Why Web Application Performance Data is Critical for Employee Experience Management in the Remote Work Era

The era when employees were neglected and unappreciated is over. Because of the competition for the best talent and the changing mindsets of the workforce, companies are now working towards engaging their employees and ensuring a positive employee experience to foster loyalty and improve productivity.

The conversation is no longer focused on employee engagement, benefits, and perks, but on employee experience. It involves a much longer-term commitment, processes, and measurements and requires companies to implement policies and changes that will ensure that employees are happy and satisfied with their jobs.

Because today’s workforce relies on a growing number of digital tools and applications in the course of their day-to-day work, these tools play an important role in the employee experience. That’s why web application monitoring tools are a vital resource for companies focused on managing and improving employee experience. What are these tools and how can they help with your employee experience management? Read on to learn more about these concepts and how you can future-proof your company and keep your employees happy.

The Employee Experience: What Is It and Why Is It Important?

Your company probably relies a great deal on web-based and mobile applications. Your customer relationship management software, your point-of-sale system, collaboration tools, electronic health records, enterprise resource planning, communication, and many other tools that your employees use are likely web-based.

You probably opted for these software or SaaS solutions because you wanted to streamline processes and provide more flexibility for your staff by allowing them to access cloud-based software solutions even when they’re not in the physical office.

As the COVID-19 pandemic led to shutdowns around the world, your choice has surely paid off. With offices closed, mobility limited, and social distancing mandated, digital transformation became critical for businesses to support business continuity. So how do you address employee experience in this new remote work setup?

What is Employee Experience?

According to Gallup, employee experience includes every single interaction your employees have with your company, including their roles, manager, well-being, and workspace. To give your employees the best experience possible, you should avoid getting hung up on processes. Instead, address the human in your employees.

A happy employee is a productive employee. However, most companies are more focused on transactional care or perks. Perks are when you incentivize their behavior, such as offering a bonus or paid vacation when an employee or team hits a monthly or annual quota.

Employee experience forces you to view your employees as consumers of your workplace. And that starts from attracting, hiring, and onboarding your employees and continues through engaging, developing, and helping them perform well.

Three Aspects of Employee Experience

According to author and speaker Jacob Morgan, there are aspects of employee experience that you should keep in mind: physical space, technology, and culture.

Physical space: Physical space includes every detail in the office, such as the artwork on the walls, free meals provided at the cafeteria, or the cleanliness of the workplace. Because employees spend much time at the office, it’s important to improve the physical environment if you want to have a better employee experience.

Technology: Technology is equally important in ensuring a good employee experience. This aspect includes software, hardware, tools, and programs that your employees use to perform their tasks. Technology not only ensures that your employees are able to carry out their tasks but also allows your organization to function in the future. Flexible working time, collaboration, real-time communication, and other concepts are already in use, and with the emergence of COVID-19, these are now day to day realities for nearly every business and not just something to think about in the future.

Culture: Culture is also another aspect of employee experience that you should fine-tune. Physical space and technology are things that you can use, see, feel, smell, and taste. Culture covers the intangibles.

Morgan reiterates that you should consider all three if you want to introduce improvements in employee experience management. Experiment with incremental changes to see how new practices, policies, and even designs around your office can impact culture, technology, and the physical work environment.

Where Web Application Monitoring Fits When You’re Talking About Employee Experience

Web application monitoring allows you to identify, catch, and diagnose any problems related to your web apps’ performance. This will enable you to do something about minor issues before they become big problems even before users find out about it.

How does web application monitoring help with employee experience management? The most obvious answer is that it helps you keep track of the technology aspect of employee experience. It ensures that you deliver responsive, fast, and trouble-free applications to your employees.

Web app monitoring minimizes chances that your employees will experience frustrations and not be able to do their work because of application downtime or usability issues. Moreover, it will enhance your corporate culture. In an era where remote work is the norm rather than a perk, providing intuitive, functional, and collaborative tools ensures that your employees can easily interact with one another.

What Can You Get from Web Application Monitoring?

Done right, there are a lot of benefits from having a web application monitoring solution to track performance and detect issues.

1. Know when the app or something related goes down.

So, you have your website or application up, and it was working smoothly the last time you’ve checked it. But you never know when it will go down.

With a web application monitoring solution, application performance logs can tell you when your site or application goes down. More importantly, these logs allow you to specifically target the problem that led to your application’s downtime.

2. Know your load times.

Application load times are a prominent concern in the workplace. Most of the time, your users want to find something or access content in a matter of seconds. If an app takes too long to load, it will frustrate many users, and the experience will quickly sour.

Web application monitoring can help you determine if there are problems with loading times throughout different devices and servers. How fast is fast when it comes to loading times? According to Neil Patel, 47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in seconds. If it’s slower than that, they will move on to another site.

And those are your potential customers. Your employees might not have a choice, so they will need to wait for your application to load. These delays can hinder productivity and very much frustrate the average person.

Others will try to find their own solutions. They might open a spreadsheet instead of using your company’s CRM, or they might even go to a competing app to do their work, resulting in shadow IT that can introduce security vulnerabilities.

3. Pinpoint security holes and risks.

With the information you get from web application monitoring, you can easily identify areas where you are vulnerable to security risks and cyber-attacks. You will no longer be blind to the fact that your business could fall victim to data breaches and even data leaks.

4. Remote work made easier.

Working from home is more prevalent today than ever before. According to Stanford University, 42 percent of the American labor force is working from home. If some or all of your employees are telecommuting, you should be able to give them a seamless experience with the apps they use for work. It should feel like they are getting the same performance that they get when they’re in the office.

In short, web application monitoring can help you with business continuity. It also ensures that your collaboration and communication tools are in proper working order, all without overwhelming your IT support because you’ve already proactively stamped out any issues that may arise.

5. Guarantee better, if not the best, user experience.

All of these benefits point to the ability to give your users a much better user experience by making sure that they get the best experience while using your apps.

With the information you get from your web application monitoring solution, you can make sure that:

Your users can access your application when they need it.

The application loads fast and that users can do what they need to do without having to wait a long time.

Users and their information are safe from hackers and cybercriminals when they use your application.

6. Know how new policies are affecting employee experience.

Out of the many benefits you gain from having a web application monitoring solution, you’ll have access to crucial insights into how your apps are performing, such as:

• How long did it take for the content to load?
• What are the response times?
• Which applications are being used?
• What device was used to access the application?
• What’s the location of the user?

Armed with these insights, you can create policies and make improvements, including:

• Making response times faster
• Streamlining the processes needed to access the required content
• Prioritizing changes and improvements in the most used applications
• Solving any issues related to devices and locations

This brings us to the next benefit of having web application monitoring tools: being able to know for certain if the improvements you have introduced worked. For instance, if you noticed that there are significant slowdowns when your applications are accessed on Android devices, you can initially invest in a few laptops or iPhones for your employees to use for work.

You can then check the new response times to see if it’s a problem with the device or if it’s something else. If the new response times are better, then you can consider making it a policy to provide your employees with these devices. It’s a good way to test your policies first before making a bigger investment.

The Bottom Line

Because today’s work environments are different, older tools that focus on device health and performance are insufficient. While memory consumption, CPU resources, and similar metrics are important, they’re not all you need to know. For one, your employees are using different devices to access your apps. There’s also the question of what kind of applications they’re using and whether it is mobile, on a local machine, accessible via a browser, or a cloud solution.

At first glance, web application monitoring tools can help you pinpoint performance issues that you can readily address. These tools establish a baseline that it uses to identify if there are problems. If the actual performance of your apps differs significantly from the baseline, these tools will instantly send an alert to your IT team. What’s more, the best tools out there will be able to differentiate if the slowdown is caused by the application used, the network, or the client.

Why is this important? Because it can easily pinpoint where the problem lies and ultimately who should resolve it. A slowdown caused by the device means that IT should focus on the desktop computer or mobile device used by the employees, rather than tweaking with the application or looking at the network infrastructure. You don’t have to wait until your employees get frustrated and productivity falters to start trying to pinpoint the source of an issue and address it. By proactively identifying and resolving issues, you’ll cut down on support tickets, as well.

With the office environment changing, you can be sure that you have the tools at your disposal to make sure that business continues even when external factors impact your business operations. Having web application monitoring tools can help you take advantage of the latest SaaS offerings, software, and even your own legacy applications, while also ensuring that they work and perform as expected.