What is Employee Experience and How to Master the EX Discipline?

Employees are an organization's most important asset, and there are no other areas that have such a heavy and broad effect on an organization's top and bottom lines. But still, only a few organizations really put their employee experience at the top of their strategic agenda. 

What is Employee Experience?

Employee Experience (EX) is defined as the sum of all the experiences a person has as a candidate, employee, manager, freelancer, alumnus, and so on at or with an organization throughout their working life and personal life (exposed, observed, felt, and sensed) from the time the person hears about the organization, is employed, and has an everyday experience of the organization until the time the person leaves, becomes an alumnus, and perhaps is employed again at a later time. There are many more terms and conceptual frameworks being used within the EX-discipline. To make it less confusing, make sure to familiarize yourself with all the most important EX concepts.

How to Master the EX Discipline

In striving to master employee experience, we've observed that an organization must accelerate its focus on four general areas:

1. Creating a strategic framework:

Get upper management engaged, establish your EX "why" in financial terms, create an organized EX unit, and build a strong EX vision. This requires that your CEO believes that EX is the way forward and is convinced that it is a good idea to spend time, money and energy on generating the best employee experience. So get your CEO to prioritize EX.

2. Establishing a data-driven culture:

The key to the EX transformation is to establish a data-driven culture to serve as a foundation. To create a serviceable data-driven culture, a business must gather feedback intelligently throughout the year and not hyper-frequently just because it can. Data from questionnaires, however, is just one source. Data from HR systems are another source while qualitative studies, transaction data, messaging data, and so on are other types.

3. Implementing a brand new way of working:

In its efforts to lift employee experiences to a new level, the organization will need to master some new techniques, tools, and methods. People need to be trained to view the organization through the employees' eyes to assume a genuine outside-in perspective. In that context, employee journey mapping is a strong approach.

4. Transforming the employee experience:

Bringing about a shift in an organization's EX level requires a massive transformative focus, but just getting the ball rolling is also an important step.

These four areas should be anchored, owned, and facilitated by HR, with local anchoring and executive power throughout the entire organization.

Get a quick idea of how EX mature your organization is right here. Rate the 11 statement on a scale from 0 to 100 based on how much you agree with it, and compare your answers to the benchmark from Ennova’s EX study with 548 HR staff members’ answers.

What is the Difference Between Employee Experience and Employee Engagement?

The main differences (and similarities) between employee experience and employee engagement can be summarized in four main ideas:

1. A focus on EX is broader than a focus on engagement

EX covers the experiences a person has from the time they hear about the organization, get hired, get onboarded, and have a daily life in the organization through the time they leave the organization, become an alumnus, and perhaps are hired once again (a winback). This definition covers both the employee's work life and portions of the employee's personal life. The actual person, in the EX definition, is also broadly defined to cover candidates, employees, managers, freelancers, and alumnies. In the field of engagement, the primary focus is on the employee and the portion of the employee journey we call "daily life as an employee," which is the portion most closely linked to management, the job itself, development, learning, purpose in the job, and so on.

2. The field of EX addresses a cross-organizational focus

All the functions in the organization focus on creating excellent, cohesive employee experiences collaboratively and with a shared EX goal. These experiences extend throughout employees' journeys through the organization, whereas employee engagement is more commonly a business area, a local team focus, or both.

3. EX and the experiences themselves come before employee engagement

The experiences throughout the whole employee journey are what create engagement. In our view, EX thereby becomes a new avenue for how employee engagement levels within an organization can reach new heights.

4. EX is a broad, holistic discipline

EX includes an array of methods, approaches, and tools. At the same time, EX meshes perfectly with the CX focus that many organizations already have as a central component of their strategies.

How does EX Affect the Top and Bottom Lines Every day?

Employee experiences affect an organization's customer experiences, top line, and bottom line each and every day in at least eight different areas. An employee exposed to excellent experiences might take less sick leave, be more productive and innovative, deliver better customer experiences, and sell more. Additionally, an employee like this is more of an ambassador for the organization and the product and is more ready for changes in the organization. Neglecting your employees is costly on the top and bottom lines in your organization.

The following 8 different dimensions affect the day-to-day top and bottom lines at your organization:

1. Sickness absence
2. Staff outflow
3. Attraction
4. Retention of key employees
5. Onboarding speed
6. Ability to innovate
7. Productivity
8. Rates of sale

We have conducted various analyses for many organizations, essentially all of which have demonstrated the positive financial effects of a clear focus on EX.

Three are shown in the following:

• Highly engaged employees deliver 38% greater profitability than weakly engaged employees.
  
• Of the weakly engaged employees, 17% quit their jobs within 1 year of the survey, while the same was true for only 4% of highly engaged employees.
• Blue-collar workers with low engagement take 2.3 weeks of sick leave per year whereas their highly engaged colleagues take only 1.6 weeks of leave. This is a difference of 30%.