Digital workplace
Digital Employee Experience (DEX) for the Modern WorkplaceDigital Employee Experience
The CTO’s guide to building an intelligent, resilient, digital workplace
Hybrid work, skills shortages, and rising expectations have made Digital Employee Experience (DEX) a strategic concern for the entire C-suite. Technology is now the workplace for most employees. When it fails, productivity, retention, and customer experience all suffer.
The scale of the problem
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A study of 9 million endpoints across 473 global organisations found IT leaders believe their organisations lose about 198,000 hours per year to poor DEX. The actual figure is 470,000 hours, a 58% underestimate that equals 131 full-time employees of unseen productivity loss.
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Only 44% of IT issues are reported. Many IT teams rely on self-reporting and ticket data, which captures what is visible. The rest, from quiet workarounds to daily frustrations, stays hidden until DEX telemetry uncovers it.
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Global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, down from 23% in 2023. It marks an 11-year low. Gallup estimates disengagement costs the US about $2 trillion in lost productivity.
These are not service desk curiosities. They are board-level risks to productivity, talent and advantage.
For CTOs, these aren’t abstract HR metrics. Disengaged employees mean slower delivery, higher turnover, rising support costs, and talent flowing to competitors who invest in better digital experiences.
SCC's DEX maturity model
Stage 1 – See: baseline & visibility
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Conduct a comprehensive review of strategic and programme objectives to understand your business landscape and digital ambitions.
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Establish a clear ‘as is’ and ‘to be’ state of your digital workplace.
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Baseline your experience, culture, measurement capabilities, pain points and desired outcomes to create a fact-based starting point.
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Deploy Nexthink as the core DEX platform to collect real-time telemetry from endpoints and applications.
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· Map key personas and roles to understand how different groups actually work.
Technology landscape review
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Highlight your existing technologies and identify where innovation can support strategic planning.
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Establish a comprehensive overview of your current Digital Workplace strategy and roadmap.
Outcome for the CTO
A factual, non‑arguable picture of where digital friction lives and which personas are most affected. Many CTOs are surprised to discover the hidden productivity loss – the 56% of problems never reported to IT.
Stage 2 – Sense: sentiment & XLAs
Persona advisory
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Create strategies that foster engagement, increase productivity and drive business success for each persona group.
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Identify patterns, trends and pain points highlighting discrepancies in how different employee groups interact with technology.
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Design employee journeys by starting from the feelings you want individuals to experience, then identifying which touchpoints are key to generating them.
XLA advisory
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Capture employee sentiment in context – short, targeted feedback campaigns tied to actual incidents and workflows.
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Create valuable metrics and insights into employee satisfaction and experience.
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Ensure digital tools are intuitive, user-friendly and accessible, minimising disruptions that can hinder productivity.
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Define Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) that track satisfaction, friction and productivity for key journeys (onboarding, remote access, collaboration, critical apps).
What are XLAs?
XLAs represent a commitment to delivering defined experiences based on measurable indicators. Unlike traditional SLAs that focus primarily on operational metrics, XLAs incorporate a broader spectrum of data points to capture the nuanced reality of user experiences – linking experience design to tangible business outcomes.
Outcome for the CTO
A shift from SLAs towards experience metrics that correlate with productivity, retention and customer satisfaction. SCC’s XLA advisory ensures these are meaningful, measurable and aligned to what truly matters for your business.
Stage 3 – Fix: automation & self‑healing
Change and adoption advisory
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Support employees in understanding the reasons behind digital changes and the benefits to their work.
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Develop clear communication strategies so users are better informed about what to expect.
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Create customised training and learning paths, ensuring the experience feels more relevant and easier to navigate.
Proactive and preventative automation
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Use SCC’s Centre of Excellence (CoE) and Nexthink Infinity to drive “See, Diagnose, Fix, Communicate” workflows.
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Implement preventive automations (self-healing and mass-heal) to resolve issues across thousands of endpoints before they reach the service desk.
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Integrate with ITSM to trigger automated remediation, targeted campaigns, or guided self-help for recurring problems.
Gartner predicts that by 2026, 30% of enterprises will automate more than half of their network activities, up from under 10% in mid-2023.
Outcome for the CTO
Reduced incident volume, faster resolution and a support model that scales without linear headcount growth. More critically, you move from reactive to proactive – fixing problems before users even notice them.
Stage 4 – Scale: DEX centre of excellence
Create a DEX Centre of Excellence, blend experts in technology, process and organisational change and adoption. Use DEX data and XLAs to prioritise change, quantify impact and feed a continuous improvement backlog. Outcome for the CTO: a sustainable capability that improves the digital workplace and gives the board meaningful, experience-based metrics.
Outcome for the CTO
A sustainable capability that continually improves the digital workplace and provides the board with meaningful, experience-based metrics. You move from “IT as cost centre” to “IT as productivity enabler.”
Strategic partnership with Nexthink
SCC’s CoE manages DEX tooling and telemetry, monitors XLAs and DEX scores across personas and locations, and delivers proactive support through See, Diagnose, Fix automation. It also supports campaign management, onboarding and persona-based service desk operations. The XMO ensures insight turns into governance, roadmaps and investment decisions. For the CTO, that is a single, accountable structure for digital workplace performance aligned to enterprise objectives, not ticket queues.
Customer Success Stories, SCC and the National Trust
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