Employee experience: What is it and why do you need it?
Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash
Nights out are a rare thing for me as a parent of a young child. So when I went to a local restaurant last week and the food arrived both late and stone cold, you can be sure I was disappointed. I complained politely to the owner and he responded with anger, denial, and defensiveness. The discussion between us got louder and the upshot is I didn’t pay for my dinner. It didn't make me feel good.
Think about the last time you were on the receiving end of poor customer service. How did it make you feel? Will you go back? Recommend to a friend?
Now try transposing the customer for the employee. How much attention do you pay to their day-to-day experience of work? How does the business react if the employee gets served up a cold dinner and makes their voice heard about that? And what do we do to ensure that it never comes to that?
We all ‘get’ customer service and its importance to the growth and success of businesses. Employees aren’t customers but they are a group of people who you want to be sure are happy, engaged and productive. You’d like to retain the best, and you’d like them to recommend you to other talented people they know. In short, you don’t want them to leave without paying and then write about it in a blog post.
Why is the experience of work important?
Employees’ needs have changed irrevocably in recent years, from where they work to what they want in a boss (which is now as important as compensation). But I’m guessing what hasn’t changed for employees is their desire to have a positive experience at work.
Hybrid working is one example of where companies are struggling to get the experience of work right. The push to return staff to the office has increased throughout 2023, moving from soft requests to collaborate in person to mandated office time (see Amazon’s attempt to track and penalize those who don’t show up in person). The evidence suggests that hybrid isn’t working. Research in the UK by the CIPD (the association of HR professionals) found that about 4 million people – 12% of employees – had changed careers due to a lack of flexible working.
For me, inclusion is another classic mis-step in the employee experience strategy. This HBR research found that the most inclusive organisations were those whose culture focused on flexibility, independence and learning. In other words, a training roll out and a shiny DEI policy will most likely not lead to your employees experiencing a sense of inclusion at work. Going back to the restaurant analogy, every part of the experience has to have a DEI lens applied to it: How are we greeted? Who gets offered the window seat? How does the menu translate to different people, needs, cultures?
What is employee experience anyway?
Employee experience is what our culture feels like. It’s the aggregation of all the things you do that shape what it feels like to belong to, and work in, your company. When the employee experience is strong, people feel a sense of purpose. They know and appreciate the impact they’re making in the world.
At Within People, we’ve distilled a decade of working with organisations to activate their purpose and values into our equitable employee experience framework. We believe employee experience should be based on a set of mutual promises that build equity into the experience of work and are a reflection of purpose and values in action.
Our employee experience framework has four lenses. We can apply these to any business to identify the strengths and stretches of the employee experience. The framework creates a structured conversation through which leaders can prioritise action and make clear promises in the most meaningful areas of their employee experience. You can read about our own employee experience promises here.
For us, employee experience can be summed up as promises over perks. A deeply embedded commitment to creating the kind of experience you want employees to have doesn’t come from beer taps and ping pong tables. Instead, it’s about making promises that are measurable commitments between employer and employee. They’re concise, meaningful and have equity baked in. You can listen to one recent client explain the process in their own words over on our podcast.
Isn’t Employee Experience the same as Employee Engagement?
Simply put, no. Engaged and motivated employees are an outcome of a positive employee experience. If your employees experience flexibility to suit their needs then one outcome will likely be productivity. If your employees experience a culture of inclusion then one outcome will be the feeling of belonging. When you focus on employee engagement, you’re constantly solving symptoms. When you’re concerned instead with employee experience, you’re solving at source.
| Employee Engagement (EE) |
Employee Experience (EX) |
|---|---|
| Is an outcome |
Is a source |
| Concerned with how people believe in your culture |
Concerned with how people feel when they’re part of your culture |
| Focuses on an employee’s response to their organization’s communication and behaviors |
Focuses on how an organization communicates and behaves in service of their employees |
| Is the emotional commitment and motivation an employee feels while on their journey with an organization |
Encompasses the entire journey an employee goes through during their tenure with an organization |
| Is a measure of how true the experience of the culture is |
Sets the tone and structure for the culture |
Is Employee Experience (EX) the new Employee Value Proposition (EVP)?
It’s a different side of the same coin and both are needed in a business looking to attract and retain talented people. EX is your internal lens on what it’s like to work in your business. It should be applied to every part of the employee lifecycle from recruitment and onboarding right through to progression and exit. Only once you have this in place can you develop a genuine EVP which attracts people to join your culture. EVP without an EX behind it is kind of an empty promise.
| Employee Value Proposition (EVP) |
Employee Experience (EX) |
|---|---|
| Single-minded propositions that inform recruiting and hiring based on a promised employee experience |
Holistic set of promises that shape the experience of work at a company |
| Set an expectation |
Align expectation with experience |
| Mostly for people outside your company |
Mostly for people inside your company |
| Designed to sell a culture |
Designed to bring a culture to life |
How to get started or take a meaningful next step
If you have employees then you already have an employee experience, but how positive and purposeful is it? Could there be a gap between reality and your aspiration for how you want it to feel around here?
One positive next step is to ask your employees how they experience the culture, but not through an engagement survey (remember engagement is the output of experience!). We often carry out listening exercises for clients to gather an accurate picture of the employee experience. Find a way of collecting honest intel which isn’t coloured by the person asking them (i.e. the leaders in your business).
Before you do that, here are a few questions for leaders to consider which will help frame the action needed in your business:
Which one element from our framework above do you feel your business embraces really well?
Which one element from our framework do you feel needs attention in your business?
What makes this ‘stretch’ element challenging for you?
How might a clearly articulated promise around this help you communicate how work is experienced?
If you need a sounding board for your thinking, we’re here for you! Contact us for a conversation to identify the strength and stretch of your employee experience, and a plan to clearly articulate your intentions for the employee experience in your business.
