Building an employee experience strategy that drives engagement and performance

Today’s workers want more than a job. They want meaningful careers at companies that align with their personal values, invest in their growth, and create a sense of belonging.

At the same time, companies want to provide a consistent, positive employee experience, but this has become more challenging. Remote and hybrid work models, global teams, and evolving employee expectations may mean each individual has a different experience working at your business.. So, how can your organization create a culture, programs, and touchpoints that ensure every employee feels supported, engaged, and empowered, no matter where or how they work? Create an employee experience strategy.

An effective employee experience strategy is one of the most important investments your business can make. Implementing a thoughtful strategy not only drives engagement and performance, but also helps attract and retain top talent, strengthening your company for the long haul.

In this article, we’ll explore what an employee experience strategy is, the key pillars of a successful one, and a step-by-step guide to creating a strategy that drives real results.

What is an employee experience strategy?

Employee experience is the sum of every interaction an employee has with your company, from their first day to their last. It’s shaped by a wide range of factors, some of which are tangible – like salary, benefits, and a supportive work environment – while others are intangible – like company culture and fair hiring and promotion practices. While it’s impossible to list every factor that impacts an individual’s experience working for your company, each touchpoint contributes to how employees perceive and engage with your organization.

An employee experience strategy is an intentional plan to enhance every aspect of the employee journey. This could mean introducing development programs to encourage career growth, refining benefits packages to offer more competitive compensation, or redesigning office spaces to promote collaboration, wellness, and productivity. A strong employee experience strategy helps create a more engaged, motivated, and loyal workforce – and ultimately drives better outcomes for your business.

Why employee experience matters for business success

Investing in employee experience can deliver measurable returns across your organization. Here are just a few of the business benefits of prioritizing employee experience:

• Attract and retain top talent: When employees feel valued, supported, and engaged, they’re more likely to stay with your company and recommend it to others. Happy employees are more committed, loyal, and eager to contribute to your organization’s success.
• Drive employee engagement: Employee experience and engagement are deeply intertwined. A thoughtful, well-designed employee experience fosters a work environment where employees feel valued and motivated to help your company succeed.
• Increase employee productivity: When employees have access to the right resources, tools, and a supportive work environment, they’re empowered to perform at their best. Investing in workplace experience and development can increase employee performance and productivity, helping your business more reach its goals.
• Enhance company culture: A positive employee experience creates a thriving workplace culture, which attracts top talent, drives innovation, and promotes collaboration across teams.
• Boost customer satisfaction: Engaged employees are more likely to deliver better customer service, which directly impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately driving business growth.

The pillars of a strong employee experience strategy

To create a strong employee experience, you need the right ingredients. From company culture to employee engagement and everything in between, here’s your recipe for crafting employee experiences that keep employees engaged, motivated, and performing their best.

1. Company culture

Every employer’s goal is to create a workplace that employees genuinely want to be a part of. The secret sauce of a successful business? It’s company culture.

Your business culture permeates everything you do as a company, from hiring to promotions to development to how you interact with customers. A strong culture is a cornerstone of a positive employee experience. For example, by fostering a company culture that encourages employees to be themselves, celebrate wins, embrace innovation, and support one another, you create an environment where people feel valued, engaged, and motivated to do great work. A strong culture enhances employee satisfaction while driving business growth and strengthening your company’s reputation.

2. Psychological safety

Psychological safety is another foundational element of a positive employee experience. Creating a supportive work environment where employees feel safe to show up as their authentic selves fosters trust, openness, and belonging. When employees know they can voice ideas, take risks, and learn from their mistakes without fear of judgment or retaliation, they’re more likely to feel engaged and connected to their work. This sense of security not only enhances collaboration and innovation, but also plays a crucial role in shaping an inclusive, empowering employee experience.

3. Employee engagement

Employee engagement and employee experience are deeply connected – and when one thrives, so does the other. A positive employee experience fuels engagement by creating an environment where employees feel valued, supported, and inspired. On the flip side, a poor employee experience can quickly lead to disengagement, lower performance, and higher turnover. In short, employee engagement is both a key outcome of a great employee experience – and a driver of ongoing success for your people and your business.

4. Employee journey mapping

A strong employee experience strategy will also include employee journey mapping. Journey mapping gives organizations a clear, structured view of how employees interact with the company at every stage of their lifecycle. The entire employee lifecycle includes six key stages:

• Attract: Attract candidates who are not only the right fit for the job, but also a culture-add.
• Onboard: Ensure new hires get the warm welcome, training, and knowledge they need to settle into their roles.
• Engage: Build culture and initiatives to drive employee motivation, commitment, and connection.
• Develop: Invest in employee learning and development to encourage individuals to grow their skills and careers with your business.
• Perform: Set clear expectations and evaluate performance fairly.
• Retain: Regularly recognize employees with competitive compensation, incentives, and public praise to reward performance and dedication.
• Exit: Gather valuable feedback from departing employees and keep the door open in case they consider returning in the future.

When you look at the entire employee lifecycle through the eyes of your employees, you can uncover key opportunities to create more engaging experiences every step of the way. A well-mapped employee journey doesn’t just improve day-to-day interactions – it strengthens retention, boosts employee engagement, and drives better performance.

As you start mapping the employee journey at your organization, focus on these three crucial elements:

1. Key moments in each stage: Identify the most meaningful touchpoints throughout the employee lifecycle. For example, the experience of interviewing with the hiring manager or receiving a job offer during the Attract stage can significantly impact how candidates perceive your company.
2. Organizational context: Look for ways to connect your company’s mission, vision, and values to each step of the employee journey. They provide a foundation for alignment, guiding employees in understanding their purpose and connection to the broader goals of the business.
3. Individual employee circumstances: Each employee’s unique identity, background, and personal circumstances will influence their journey within your company. Recognizing and respecting these differences will help you develop a more inclusive and personalized experience that resonates with everyone.

Documenting these key factors can give your business a deeper understanding of how your employees experience each stage of their journey – and uncover targeted opportunities to improve employee engagement, satisfaction, and performance. While this component of the employee experience may take time, its long-term impact on engagement, retention, and performance makes it well worth the effort.

5. Learning and development

As part of your employee experience strategy, you’ll also want to invest in both the short- and long-term growth of your employees. Today’s employees want to learn and advance their careers while helping your company grow – but if they can’t envision a future with your organization or don’t see clear development opportunities, they may start looking elsewhere.

Building a culture that values and celebrates continuous learning can boost retention, engagement, and motivation. From stretch projects and mentorship programs to tuition reimbursement and professional conferences, businesses have plenty of internal and external opportunities to invest in employee growth. Your business just needs to ensure your employees know what’s available to them and what they need to do to grow professionally.

Ready to level up your L&D game? Check out our blog posts, Learning & development 101: How to attract and retain talent and HR’s complete guide to employee development, for practical strategies to grow and retain your workforce.

6. Technology and tools

As you strategize, be sure your employees have the tools and resources they need to perform their jobs well. This includes the right devices (computers, phones, tablets, specialized equipment, etc.), the right software, and the right training on how to use them both!

Employees who are under-resourced and unsupported are unlikely to have a positive experience at your company. By providing employees with everything they need to succeed, your business can foster productivity, reduce frustration, and create an environment where employees feel prepared to do efficient, effective work.

7. Work environment

A well-designed work environment affects how employees feel, perform, and connect with your organization. Whether it's a quiet space for focused work, ample meeting rooms, or inviting areas for collaboration, various elements of the physical workspace contribute to employee satisfaction, wellbeing, and productivity. Investing in the comfort of your office is worth considering as part of your employee experience strategy.

And don’t forget your remote employees – their work environment matters, too. Offering a remote work stipend or home office support helps set them up to thrive – no matter where they’re working from. Prioritizing comfort, flexibility, and functionality across all work settings helps create a more inclusive employee experience.

How to create an effective employee experience strategy

Ready to create a better workplace experience built on the pillars listed above? Follow these five steps to understand and address changing employee needs:

Step 1: Define your business’ key priorities

Start by setting clear goals for your employee experience strategy. What is your business looking to achieve? Are you aiming to increase engagement? Reduce turnover? Strengthen your culture? Or attract higher caliber talent? Identify specific, attainable objectives that will guide the rest of your strategy and focus your efforts.

Step 2: Collect and analyze employee feedback with employee experience surveys

Before you set your strategy, it's essential to have a clear, comprehensive view of your current employee experience as a starting point. To develop this understanding, use a mix of tools to gather feedback across key touchpoints in the employee lifecycle, including:

• Employee experience surveys: Use a collection of onboarding, engagement, DEI, satisfaction surveys, and more to get a quantitative pulse on how employees feel about various aspects of their experience.
• Employee interviews: Collect qualitative feedback through focus groups, stay interviews, and exit interviews to uncover nuanced insights that surveys might miss.
• Employee journey mapping: Visualize the employee lifecycle by identifying key stages, meaningful moments, and potential friction points. Mapping this journey helps you understand how different employees experience your organization and how you can better support them at each stage.

Together, these insights can help your HR team pinpoint what’s working well and uncover opportunities for improvement that will drive your strategy later on.

Step 3: Implement policies that foster a positive work environment

Now it’s time to put your insights into action. ​Once you've defined your employee experience goals and gathered insights into current challenges and opportunities, you’re ready to align these elements and create a targeted strategy. Determine which policies, programs, and practices you can update or introduce to improve your employee experience and create a more positive, engaging work environment.

For example, let’s say your surveys revealed that employees feel disconnected from leadership, and in response, your business set a goal to improve organizational transparency over the next two quarters. As part of your strategy, you might consider introducing initiatives like:

• Regular "Ask Me Anything" sessions with executives
• Recurring leadership office hours
• Monthly All-Hands meetings (instead of quarterly)

These low-cost, high-impact programs and the subsequent increase in executive facetime can help build trust, increase transparency, and foster a stronger sense of connection between employees and leadership.

Step 4: Track employee experience metrics

Once your initiatives are in place, give them time to take effect, and then measure their impact. Use the same feedback methods from step one (surveys, interviews, and journey mapping) to track changes in employee sentiment and experience over time.

Keep in mind that not every initiative will resonate with every employee. To better understand what’s working, you may need to segment your results.

For example, introducing on-site childcare might be popular with employees who are the parents of young children, but this change likely won’t affect employees without children. To accurately measure the impact of this perk, filter survey results to focus on feedback from employees who are parents.

By filtering survey results to focus on feedback from parents, you can gain clearer insights into the program's effectiveness for its intended audience. Segmenting employee feedback by relevant demographics or roles allows for more targeted analysis, ensuring that your initiatives are meeting the needs of those they are designed to support.

Step 5: Adjust your strategy as needed

Stay flexible and be ready to adjust your initiatives as you gather more data. New initiatives won’t always achieve the desired results – you might need to tweak the offering, improve internal awareness of new perks, and strengthen communication around their value to ensure they make a lasting, positive impact on the employee experience.

Don’t be discouraged if your programs don’t succeed right away. Use employee surveys and interviews to gather insights, make thoughtful adjustments, and iterate. Over time and with continuous feedback, you’ll be able to refine your strategy and deliver employee experiences that matter.

Common employee experience challenges (and how to overcome them)

Even the best-intentioned companies face obstacles when it comes to creating a consistently strong employee experience. Here are five of the most common challenges businesses face – along with tips for navigating them:

1. Balancing employee expectations with business objectives

Today’s employees expect meaningful work, career growth, flexibility, and purpose. At the same time, businesses need to drive results, maintain productivity, and manage costs. Investing in new perks and programs is important, but so is seeing a clear return on these investments. Finding the right balance between employee needs and business objectives is critical.

How to overcome this challenge: Prioritize transparency and clear communication. One effective approach is to set people-first objectives that align with your company’s broader goals for the year. Every program or people investment should support these goals, helping employees understand the “why” behind key initiatives and what to expect in the months ahead.

To further bridge the gap between employee expectations and business needs, involve employees in the decision-making process whenever possible. For example, if you’re weighing a few potential initiatives but only have the resources to pursue one or two, consider hosting employee focus groups. This not only helps surface what matters most to your people but also ensures your efforts are grounded in both organizational priorities and employee needs.

2. Getting executive buy-in

Securing support from senior leadership is one of the most crucial, yet often one of the most challenging, aspects of implementing an employee experience strategy. Without executive buy-in, it can be difficult to secure the necessary resources and influence to create and maintain company-wide initiatives and drive lasting change. Expect to do research so you can bring compelling facts and figures to present a strong business case to your executives. Show them how investing in employee experience is directly tied to positive outcomes for your business.

How to overcome this challenge: To gain executive buy-in, focus on aligning the employee experience strategy with your company’s broader business goals. Share data from your surveys, employee interviews, and journey mapping – along with any relevant case studies and benchmark data – that demonstrate the tangible impact of a positive employee experience, such as lower turnover rates, increased productivity, and stronger employer brand. Building a strong, data-backed business case that speaks to both financial and cultural benefits is key to getting leadership on board.

3. Addressing burnout and work-life balance concerns

Heavy workloads, unrealistic expectations, and periods of drastic change can quickly lead to poor work-life balance and burnout – two leading causes of employee turnover. Even more concerning? Most employees suffer in silence. One survey found that 71% of employees never tell their manager or company they’re experiencing burnout. Businesses often don’t notice the signs until it’s too late and their top performers are already out the door.

How to overcome this challenge: Promote a culture that respects work-life boundaries. Encourage leaders to model healthy behaviors, like taking time off and setting clear after-hours expectations, like not replying to messages or emails outside of working hours. Flexible schedules, manageable workloads, and mental health resources can help employees sustain their energy and motivation.

4. Navigating remote and hybrid work dynamics

The shift to remote and hybrid work has provided employees with unmatched flexibility, but it has also brought new challenges. While early concerns focused on communication breakdowns, isolation, and unequal access to growth opportunities, Culture Amp research suggests these challenges are not as widespread or detrimental as once feared. In fact, many employees thrive in flexible environments when they’re supported with intentional communication, inclusive leadership, and equitable access to development opportunities. Focus on optimizing these flexible models to foster connection, engagement, and growth across all of your work settings.

How to overcome this challenge: Be intentional about connection and inclusion. Here are a few ways to do this:

• Build structured communication practices like regular 1-on-1s and ongoing team meetings to give employees time to align with their manager and colleagues, ask questions, and socialize with their peers.
• Invest in collaboration tools to help employees set expectations, assign tasks, update each other on roadblocks, and more, so projects can move forward asynchronously.
• Design remote-friendly initiatives that ensure all employees have the same opportunities when it comes to development, recognition, and advancement as in-office workers.

Together, these initiatives ensure your employees feel connected to and have the same opportunities as their in-office peers.

5. Lacking clear insights into your employee experience

HR professionals sometimes struggle to know where to start when building an employee experience strategy – either because they don’t have the data they need or because they have too much data at their disposal. Without a clear understanding of what employees are experiencing day-to-day, it’s difficult to identify areas for improvement. This can result in well-intentioned but ineffective programs that miss the mark and drain valuable time and resources.

How to overcome this challenge: Tools like Culture Amp help organizations gain a deeper understanding of the employee experience across every stage of the employee lifecycle. With employee experience surveys, you can collect both quantitative and qualitative data to identify what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus your efforts.

Beyond surveys, platforms like Culture Amp also support key moments that shape employee experience – from performance reviews and 1-on-1s to goal setting, career development, and feedback. Together, these tools give your people the structure, guidance, and opportunities they need to thrive.

Case study: How NASCAR used Culture Amp to build an exceptional employee experience

When NASCAR merged with another organization in 2020, its leadership team recognized the company’s need for a unified, data-driven approach to bring both company cultures together. They turned to Culture Amp for helping navigating the transition and aligning employees around a shared experience.

The first step? Listening. NASCAR launched employee surveys to uncover what was working – and what needed to change. Sharing those results transparently earned trust across the organization and paved the way for a wave of targeted, people-first initiatives, including:

• Learning and development: Relaunched NASCAR University, leading to a 15% increase in program enrollment and a 107% jump in course completions.
• Recognition and connection: Introduced the virtual High Five initiative, a peer recognition program, along with employee spotlights, coffee talks, employee resource group investment, and a company-wide volunteer week.
• Benefits and wellness: Expanded access to healthcare, increased paid time off and parental leave, enhanced employee assistance programs, and revamped in-office wellness rooms to encourage employee wellbeing and financial security.

By using Culture Amp to guide decisions and track progress, NASCAR was able to strengthen its culture and create a more connected, cohesive employee experience.

Read the full NASCAR case study →

Create an effective customer experience strategy with Culture Amp

Building a thoughtful, intentional employee experience strategy is common sense for any business that wants to attract, engage, and retain top talent. From balancing employee expectations with business needs to navigating the complexities of remote and hybrid work, the most successful strategies focus on creating meaningful, supportive experiences throughout every stage of the employee journey.

With Culture Amp, your company can continuously gather employee feedback, uncover actionable insights, and design initiatives that truly move the needle on engagement and performance. Whether you’re ready to create a seamless onboarding process, develop a leadership program, or strengthen your company culture, Culture Amp provides the tools you need to create a workplace where your employees and your business thrive.

Key features that contribute to a strong employee experience strategy include:

• Employee surveys to gather feedback and insights at every stage of the employee journey
• Performance reviews and 360° feedback to drive growth, alignment, and continuous development
• Goal and OKR tracking to ensure clarity, focus, and accountability
• 1-on-1 and feedback tools to encourage ongoing conversations and coaching
• Employee development tools such as career pathing, skills tracking, and learning goals to grow your talent
• DEI analytics to uncover disparities and improve inclusivity across teams
• Benchmarks and reporting to help your HR team make data-backed decisions with confidence

Ready to take a data-driven, employee-first approach to building a better workplace?

Get a Culture Amp demo and see how our employee experience platform can support you at every stage of the employee journey.

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