A complete guide to the employee experience

Published: August 23, 2024 | by Natasha K. A. Wiebusch, Brightmine Marketing Content Manager

Research shows that companies with a better experience can increase their revenue by more than 50%. This statistic comes from an in-depth joint study of a large retailer by Salesforce and Talenteck. The study also found that investing in the employee experience increases profits by a whopping 45%.

Clearly, investing in your employee experience has a real, significant return on investment (ROI). Not only does it improve talent outcomes, as expected, but it also has a measurable business impact.

The million-dollar question is: What does it take to create a winning employee experience? As you might expect, the answer is slightly different for each employer. Still, there are key steps you can take to set yourself up for employee experience success…

What is the employee experience?

The employee experience is the sum of all the experiences an employee has with their employer throughout their tenure. This includes the experience at every stage of the employee journey from recruitment and onboarding to exit. Employee experience evaluates every aspect of the job, including the social, organizational, physical and work experience.

Defined this way, the employee experience can seem overwhelming and maybe even amorphous. With so much potential information to analyze, it may be hard to pin down what matters most. The key to designing an excellent experience is to discover the moments that matter in the employee journey.

Approaches to employee experience design

To find the moments that matter in the employee journey, leaders use an employee experience framework. A framework provides structure to helps identify important variables and narrow the scope of information to analyze. With a solid structure, organizations are better able to design an experience they can evaluate using key metrics.

The following are common frameworks for understanding the employee experience:

Employee experience environments

The employee experience environment framework, also called the Employee Experience Equation, focuses on three elements of the working environment:

Together, these three environments either help create or detract from a positive employee experience. According to Jacob Morgan, the framework’s creator, employers must focus on each of these environments to be successful.

Mckinsey & Company’s nine employee Experience Elements

Another approach to framing the employee experience is Mckinsey & Company’s nine employee experience elements. Similar to Morgan’s environment framework, it breaks the experience down into three primary domains:

1. Social experience.
2. Work experience.
3. Organization experience.

Mckinsey’s research found that these three domains accounted for most of the variance in employees’ experiences with their employers. Unlike Morgan’s model, however, Mckinsey’s model goes a step further. It identifies 9 elements of the experience, each of which falls under a domain:

Mckinsey’s model accounts for the shifts employees experienced during and after COVID-19. That is, employees in the post COVID-19 era tend to prioritize flexibility and purpose. Gen Z employees also prioritize these factors. Accordingly, this framework may be helpful for organizations managing a large Gen Z workforce.

Employee journey mapping

Employee journey mapping identifies key moments in the employee lifecycle that influence the employee experience. This framework focuses on how the employee interacts with their employer throughout their journey from attraction to separation. Key moments in the employee lifecycle — also called the employee journey — include:

• Attraction.
• Recruitment.
• Onboarding.
• Engagement.
• Development.
• Recognition.
• Transition.
• Separation.

If you choose to use journey mapping, you’ll need to identify the types of employees you have and create employee journeys for each. Organizations usually do this by creating employee personas (e.g., “entry level engineer,” or “mid-management marketing manager”).

Employee experience and the employee value proposition

The employee experience and the employee value proposition (EVP) are closely related concepts. Both are key to a successful talent strategy and employee-centric, and they overlap in many ways. Organizations focus on enhancing them to improve employee engagement, performance and retention. The key difference between the two is that they have slightly different perspectives.

An EVP is a way to identify all that an employer has to offer its employees. It helps companies understand what they bring of value to the employee and how that influences engagement and performance. Employers generally evaluate their EVP to direct efforts to increase or improve their offerings.

The employee experience, on the other hand, truly takes the perspective of the employee. It considers how the employee experiences their work, organization and colleagues. Companies evaluate the employee experience to help direct efforts to improve how employees feel about their employer and work. Organizations also evaluate the employee experience to inform their EVP strategy.

The benefits of a great employee experience

Research shows that the employee experience is key to organizational success. Though the business case is clear, the benefits of a great employee experience may be difficult to quantify. The following are key, research backed benefits of investing in your organization’s experience:

Talent edge

The employee experience is key to attracting talent and building the employer brand. First, it influences how employees feel at work and about their employers. And according to Indeed’s 2024 Workforce Insights Report, how current employees feel is a top priority to new talent.

The report found that employee happiness is the third most common thing job seekers look for when researching a company. That is, 58% of job seekers look at whether current employees are happy. The report also found that 50% consider an employer’s overall rating.

Engaged employees

Research has consistently shown that the employee experience directly influences employee engagement. Employees at organizations with a positive employee experience are more likely to feel happy and connected to their work.

Importantly, engaged employees are also more productive. Without high engagement, employers stand to lose on…well, a lot. According to the Gallup State of the Global Workplace: 2024 Report, low employee engagement costs the global economy an estimated $8.9 trillion.

Financial performance

As illustrated by the joint research from Salesforce and Talenteck, improving the employee experience doesn’t just improve employee satisfaction. It also improves a company’s financial performance. That is, companies with a great experience see increases in revenue and profits. Their research found the ROI for moving from the bottom quartile to the top quartile of employee experience was 150%.

Improving the employee experience

Gaining the competitive advantage of a great employee experience requires careful planning, investments and more. The following are six steps you can take to sustainably improve the experience in your organization:

1. Choose a framework

First, choose a framework to provide structure to your employee experience efforts. A framework will help you zero in on moments in the employee journey that matter most to your workforce. It will also provide a holistic view of the employee experience. This allows stakeholders to see how specific efforts impact the experience as a whole.

In addition to providing structure, a framework can help you understand what resources you need. These may relate to your budget, people or skills needs. For example, if you map an employee journey, you can identify specific departments that need additional funding or training.

2. Apply design thinking

Employee experience design is the process of building the employee experience strategically. One way to do this is through design thinking, which is a user-centric approach to project management that includes six steps:

• Empathize: Research what employees want and need out of their relationship with their employer.
• Define: Define what challenges and opportunities exist to improve the employee experience.
• Ideate: Brainstorm ideas for how to improve the experience in ways that matter most to employees.
• Prototype: Apply your ideas to real, achievable solutions, whether through training, support or new human resource technology investments.
• Test: Test your solutions to ensure they have the desired impact on the employee experience.
• Implement: Implement your solution in the workplace.

Design thinking is also iterative. That is, once you implement a solution, you can then evaluate it and identify areas for improvement. With this information in hand, you can begin the design process again to make improvements.

3. Gain buy-in

Because the employee experience spans across the employee journey, it’s important to avoid creating silos. Siloed efforts from separate teams can send mixed messages and hinder efforts to create a unified employer brand. It can also lead to inefficiencies.

For example, if two teams invest in separate engagement platforms, they’ll likely pay more than if they’d agreed on one provider. And with separate platforms, team members in each department will have different experiences.

To ensure your efforts are unified, gain buy-in from stakeholders across the organization from the start. You can make a business case by highlighting the key talent and financial benefits of investing in your organization’s employee experience.

Who’s a stakeholder?

The employee experience impacts everyone in the organization. So, who you involve should represent the whole company. This includes:

• HR.
• The C-suite.
• Department leaders.
• Line managers.
• Employee resource groups.
• Employees.

Beyond gaining buy-in, continue to involve these stakeholders in the experience design process. This is particularly important during the research and brainstorming phases, as well as when you evaluate your efforts. You can keep them involved through focus groups, a committee, or via surveys.

4. Set goals

Once you’ve selected stakeholders to include in the design process, set goals for your employee experience. These goals should align with the organization’s mission and values — their raison d’être.
Setting goals can be difficult, as you may not be sure how effective your initial efforts may be. To help you reduce uncertainty, leverage people analytics. Leveraging people analytics to design your employee experience will allow you to:

• Select key performance indicators.
• Determine what’s reasonable for your organization.
• Make objective decisions.
• Track progress.

5. Invest

Ensuring an excellent experience requires long term investments from the organization as a whole — not just HR. Talent management is an HR function, but managers and other leaders have a significant impact on employees. In fact, according to research by Gallup, managers account for 70% of the variance in their team’s engagement.
Investments in the employee experience may be monetary or people related. To what extent you increase your investments will also depend on where your organization’s current experience stands. The key is to ensure each investment ties back to a specific goal you’ve set.

6. Be holistic

If your company is experiencing high dysfunctional attrition rates, your first instinct will be to find the cause. In the world of HR, having a single cause to a serious problem would be nice — but it’s not likely. Unfortunately, when it comes to why employees leave or stay at a company, it may be more complicated.

To make sustainable progress on your employee experience, consider a holistic approach that examines experience challenges from multiple angles. For example, when you identify high turnover rate, consider reviewing multiple moments in the employee journey.

When implementing new solutions, implement both targeted and systematic changes. For example, in addition to creating a new engagement program, review your processes and policies. You can even use your employee handbook to improve the experience.

Additionally, allow this multi-lens view to guide surveys and other progress measurement tools.

7. Personalize the experience

In recent years, employee expectations for their employers have changed. Employees now expect more than employee recognition awards and salary increases. Today, employees are seeking individualized experiences — from their benefits to their career paths.

When considering your employee experience efforts, consider strategies to personalize the experience for each employee. This may include:

• Ensuring all employees have access to some form of flexibility.
• Allowing employees to personalize their benefits plans.
• Implementing individualized career coaching.
• Investing in software that personalizes onboarding, learning and engagement journeys.
• Establishing an employee-driven development program.

These and other strategies can help guide employees along their own, individual employee journey.

8. Monitor progress

Finally, no strategic effort is complete without a way to monitor its progress. Since the employee experience consists of literally all interactions an employee has with their employer, the opportunities to evaluate it are endless.

To determine what you need to measure, it’s helpful to first consider the elements of your employee experience framework. Each of these elements can help you identify the most relevant metrics to watch. Once you’ve selected the right metrics, you can use people analytics to evaluate your efforts.

Quantitative and qualitative data

When evaluating your efforts, it’s important to consider both quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data can help you evaluate outcomes, identify patterns and help determine causes of challenges your organization is experiencing.

Qualitative data can provide similar information. Importantly, qualitative data from sources like employee experience surveys and exit interviews raises the employee voice. Employee feedback provided through these means also help leaders understand how employees feel and what their perceptions are.

Leveraging HR tech

Depending on the organization, you may have access to varying amounts of data and analytics expertise. To assist with data or skills gaps, you can invest in analytics software. They may be an all-in-one solution, or one for a specific function, such as compensation.

You may also consider employee experience software. This type of software offers various capabilities to help you enhance and monitor the employee experience. It enables users to acquire data from employees — including productivity and engagement data. You can also use this software to run employee surveys and analyze the results.

With robust data and enabling technology, you can gain a deeper, objective understanding of your employee experience. Monitoring your progress will also help guide action items and further investments.

The employee experience journey doesn’t stop here

A great employee experience can help you retain top talent and maximize engagement. By supporting employee needs with targeted investments, employers can create an environment and a culture that helps employees thrive. However, such gains can’t be made overnight. The employee experience is truly a long-term journey for employees and employers alike.

Learn how you can improve your employee experience by leveraging Brightmine, formerly XpertHR.