What is employee experience management? Best practices & tools

Cultivating a world-class employee experience (EX) won’t happen overnight. Your business must create employee experience management programs and follow through on satisfaction suggestions. However, by improving the average employee experience, you’ll radically increase workplace efficiency, happiness, and productivity.

The employee experience encompasses every single point of interaction an employee has with your business. From the moment they see your job post to the day they depart the company, everything feeds into their experience. 

Cultural experiences, interactions with coworkers and leadership, workplace incidents, and even the use of technology all form the employee experience. If an employee has a positive experience at work, they’re more likely to perform better. According to our research, 15% of workers aren’t satisfied with their jobs, which stems from poor experiences during the employee lifecycle.

Understanding the events and circumstances that impact the employee experience is the first step toward creating a wonderful workplace for all.

Technology is integral to employee experience, especially today with the prevalence of remote and hybrid work. Digital employee experience includes how employees interact with workplace technology and the support your IT department offers them.

As technology is a huge part of the modern workplace, digital employee experiences have a significant impact.

When considering the digital employee experience, you must keep the following in mind:

The employee experience is the overall arc that your employees have when working at your company. Every single action they take and minute they spend at work influences their experience. Part of those actions will inevitably be interacting with technology.

The digital employee experience is a smaller focus that only references interaction with the technologies necessary to complete work tasks. Touchpoints could include laptops, desktop computers, tablets, smartphones, headsets, and the software employees use. Any IT support that your business offers also falls into the digital experience. 

While the digital employee experience feeds into the overall experience, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. 

A positive employee experience impacts your company’s culture and business outcomes. Happy and satisfied employees perform better, are more productive, and are more likely to stay at your organization. Here are five crucial benefits of a great employee experience:

An employee who enjoys coming to work will perform more effectively. Around 86% of employees report that they’re satisfied with their jobs. These engaged employees typically finish tasks faster and to a much higher standard than unhappy employees. By focusing on providing a world-class employee experience, you can motivate employees and skyrocket satisfaction.

Job seekers are looking for meaningful work and a diverse work culture. Before applying to a role, most people will read about your company on review sites and discussion boards. Prospective employees want to know about your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives, benefits, company culture, technology, and other employee experience components. 

If previous employees leave bad reviews about your company, top talent may look elsewhere. 

A positive employee experience leads directly to a high degree of employee retention. The happier your employees are, the more likely they will continue working for you. Streamlining the employee experience is a great place to begin if you want to increase retention.

When you engage your employees, they’re more likely to do their best work. Happier employees will give customers a better service, improving the customer experience. Whether it's rapid customer support response rates or a shining customer advocacy team, engaged employees lead to higher customer satisfaction. 

When your employees thrive, your customers do, too. 

Since employee experience includes every touchpoint an employee has with a company, employee experience management influences each touchpoint to ensure positive experiences.

You can pinpoint weak areas by measuring the employee experience across different touchpoints. Addressing these areas first will allow you to improve the employee experience holistically. Over time, continual employee experience management can lead to a happier workplace for everyone.

To arrive at that stage, you must first measure your employee experience and act upon the data.

Employee experience is more than just one thing. Due to how expansive it is, you can use a blend of different tools to measure distinct aspects. Bringing varying measurements and tools together gives you a more comprehensive picture of your employees' feelings.

Several factors could impact the employee experience:

Employee experience management examines the employee experience through all these factors. By making small improvements across the board, you can refine EX, promote a better company culture, and improve your workplace.

The five key touchpoints for monitoring and improving employee experience are:

You’ll need to monitor feedback throughout the employee journey to improve their experience. Here are a few practical ways to monitor employee experience.

It’s a good idea to conduct an employee engagement survey on an annual basis. Take note of factors related to employee experience and act on them to improve. You may notice that one department is less engaged than others or that certain roles feel overworked. 

Employee engagement surveys are an excellent opportunity to understand how employees are feeling. If you run them frequently, you can act before anything becomes serious.

Periodic pulse surveys are short, focused surveys to assess the success of your EX efforts. These surveys allow you to tweak your EX management plan to improve effectiveness. 

Use our employee satisfaction survey template as a starting point. These surveys will single out any areas that you could improve upon. 

Onboarding is a great time to discover what new employees think about their roles, expectations, and workplace resources. An onboarding survey or new hire training quiz can affect the entire employee lifecycle. If employee expectations for their role don’t align with reality, your employee could feel frustrated. Understanding what they expect from day one will help you create the optimal experience for them.

An exit interview should link the input from all the other surveys an employee has taken while working at your organization. Asking them about their experience will help you fill in any information you lack. You should be able to create a picture of the entire employee experience journey with the data and find insights into retention.

Stay interviews are regular conversations between a manager and a team member. In these interviews, the manager can ask how employees feel and if their work satisfies them. Unlike a performance review, this gives employees a platform to voice the need for more support or compensation.

Taking action based on the feedback you gain from stay interviews can show your teams that you care about their opinions. Stay interviews can help increase employee satisfaction, motivation, and other core factors influencing EX.

A 360 review includes input from a senior employee, a junior employee, a peer, and a self-assessment. This review reveals more about the employee experience than traditional manager-employee reviews. You can use SurveyMonkey Custom Variables to ensure that reviewers remain anonymous. Use these surveys to investigate EX for development opportunities rather than as an overall performance review.

A positive employee experience is vital for a productive, effective, and motivated workplace. You can take several actions if you measure your EX and realize your employees aren’t happy. Here are some effective methods of improving the employee experience.

The fastest way to make employees lose faith in your company is to never act on their feedback. Making employees fill out surveys that never result in changes will drastically impact morale. 

Employees are more likely to share their opinions and provide useful ideas if they feel they are being listened to. Gather your feedback and create an action plan to share with employees. Commit to listening and taking action to improve CX.

Your company culture combines leadership style, organizational structure, sense of purpose, and employee personalities. A great company culture is motivating, energizing, and empowering. Take a look at how SurveyMonkey helped Dennemeyer build its employee-centric culture.

Provide your employees with the tools they require to do their jobs efficiently. Make sure tech is up-to-date and running smoothly. 

Your physical workspace should be light and inviting. You could even include perks like free snacks or a coffee station. Equally, you can offer the flexibility to work from home or the office. 

Your company may need to adapt to hybrid work situations and consider employee experience from that point of view. See how the State of Michigan Department of Technology engages remote workers.

Senior HR directors are the natural choice to take ownership of your employee experience program. They can collect data and present it alongside actionable insights. 

While your learning and development director and recruitment director may “own” the program, every leader in the organization plays a role in creating optimal employee experiences. Encourage all leaders to send surveys, engage with data, and follow through on promises.

As the first point of contact between an employee and a business, onboarding sets the stage for the entire employee experience. Employees learn about their work environment, culture, and expectations during onboarding. If an employee loses enthusiasm during onboarding, you must examine your process and adjust.

The SurveyMonkey CNBC May 2023 survey revealed that 13% of employees state that their job roles do not satisfy them. Unsatisfied employees will leave a company if they find a new opportunity. To reduce employee churn and increase satisfaction, demonstrate your empathy with good benefits.

Look at your family leave policies for maternity and paternity leave, bereavement, and time to care for sick family members. Do your benefits show that you care? The more extensive the range of benefits you offer to your employees, the more they’ll feel the love.

DE&I efforts are important to employees. If you’re not already measuring DE&I in your workplace, it’s time to start. Ensure you promote your DE&I efforts and keep your employees up-to-date with improvements.

Technology is a huge part of the employee experience. From the computers that employees use to get work done to the survey tools they use to deliver feedback, everything influences their experience. Plus, organizations can use that same technology to improve the customer experience. 

Here are some tools to use for digital employee experience management. 

There is a range of software, tools, and platforms that you can add to your employee experience tech stack:

Instead of overwhelming your HR teams with various new tools and platforms at once, consider working with SurveyMonkey. As an all-in-one platform, SurveyMonkey can streamline employee experience management and act as your base of operations for all things EX.

Put the voice of your employees at the heart of your business. Learn how SurveyMonkey can help you attract, engage, and retain top employees.