What is employee experience?

Why is employee experience important?

As people make up a company, employee experience will have a knock-on effect on many aspects of your business. One of the most notable of these will be your employee retention rate or turnover.

Employee experience by definition describes an employee’s feelings and everyday happiness in a company. If their experience is not positive, they’re more likely to leave. 

Aside from causing a loss of great talent, this can cause other employees to feel overworked as they pick up extra tasks from unfilled positions. This, in turn, will negatively impact their employee experience and thus potentially create a ripple effect throughout your organisation.

Employee experience also influences new hires. Prospective candidates often check review websites to establish what the employee experience is like at a business they are considering joining. Therefore, having good reviews in this regard can be the difference between great talent joining a business or not.

What forms employee experience?

Employee experience is a term that captures the full effect felt from a range of different, smaller aspects. These include:

• Company culture

• Employee benefits

• Progression opportunities

• Working relationships

• Work-life balance

• Workload

Each of these aspects, among other things, will play an important role in forming the overall employee experience. The weight that each aspect carries will differ for each employee. Some, such as those with a young family, may value work-life balance the most, while new graduates may value progression and working relationships more.

Employee experience vs employee engagement

It is important not to confuse employee experience with employee engagement. While the two might be similar in some ways, employee engagement is the desired outcome of improving your employee experience. 

Once employees feel as though their experience has improved, an increase in engagement in work relationships, tasks, or company culture may be seen.

How can employers improve employee experience?

There are several steps that can be taken to improve employee experience. The way that the employee experience strategy will be shaped will, of course, depend on the employer and what measures they already have in place.

Speak to employees

The first stage in any employee experience improvement lifecycle should be to speak to the employees themselves. This can be in person, or through a survey that allows employees to detail what they do or don’t enjoy about their current experience in the workplace.

Propose improved employee experience examples

Once the data has been collected, it can be used to draft up solutions to any issues that have been mentioned. It is worth presenting current employees with the new strategy and getting their opinion on it, before implementing it.

Regularly check in once the strategy is in place

Regular check-ups should be performed with employees to ensure the strategy is having the desired impact. It will also give employees the chance to bring up any problems that have developed in the meantime, or to propose new ideas.

If you’re looking for more information about this employee experience or engagement, check out the following Knowledge Hub articles:

• How to improve employee engagement

• Planning enjoyable team building activities for introverts