposes. So it really does matter. That’s part of that digital employee experience.

@nevillehobson (15:23)
It does. It matters a great deal.

Yeah, DX.

Shel Holtz (15:28)
Yep, that particular DEX and that will be a 30 for this particular episode of for immediate release.

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