HR’s complete guide to employee experience

From an employee’s first day at your company to their last, every interaction they have with your organization – from their relationship with their manager to their salary and benefits – shapes their overall employee experience. A strong employee experience boosts productivity, loyalty, and engagement, while a poor one leaves people feeling disconnected and unmotivated.

So, what separates a positive experience from a problematic one? This guide breaks down what employee experience really is, why it matters, and how you can improve the employee experience at your company. We’ll also share several real-world examples of employee experience strategies in action.

What is employee experience?

Employee experience encapsulates what people encounter and observe throughout their tenure at your organization. It spans from an employee’s first day at your company to their last – and all of the touchpoints in between.

People sometimes talk about employee engagement in the same conversations as employee experience. These concepts are related, but they aren’t the same thing. Engagement is an outcome of your employee experience. Put simply, a better experience means higher engagement. A solid employee experience can also improve other important feelings like employee satisfaction, wellbeing, connection, belonging, and purpose.

How to create your employee experience strategy

Wondering how to improve employee experience? Some organizations choose to develop an employee experience strategy, a process that’s also known as “employee experience management.” This strategy is a documented plan that describes how your organization will take action. What, specifically, will you do to positively influence how employees feel about your company?

Of course, you can also take targeted action as part of your overarching people strategy. While an employee experience strategy can be helpful, improving your employee experience doesn’t need to be a massive or formal undertaking.

Either way, before you start hashing out ideas for employee experience programs, it’s helpful to understand the nuts and bolts. Let’s start by breaking down the employee lifecycle – all of the different stages and phases a single employee moves through within your organization.

The 7 stages of the employee lifecycle

The employee lifecycle is made up of seven unique stages, each of which shapes your employee experience.

1. Attract - Candidates learn about your company and the role and decide if it’s the right fit for them. During this stage, people may become advocates for your organization, regardless of whether they join it.

2. Onboard - Employees get the training and knowledge they need to settle into their roles. This stage is critical because the effectiveness of your onboarding program can significantly impact the employee’s tenure.

3. Engage - Employees learn more about your company and what it stands for, leading them to greater motivation, commitment, and connection.

4. Develop - Employees receive feedback on how they’re doing and the tools and skills they need to grow. They may receive stretch assignments or other development opportunities to grow in or out of their role.

5. Perform - Employees are evaluated on their performance and recognized for their achievements. How your company approaches performance reviews and compensation will shape your employees' experience during this stage.

6. Exit - Employees depart your organization and begin their next chapter. During this stage, administering an exit survey may help you understand why an employee decided to leave your company.

7. Alumni - If the employee experience is positive, employees continue to cheer on the company from the sidelines.

Keep in mind that employees might not move through all of these stages in order. For example, when an employee’s role changes, they’ll move back to the onboarding stage as they get up to speed in their new position.

The employee experience is shaped by how your organization approaches each and every one of these steps.

What factors shape the employee experience?

We’ve covered the when of the employee experience, so now let’s talk about the what. Everything your employees encounter on the job affects their employee experience.

Of course, that includes salary, benefits, and company culture. However, there are many other influences at play, including your business’s commitment to fair hiring and promotion practices, its relationship with the local community, and even whether your managers check in with their teams daily.

Here’s a quick look at some of the different elements that impact the employee experience:

• A culture of recognition
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)
• Employee autonomy
• Employee development
• Healthcare and voluntary benefits
• Manager relations
• Mission, vision, and values
• Office space
• Organizational transparency
• Performance management practices
• Work-life balance
• Workplace policies

Using this information to shape your employee experience strategy

If you are just getting started with this process, we recommend using journey mapping to audit the different touchpoints of your employee lifecycle. You’ll identify the most meaningful moments for employees and then determine where and how you can make a significant impact on the employee experience. Once you have that foundation in place, you’re ready to create your employee experience strategy.

You can map the employee experience with a simple, four-step framework:

1. Identify the moments that matter most to your employees
   Look stage by stage. For example, during the attraction stage, “receiving an offer letter” may be a particularly powerful “moment that matters” for people at your company.
2. Connect the moments that matter to your unique organizational context
   Ensure congruence between what your company stands for and what employees experience at each stage. You can do this by identifying the key values you want to emphasize in your moments that matter. For example, if transparency is a key value, how can you connect that to an employee’s first experience with a performance review?
3. Consider the employee perspective
   Who an employee is shapes how they view the organization. Consider the identities that could affect an individual’s experience at your company, and which moments would matter most to that employee. For example, remote employees may feel particularly strongly about meeting their team for the first time.
4. Prioritize
   Decide what stage of the employee lifecycle to focus on first, and then choose a specific moment you’d like to improve. Determine how you will define and measure success (i.e., which question will you track in your engagement survey, or which KPI will you use to prove the success of your efforts?).

These four steps serve as the foundation for your employee experience strategy. After you’ve mapped out the moments that matter most in your organization, you can develop specific tactics for deliberately enhancing each of these moments. We’ll get into these a little later in the guide.

Why is employee experience important?

Employee experience has long been a priority for executives and HR leaders, and for good reason: it has a measurable impact on a company’s engagement, productivity, profitability, turnover, and more. Here are a few reasons why your C-suite probably has employee experience top of mind, too.

Higher engagement

Employee engagement measures the relationship between employees and an organization. It’s one of the constellations of feelings that can result from the employee experience. Most companies monitor and aim to improve their employee engagement since it’s highly correlated with turnover and how much effort people are likely to put into their work.

Higher employee engagement is one of many possible results of a good employee experience. When your employees find value in the work they do, feel recognized and rewarded for their contributions, and are aligned with your company’s mission and values, they are more likely to put in their best effort, stay loyal, and speak positively of your organization to colleagues, friends, and customers – even after they exit the company.

Engagement isn’t just a feel-good metric – it has a direct impact on employee performance. Culture Amp data shows that companies that actively cultivate engagement create conditions where high performance is more likely to thrive.

Moreover, the relationship between high performance and engagement is reciprocal. When we looked at companies that scored in the top 25% for engagement, we found that they had a significantly higher proportion of high-performing employees than companies in the bottom 25% for engagement.

More successful recruiting

Today, most job seekers want to understand what it’s like to work for your company – long before they sign an offer letter.

Many candidates search for information online to get a better understanding of what their experience will be like at your organization. They pay close attention to company reviews and ratings, with 83% of job seekers saying they’ve referred to this information when deciding where to apply.

It only takes a few negative reviews to scare away potential talent, so it's worth doing everything you can to craft a positive and engaging employee experience at your organization.

Increased productivity

Engaged employees perform at a higher level – and they’re also more productive and efficient. To confirm this, Culture Amp partnered with customer service software company Zendesk to see if companies with higher engagement scores had higher customer satisfaction scores.

By combining Zendesk’s customer satisfaction and support ticket data with Culture Amp’s employee engagement benchmark data, we discovered that companies with engagement scores above our benchmark scored 10% higher on customer satisfaction than companies below the benchmark.

These higher-scoring companies also had lower first response times but higher first resolution times, meaning they could tackle incoming tickets quickly while taking the time and care to completely resolve a customer’s issue before closing a ticket. Unsurprisingly, businesses that create a better employee experience benefit from higher engagement and productivity.

Reduced turnover

It’s fairly straightforward: If an employee is having a positive experience with your organization, there’s little to no reason for them to look for a new job. Recent research shows that employees with a positive employee experience are 68% less likely to consider leaving their current role.

At Culture Amp, we’ve found most employee departures are related to one (or more) of these three elements: career growth, role expectations, and inclusion. You can easily measure and track changes in employee sentiment around these key areas by asking these three questions in your employee engagement surveys:

1. I believe there are good career opportunities for me here at [Company].
2. I am happy with my current role relative to what was described to me.
3. I feel like I belong at [Company].

Carefully monitoring shifts in team, department, and company-wide morale with these questions can be a key indicator that your business needs to invest in these areas of the employee experience.

Increased profitability

Your organization’s employee experience benefits your bottom line, too. Research shows that companies with engaged employees (a direct outcome of the employee experience) are up to 23% more profitable than companies with engagement levels in the bottom quartile. Further, Culture Amp data shows that companies that focused on improving engagement increased profitability by $963,000, proving that employee experience solutions and efforts pay for themselves.

Another perk? Companies with engaged workforces have higher earnings per share (EPS) and outperform their competition.

Still not convinced that improving your employee experience is worth it?

Use our ROI calculator to plug in your numbers and see your potential benefits.

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Employee experience examples: A real-world look at its importance (and influence)

Because employee experience is so broad, it can feel nebulous. The following examples will help you see what it means to take action on employee experience and how these real-world companies have reaped the rewards.

1. NASCAR

After merging with International Speedway Corp., NASCAR faced the challenge of bringing two distinct workforces into one cohesive team.

Partnering with Culture Amp, the organization gathered and analyzed engagement data across teams and locations. Using that information, NASCAR took targeted actions like relaunching NASCAR University for learning and development, creating a virtual recognition program, and expanding benefits and wellness offerings.

The company saw an increase in survey participation and improved leadership buy-in. Plus, NASCAR also received Sport Business Journal’s Best Places to Work award in 2023.

2. Omio

When the COVID-19 pandemic derailed the travel industry – and Omio’s business – seemingly overnight, employee engagement took a nosedive, attrition was at an all-time high, and morale suffered.

The company turned to Culture Amp to take data-driven action on its employee experience. Efforts like a referral bonus, a six-week “work from anywhere” policy, a sabbatical option after two years of employment, and a hybrid all-company event helped Omio create a more supportive and flexible experience that addressed real needs.

As a result, Omio saw a 23% lower attrition rate year on year and an impressive 33% boost in employee engagement.

3. Emma

Rapid growth (from 220 to 800 employees) meant Emma’s previous survey and performance workflows were unsustainable. The sleep solutions company decided to integrate Culture Amp into its HR system to improve automation and accuracy across employee data.

Emma offered timely well-being surveys that informed future initiatives, provided clearer and more helpful employee feedback, and eased the burden of employee performance surveys.

The seemingly small changes led to big results. Employee engagement scores increased by 5% and retention outlook improved, with a 6% uplift in people seeing themselves with the company in 12 months.

How to improve employee experience

Your company is unique – and so is your employee experience. For that reason, there isn’t one “right” way to go about improving your employees’ journeys and perceptions. While Company A might need to optimize its hybrid onboarding strategy, Company B might be better off investing in professional development opportunities for its long-tenured staff.

Here at Culture Amp, we use this broad framework: Collect, understand, and act. We encourage you to use data from a variety of employee surveys to determine your focus areas and take targeted action. Here’s a closer look at how to use this framework to improve your employee experience, while still leaving room for nuance:

1. Determine your top priority

First, identify what aspect of the employee experience your organization wants to focus on. This is another reason why understanding the employee lifecycle and your most meaningful moments is so useful: it helps you focus your efforts.

If you’re about to significantly increase hiring volumes, you may want to focus on the attraction/recruitment stage first and consider using a candidate survey to get feedback. Or if you’re seeing high turnover rates, putting your resources into understanding and improving an employee's exit experience may be your first step. There’s no right or wrong here – it depends on your organization’s priorities.

2. Start capturing data

Once you’ve determined your top priority, start capturing feedback. Don’t worry – we’ll talk about employee surveys in detail a little later.

Collecting enough data to draw linkages and tell stories about the employee experience takes time. That’s why we recommend not overwhelming yourself by tackling everything at once. Instead, focus on one aspect of the employee experience (such as onboarding), iterate, and then grow your employee experience data capture program.

3. Build in linkages

To build a comprehensive understanding of the entire employee lifecycle, it’s essential to build linkages to and from other content and data. For example, if you have already run an engagement survey, that data may inform which factors to focus on in your exit survey. Also, make sure your surveys are customized to your specific programs instead of using cookie-cutter questions that don’t address the root of the problem.

4. Empower action

Employee experience surveys give you a lot of valuable information. But there’s no point in having it if you don’t use it to take action. We recommend looking at the aggregate results and exploring ways to modify organization-wide programs. From there, looking at the detailed results can help you identify whether particular hiring managers, departments, or teams need extra support – and help them understand how they’re doing compared to the company overall. This will allow everyone to make small tweaks to improve employee experiences.

Employee experience best practices

You can use the general framework above to improve your employee experience. However, it’s worth getting a little more tactical. Here are a few employee experience best practices that are sure to make a positive impact.

1. Create a culture of continuous listening

Optimizing the employee experience isn’t a one-and-done task. It’s an ongoing process fueled by continuous listening. While there are many ways to listen to your employees, one of the most efficient and effective methods is conducting employee surveys.

You likely already have a cadence of regular engagement surveys, and those are important. However, using other surveys alongside and in line with your overarching strategy can help you track progress on your engagement initiatives.

Here’s a brief example of continuous listening to show you what it looks like in practice:

After computer software nonprofit Mozilla had to undergo a round of pandemic layoffs, the company’s HR team decided to run a pulse survey to check employee engagement. The results revealed that employees were exhausted, frustrated, stressed, and (most curiously) less likely to believe Mozilla had career development opportunities for them.

While the COVID-19 pandemic was an extreme event, this story still exemplifies how crucial listening to your employees is to gaining insight into their needs, pain points, and overall employee experience, especially during a crisis.

More customer stories:

• How WisdomTree used Culture Amp's inclusion survey to improve employee experience
• How MLB used data to transform its employee experience strategy
• How Meltwater APAC built a better employee experience with feedback

2. Take action on employee feedback

Collecting employee feedback is meaningless without action. If people go through the trouble of filling out a survey, but nothing in the organization changes, they’re likely to get what Didier Elzinga, CEO of Culture Amp, calls “lack-of-action fatigue.”

Didier explains, “If the survey brought about changes or communication, people will be much more inclined to welcome the chance to do another survey, even if the changes were not what that particular person wanted. If they can see that a change was made on the back of the results of a survey, they will see the survey as a tool for change.”​​

If you want your employees to be forthcoming and open about their thoughts, show them that their feedback matters. Be transparent about how you’re using their feedback to build a better workplace. One quick win: Clearly communicate and share survey data with your entire organization, along with your team’s plans to implement changes.

To continue our Mozilla example from above, once the company’s HR team knew employees were not optimistic about their careers with the company, the team got to work trying to help alleviate employees’ concerns.

They reframed annual performance reviews to focus on ongoing feedback, employee recognition, and coaching conversations centered around learning and growth. With more real-time feedback and coaching from managers, employees became more positive about their own growth and development opportunities at the company. Even this small change to performance reviews had a lasting effect on employee experience.

3. Use employee personas

An employee persona is a profile of a specific employee segment that details their characteristics, attitudes, wants, and needs. HR teams can use these profiles to better tailor their initiatives to different segments of employees. For example, if you’re debating which new voluntary benefit to introduce, you’ll want to consider the makeup of your organization and the needs of your employees. A childcare stipend might not excite a predominantly young workforce, but it might make more sense for a company with a workforce that includes many caregivers.

Even if you’re already informally using personas as a part of your employee experience strategy, take the time to develop and document three to five personas for your workplace. That way, you and any new HR teammates that join your company can quickly and easily reference them – and consider the perspective of different types of employees – every time you launch a new initiative.

4. Invest in managers

Managers directly impact an employee’s day-to-day experience, so ensure that your managers are properly equipped to support their direct reports. While in the past, businesses focused on training managers in highly technical skills, recent years have shown that core capabilities (previously called “soft skills”) are equally important. Train managers on giving good feedback, leading through change, acting with empathy, communicating asynchronously, and more – but keep in mind that meaningful change is rarely achieved from one-off training programs.

To support your managers in developing these skills, consider harnessing ongoing conversational microlearning with solutions such as Culture Amp’s Skills Coach tool. Using Skills Coach, managers receive daily bite-sized activities and learnings via Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email that they can seamlessly incorporate into their daily routines. Through the magic of spaced repetition, your employees can become better, more effective leaders.

Thinking of using these four employee experience best practices in your own workplace? Remember that the most effective and powerful way to improve the employee experience is to ask your employees about their experiences at the company and prioritize your initiatives based on their feedback. By asking your employees what they want, you can implement meaningful changes that make an impact.

Additional resources:

• Building an employee experience for a hybrid workforce
• How to build an employee experience with social impact
• 4 tips for creating an equitable employee experience
• Using employee experience data to conquer workplace politics

Types of employee experience surveys

Listening to your employees is crucial for creating employee experience programs that drive change and progress. But you can’t be everywhere at once, so let’s talk about how to always have an ear to the ground.

At Culture Amp, we think the best way to listen to employees is to regularly conduct employee surveys. There are many different types of employee surveys, including surveys focused on engagement, development, DEI, onboarding, and exit. Insights from all of these can inform your people decisions and improve the employee experience.

This is another area where it helps to keep the employee lifecycle in mind, as we recommend offering different surveys at different points in the journey. For example:

• Attract stage: Candidate experience survey
• Onboard stage: Onboarding survey, 90-day stay interviews
• Engage, Develop, Perform stages: Engagement surveys (annual and pulse)
• Exit stage: Employee exit surveys

These surveys provide important, objective, quantitative data you can use to understand where your employee experience excels and where it falls short. Moreover, by collecting data on an ongoing basis, you can see how that experience changes over time, including whether your initiatives are making a meaningful difference.

Depending on the survey and the questions you ask, you can better understand various aspects of the employee experience, such as resource availability, clarity around goals, perception of leadership, and more.

Tip: Employee experience varies by individual and is shaped by one’s identity.
The employee experience may not be equitable, which is why we highly recommend collecting demographic information about your employees. Having this information enables you to slice and dice your data to identify disparities within the employee experience for different segments of your workforce. For example, BIPOC vs. non-BIPOC, full-time vs. part-time, remote vs. in-office vs. hybrid, or disabled vs. non-disabled.

How do you measure employee experience?

Your various employee surveys will provide the data you need, but it’s your job to process the data, identify trends, draw conclusions, and monitor your progress.

Again, since everything affects your company’s overall employee experience, it’s challenging to know how to quantify what your employees are experiencing and feeling. That’s why it’s helpful to select a key performance indicator (KPI).

Using employee engagement as a meaningful metric

One of the main metrics we use at Culture Amp is employee engagement. It can be used as a leading metric, strategic input to decision-making, and diagnostic tool.

We consider engagement a holistic measurement of the enthusiasm and connection an employee feels towards your organization as a result of their experience at your organization. At a high level, engagement covers:

• Pride. “I am proud to work for [Company]”
• Recommendation. “I would recommend [Company] as a great place to work”
• Motivation. “[Company] motivates me to go beyond what I would in a similar role elsewhere”
• Present commitment. “I rarely think about looking for a job at another company”
• Future commitment. “I see myself still working at [Company] in two years’ time”

It’s important here to clarify the relationship between employee engagement and employee experience. Although employee experience directly influences what employees feel, it’s not the employees’ feelings – it’s what happens to the employees. Meanwhile, employee engagement is one of the feelings that can result from the employee experience. Since employee engagement directly informs whether people are willing to invest their time, energy, and intellect in the organization, it’s what most employers want to understand and predict.

Focusing on the metrics that matter

Engagement carries a lot of weight, but there are plenty of other metrics that can help you measure the success of your employee experience. Some of these can be measured with surveys, while others require you to crunch other types of employee data:

• Development plan participation rate
• Employee absenteeism rate
• Employee satisfaction
• Frequency of recognition
• Internal promotion rate
• Internal referral rate
• Manager approval rating
• Retention rate
• Revenue per employee
• Survey response rate

Tracking trends over time

The value of measuring your employee experience doesn’t come from a single snapshot – it’s about watching how things change over time. Your employee experience is always shifting, which means the most effective measurements are continuous, adaptive, and built into your long-term strategy.

For example, if you notice favorability around performance-related questions nosediving after implementing a new performance review process, it may indicate the need for greater enablement or education. Or, you may notice that after making BIPOC representation in leadership a priority, scores around belonging and leadership rise. Those are insights you can use to continue to refine your efforts.

Employee experience solutions that can help

Your employee experience isn’t something to invest in once and never revisit. It’s dynamic, varies at every stage of the employee lifecycle, and needs ongoing attention. And to effectively monitor and track changes at every stage of an employee’s tenure, you need a robust employee experience management solution that can help you track engagement, performance, and development.

Culture Amp’s complete employee experience solution has you covered. It allows you to empower your teams and fuel positive change in one intuitive platform. With engagement, development, and performance tools made for today's world of work, you can improve talent retention, increase business performance, break down silos, and drive engagement at every step in the employee lifecycle.

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