What does a good digital employee experience actually look like on Mac?

What does “good DEX” mean?

For most end users, things like configuration profiles, management workflows or update cadences have little to no direct impact on the work they produce. What they are concerned with is how the technologies they use make completing tasks easier versus getting in the way of productivity.

The intersection of tech meeting users where they’re at, that’s what the digital employee experience is about. It’s not an abstract satisfaction score to hit or an administrative policy that looks good on paper.

Good DEX is measured in the moments employees have with their Mac daily. Specifically, whether those moments support the work their tasked with completing — as opposed to being littered with friction points that surface as obstacles, frustration and ultimately, loss of productivity.

It starts without a technology hurdle.

Before employees lift the lid on their MacBook Pro or unbox it even, good DEX begins with a Mac that arrives pre-configured with everything their role requires to perform successfully. Critical things like:

• User account and permissions
• Identity services
• Settings and configurations
• Apps and cloud services
• Endpoint security
• Updates
• Policies and compliance

In short, a device that’s ready for the employee to start working from day one instead of start then stopping and/or waiting for it to be ready.

While onboarding is simply ‘chapter 1’ in your DEX story, it is a crucial one, because it sets the tone for all stakeholders across the entire organization. Simply put: when a device arrives prepared, the employee’s first experience with technology is to confidently move forward doing what they were hired to do — not waiting on IT’s response to a help desk ticket.

The tools employees need are available when they need them.

Moving past onboarding onto day-to-day usage, DEX branches off into two distinct paths that work together to flow in the same direction:

1. Access

Things that employees need to perform in their job functions. Examples of this include:

• Availability of resources, like data files and/or services
• Having the necessary permissions to work with those tools

2. Simplicity

Processes, enabled by IT, streamline employee productivity through enhanced workflows, which we go into greater detail in a later section.

Sticking with access, this branch is about empowering employees by ensuring they can obtain the resources they need — when they need them — while cutting down on support tickets and subsequent resolution wait times.

Let’s be clear, this is not about removing IT from the equation nor offloading responsibility on the end user. It’s about implementing a strategy, which IT manages, that automates a broad range of common privileges necessary for employees to perform their tasks with minimal friction.

Management happens without constantly interrupting work.

Common tasks, like installing critical patches and executing policies to ensure configuration compliance, are a core part of endpoint management. Good DEX focuses on keeping interruptions that stem from management and security tasks executing to a minimum, preserving user productivity.

It achieves this by working with workflows so that updates install overnight or compliance checks operate in the background — not in the middle of a user’s presentation. The difference being that the former requires IT to understand how employees work and bake in management strategically that supports — not works against — them.

Problems don't always have to start with the employee.

Across many organizations, IT operates in a reactive mode, meaning device issues are reported after employees encounter a problem. The takeaway is that a disruption occurred (and impacted productivity) before IT has even looked at it.

While this scenario can’t always be avoided, increased visibility into endpoint configuration, performance and health statuses changes the landscape considerably. Granular insight helps IT identify device behaviors holistically across the enterprise and proactively mitigate issues before they become a problem for employees and the org itself.

And best of all, this shift to proactive mode supports a good, consistent digital employee experience by minimizing the end user’s exposure to interruptions that they can count on.

When employees need IT: getting help should be straightforward.

IT’s core objective is simple: resolve technology issues. This objective remains just as essential today as decades before. What has changed however, is how DEX is measured across modern environments and hybrid workforces.

Particularly, how frustrating the path is for employees to resolve issues. It’s about dynamically adjusting to their experiences — not a one size fits all approach where IT swoops in and saves the day every time. For example, a remote employee needs to install a Zoom update before a client meeting. An employee waiting hours for IT to respond to the ticket for a two-minute install halts productivity, frustrates employees and isn’t the best use of IT’s limited resources.

The simplicity employees experience is enabled by IT.

Think about common employee experiences, like:

• Provisioning devices that allow them to be productive right out of the box
• Apps deployed and configured exactly as needed for the user’s role
• Security patches, up to date, that occur after hours to not interrupt work
• Endpoint health insight that mitigates risk before growing into a larger disruption

None of the moments described above occur automagically — they’re built into IT’s management strategy from the beginning and weave throughout the device’s lifecycle.

That’s what is referred to by simplicity: the output of proactive workflows, carefully designed so that employees glean the experience without ever seeing the mechanics behind it all.

The takeaway: employees experience the outcome, not the complexity.

A sad truth is that employees often never think twice about IT when devices, apps and services are working well. But instead of looking at this as a ‘thankless job,’ IT should consider it badge of honor: end-user roles weren’t intended to face complex technology issues head-on, so the absence of a support request or late-night emergency call means employee’s daily experiences are:

• A Mac that’s ready when they need it
• Applications behaving reliably
• Patches not installing at the wrong time
• Access to resources set for their role
• Security protections running in the background

It's management done well enough that the employee never has to think about it, but a proactive IT team that responds to elevated issues quickly and efficiently is there when (not if) they’re needed.

For growing organizations trying to scale a good digital employee experience across a lean IT team, that distinction is worth paying attention to.