If we look at the last decade, organizations are increasingly championing the movement of employee satisfaction. Customer satisfaction, of course, is one of the quintessential factors for any enterprise to be successful. However, in recent times, enterprises have realized that employee satisfaction is an enabler of customer satisfaction and business success.
With the onset of hybrid work models, UEM solutions are more centred towards employee enablement. As a bridge between IT leaders of an enterprise and its employees, UEM solutions enable positive employee experiences with:
1. Seamless onboarding
One of the first hurdles for employees would be waiting for ages to get their devices provisioned by their IT admins. A Gallup survey indicates that 88% of employees strongly agree that their organization needs more improvement in the onboarding process. A typical UEM solution could baseline configurations and profiles suited to the employee’s role in an organization. Leveraging Windows Autopilot, UEM solutions also enable drop-shipping of Windows devices directly from the OEM vendor to the employee’s location making remote working easier.
2. Unified self-service portal
According to this Harvard Business Review article, 81% of all customers attempt to solve the problem themselves before reaching out to support personnel. As employees increasingly become the internal customers of an organization, it is necessary to provide them with the necessary tools. Using UEM tools, IT admins could deploy frequently requested applications and software to the employee service portal, where they could install them as needed.
3. Separate personal and corporate data
With enterprises increasingly using BYOD devices, the obligation should not be only on the employee to ensure data integrity. Endpoint management solutions help achieve the CIA triad (confidentiality, integrity and availability of data) by containerizing personal and corporate profiles, and helping them prevent unintentional data leakage via clipboards, screenshots, cloud backups, unmanaged apps, USBs, and more. These data leakage capabilities also come with false positive remediation helping employees avoid wasting precious time tending to false security concerns.
4. Many apps, one login
Employees use multiple apps for productivity and might require many sign-ins for access. It is a nightmare for them to remember passwords for these apps. Worse, if they forget the password for even one of them, they might have to raise tickets and wait endlessly to access them. Modern management solutions enable single sign-on to resolve this issue. Even better, using Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol, employees can have an automated, seamless authentication experience without having to scramble for passwords.
5. Troubleshooting, anywhere, anytime
In an anywhere work model, endpoints could go haywire any place. It is prudent to have a location-agnostic approach to troubleshooting endpoints. Remote Endpoint troubleshooting tools could come in handy in these situations, saving invaluable productive hours. Most of them are HIPAA compliant to ensure that the employee’s privacy is given utmost importance. With the explosion of frontline devices and workers, addressing faulty unattended devices becomes critical. Modern Endpoint Mobility solutions have OEM partnerships with frontline devices, including rugged and IoT devices, and could provide instant troubleshooting capabilities.
6. Transitioning from traditional to modern devices without giving up on the user persona
Both SMBs and enterprises are increasingly migrating from traditional and legacy devices to modern devices, which are generally viewed as utilizing an OS of Windows 10 or later. To make the transition seamless, IT admins could capture the data stored in the employees’ previous computers and deploy it to the newly purchased computers using disk imaging tools. Not just that, these solutions can effectively reduce the time taken to customize the user profiles in these new computers. This way, employees could start being productive from day one of the migration.
7. Best of both worlds: Security and productivity
According to the 2022 Cost of Insider Threats: Global Report, insider threats have risen 44% over the past two years. More importantly, the report also says the time to contain an insider threat incident increased from 77 days to 85 days. These stats certainly make IT leaders more sceptical about giving more autonomy to their workforce. Here is where endpoint protection solutions come to the rescue. With the principle of least privilege, IT admins can allow employees to self-elevate their privileges to specific applications while controlling the proliferation of local admin accounts. By enabling just-in-time access, users could access the blocked applications in their organization for short-term needs.
8. Browser is the new endpoint
With browsers becoming the gateway to access the internet, there is a growing consensus among experts that it has evolved into an endpoint. Employees use browsers for both work-related tasks and personal reasons. As we saw earlier, burdening the workforce with data security hampers productivity.
A secure browser management tool helps restrict access to unnecessary websites and removes unnecessary plugins and harmful extensions. Further, it routes website traffic to trusted browsers and ensures downloads are from trustworthy websites. To prevent corporate data leakage, employees can also access websites for personal use through virtual browsers that isolate local files, storage, extensions, cookies, and more.
The convergence of ITOps and SecOps is making UEM a comprehensive toolkit for endpoint management and security, besides quickly getting transformed into an end-user experience management (EUEM) resource. A couple of UEM players have been recognized in the 2022 Forrester Wave for EUEM, confirming that employee experience management is becoming a subset of endpoint management.
In psychology, a flow state, colloquially known as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performs an activity with intense focus, full involvement, and enjoyment. Employees could enter this state if their organizations could provide them with effective and efficient tools and help them access these tools with ease.
Ensuring your organization’s IT efforts are centred around employee enablement is vital. As UEM tools are enablers of the employee experience, they are an essential requirement for an enterprise to function smoothly. The key to success is a comprehensive UEM solution that efficiently manages and secures the increasing number and variety of endpoints, anywhere.
