Is Employee experience the new employee engagement?
Employee experience (EX) and employee engagement (EE) are related but very distinct concepts. To start, let’s define EX and EE.
EX encompasses every interaction, solution, and process employees encounter during their time within an organisation. This includes onboarding processes, training programs, daily work tasks, and relationships with managers, among others.
Crucially, the quality of these interactions and touchpoints—whether positive or negative—shape employee perceptions and feelings about their overall experience within the organisation – this is the employee experience.
Employee experience can be likened to our experience as consumers wherein we can experience negative, indifferent or positive emotions when using or buying a product or service. These emotions have a knock-on effect normally resulting in us telling our friends how amazing or how terrible a service was – the same happens with the workplace.
Given its dynamic nature, EX is a continuous and evolving process that every employee will experience differently.
In contrast, employee engagement (EE) is an emotional feeling that employees have about their organisation. Typically measured by annual engagement surveys which seek to gauge feelings of pride, advocacy, commitment and satisfaction.
When an employee holds strong feelings of pride, advocacy, commitment and satisfaction, the result is increased levels of discretionary effort which has the potential to increase business outcomes.
So, we’ve established that employee experience and employee engagement aren’t the same things, let’s return to how they are related.
A positive employee experience can lead to high levels of employee engagement which can lead to increased productivity, innovation, and overall business success. This makes employee engagement an outcome of employee experience.
But what does this mean for your business? Well, research has shown that companies with a positive EX are 22% more profitable[1], generate three times more average revenue per employee[2] and are up to forty times more often on lists of the most innovative organisations and the best places to work[3] than those who don’t focus on a positive EX.
Who could resist that? If you want to discuss employee experience or employee engagement in more detail, get in touch today, we’d love to hear from you.
Sources: [1] Harvard Business Review; [2] Employee experience how to build an EX centric organisation, Kennedy-Fitch; [3] Jacob Morgan