What is Employee Experience?
What is Employee Experience?
Employee experience refers to the full spectrum of interactions, touchpoints, and perceptions a person has with your organization throughout their working life—starting as a candidate and continuing as an employee, manager, leader, or even freelancer. It includes both professional and personal moments that shape how people feel, perform, and grow within your company.
Employee experience is not the same as employee engagement, which is about the employee's commitment to the organization. Engagement focuses on an employee’s commitment and emotional connection to the organization, whereas employee experience is the environment, processes, and culture that influence that commitment.
Creating a strong employee experience is essential for attracting, developing, and retaining talent. Organizations that actively design and improve their employee experience see higher engagement, stronger performance, and reduced turnover.
To deliver an excellent employee experience across the employee lifecycle, organizations should focus on four key areas—each supporting a more connected, inclusive, and high-performing workplace.
Why is Employee Experience Important?
Employees are one of your organization’s greatest drivers of performance and long-term growth. Investing in employee experience is not only the right thing to do—it is a financially sound strategy. A well-designed employee experience directly influences multiple business-critical areas, including productivity, retention, customer satisfaction, collaboration, and innovation.
In fact, employee experience affects eight core dimensions that connect directly to your top and bottom line. When these areas are strengthened, organizations see measurable gains. But when employee experience is ignored or handled reactively, it can lead to costly turnover, reduced performance, and a weakened employer brand.
How to Master Employee Experience
To create meaningful change, your organization needs more than surveys—it needs strategy, data, and a new mindset. These three building blocks form the foundation for working proactively and effectively with employee experience.
- 01 Make EX a Leadership Priority
- 02 Turn Insight into Action with Data
- 03 Adopt an Outside-In Mindset
Step 1: Make EX a Leadership Priority
Success with the employee experience area is only possible if the executive board are prepared to work in a focused and committed way with the employee experience. If they are not convinced yet, it is important that you convince the CEO to prioritize working with the employee experience area.
Step 2: Turn Insight into Action with Data
The foundation of any employee experience transformation should be data driven. Employee insights should be collected in an intelligent way and analysis and facts must be anchored in a way that the organization wants to act and thus generate positive change.
Step 3: Adopt an Outside-In Mindset
It is necessary to master some new techniques with respect to designing the best possible experiences. HR, managers etc. must be trained in being able to perceive the organization through the eyes of the employees to be able to assume a true outside-in focus.
Who is Responsible for the Employee Experience Area
Employees are an organization's most important asset. From a financially perspective, prioritizing the employee experience area is very important. Because great employee experiences pay off and give your organization several different financial benefits.
The employee experience area affects no less than eight dimensions in the daily work that is related directly to the top and bottom line.
Neglecting your employees and not working strategically with the area can be very costly on the top and bottom line.
Improve your Employee Experience
If you have decided to start improving the employee experiences and thereby differentiate your organization from your competitors, you can improve your employee experiences by following these 8 steps.
Employee Experience Dictionary
The employee experience discipline is full of terms and conceptual frameworks.
Find an explanation of the most central EX concepts below:
Employee Experience (EX) refers to the entire field. It sums up an employee's experience with an organization during work life and personal life.
Employee Journey (EJ) is the path an employee takes in an organization from hearing about the organization to becoming an alumnus. There are at least 25 subjourneys in every organization.
Employee Touchpoint (ET) is a point of contact in the employee journey. This could be a job interview with a recruiter, your first day, or morning meetings. In every organization, there are more than 250 touchpoints.
Before You Survey, Get the Strategy Right
How high on the strategic agenda are the employees in your organization actually – if you really think about it?
Employee experience is a complex discipline to master. Many talk about it, but few companies have started working with it. Therefore, our book “Mastering Employee Experience” gives HR and top management 16 specific initiatives for implementing a transformation of employee experience over a 3-year period.
How to Listen to Your Employees?
Organizations today are listening to their employees more frequently and across more touchpoints than ever before, and this development has a clear purpose. To deliver strong employee experiences, you need to measure employee feedback intelligently and consistently throughout the entire employee journey.
Effective employee listening is more than collecting large amounts of data. Real impact happens when organizations turn insights into meaningful action and follow up continuously. This balance between gathering insights and taking action is one of the most important, and often most challenging, parts of creating excellent employee experiences.
How to Measure Employee Experience?
If you are considering to start working strategically with your employee experiences, you might wonder "which sources will lead to employee experience insights?"
You can mix data from various sources to create a set up that covers the entire employee journey as baseline for creating the best employee experiences. Therefore, choosing the right sources to gain the EX insights that you actually need is important if you don't want the work to be a waste of time and resources.
Explore the One-Stop-Shop for Engagement
The Employee Engagement Survey is just one piece of the puzzle. Our products and solutions make up a one-stop-shop with multiple tools developed to strengthen different areas of your employee experience – so you can take targeted actions.
Make inclusion real across every team
Turn team feedback into real results with our quick and impactful team survey. It lets you create on-demand check-ins with your team to address challenges, evaluate projects, and drive change.
ExploreMake inclusion real across every team
Turn team feedback into real results with our quick and impactful team survey. It lets you create on-demand check-ins with your team to address challenges, evaluate projects, and drive change.
ExploreSee the bigger picture
Combine leadership feedback with engagement insights to understand what drives motivation and what’s holding performance back. With clear data and built-in guidance, you’ll know where to focus to improve retention and results.
ExploreSee the bigger picture
Combine leadership feedback with engagement insights to understand what drives motivation and what’s holding performance back. With clear data and built-in guidance, you’ll know where to focus to improve retention and results.
ExploreBuild capabilities that last
From targeted training to full-scale leadership journeys, we help develop the mindset and skills today’s leaders need. Whether you’re growing individuals or transforming an entire culture, we support both personal growth and organizational change.
ExploreBuild capabilities that last
From targeted training to full-scale leadership journeys, we help develop the mindset and skills today’s leaders need. Whether you’re growing individuals or transforming an entire culture, we support both personal growth and organizational change.
ExploreTurn Insight into Impact
Explore real-world strategies, expert takes, and practical ideas to help you build better workplaces.
We areWe are Empowering.
Want to see how our employee experience platform works – live? Contact us today to schedule a no-obligation session with one of our specialists. You will get a personalized tour of the platform and can get an idea of whether our solution is the right fit for you.