According to Forbes, building the best employee experience is the next competitive frontier for companies in 2018. Employee experience is the sum of everything an employee perceives, lives and engages with during their journey within an organization. Driving factors include the increasingly competitive war for talent, the popularity of company review websites like Glassdoor and LinkedIn and the shift in employees’ expectations from stability to rapid career development. According to recent research, top companies focusing on employee experience tend to have four times the average profit and more than twice the average revenue.

Building a solid employee experience is a company-wide endeavor involving multiple departments. But as digital innovation is fundamentally changing the workplace, IT teams have a critical role to play in building a powerful employee experience.

Here are five areas IT teams need to consider to build a better digital employee experience.

1. Understand The Needs Of ‘Generation Me’ Employees

“Generation Me” employees (otherwise known as the millennials) demand the same quality of experience as customers. According to a recent survey by Management Today and Sopra Steria, employers are ignoring this at their peril.

Understanding the new generations is critical as they already represent the largest labor force of our economy today. The relationships different age groups have built with new technology are driving different needs and expectations inside the enterprise and developing creative ways to accomplish jobs and tasks by using digital tools and applications. Growth Business makes an interesting comparison of the workforce by age groups; the generations X and Y have ingrained memories of waiting for the dial-up modem to connect compared to the younger generations Me and Z, which grew up with an “iPad for a nanny.”

Companies that fail to understand the individual digital needs of their employees are squandering opportunities to have a more engaged, energized and productive workforce.

Companies should focus on offering greater flexible working and career development to their employees in order to enhance their experience. While technology is an integral part of the lives of millennials, employers appear slow to understand and implement automation, analytics and other technologies that can facilitate these improvements.