How to Measure Employee Experience


Instead of the narrow focus on employee engagement and culture, organizations have turned their attention to the development of an integrated employee experience.

Logically the question is: How do you measure Employee Experience?  A mixed methodology of pulse survey tools, performance management tools, digital tools, and open survey tools are used to measure what a business has achieved regarding each area of employee experience.

This integrated perception of experience has created to the employees the need to demand a holistic, end-to-end—recruitment-to-retirement—experience regardless of their job position or the type of work.

HR, management and organization leaders have all realized the importance of EX and they need to redefine the roles, structure, tools, and strategy they use to plan and provide an integrated employee experience.

5 Factors that Make Employee Experience Important Today

1. Most organizations have not yet given the employee experience the priority required, but tackle the problem with annual engagement surveys.

2. Many companies have not delivered responsibility to a senior executive or team to develop and create the employee experience.

3. Siloed HR departments often face difficulty in reaching the resources and data needed in order to create a holistic set of priorities, which include management practices, workplace benefits and, the work culture itself.

4. rganizations have to reevaluate their tools to engage employees so as to assist HR teams and leaders to detect effectively the employees’ expectations and values.

5. Many organizations still focus on “point-in-time engagement” and have not yet defined the rules of performance management, goal setting, diversity, inclusion, wellness, workplace design, and leadership into an integrated framework.

Jacob Morgan, in his book, The Employee Experience AdvantageOpens in a new tab.: How to Win the War for Talent by Giving Employees the Workspaces They Want, the Tools They Need, and a Culture They Can Celebrate, explains very well the way the nature of work has changed over times.

First, it was about utility, then about productivity, the engagement and today we see the dawn of the experience era to make people show up because they want and not because they must.

He argues that employee experience is the reality of work, it’s about what people live when they work in a given business. It’s a more structural approach relies on 3 buildings blocks: culture, technology, and physical space.

He also considers Employee Experience as a PYRAMID comprised of different levels, each sits on top of the other.

When employees are being given the reasons for being, the means to achieve their goals, the proper working environment, the opportunity to decide for their career path and the freedom to personalize the positive feelings for their company around him, then the first steps to build a good employee experience has been made.

A productive, positive employee experience has emerged as the new relationship between employer and employee has been created.

11 Key Influencers of Employee Satisfaction

As cited by many studies some very important key influencers of employee satisfaction that should thoroughly be analyzed and measured through surveys are:

1. Job – This is the employee’s perception of his or her own job.

2. Workload – The amount of work required to do the job. It is related to job stress and burnout.

3. Work Environment – The physical conditions of the workplace.

4. Manager – The immediate manager of an employee is a key influencer of employee satisfaction. A manager’s support, such as recognition and feedback, and management styles, such as treating team members fairly, directly influence employee satisfaction and engagement.

5. Teamwork – Relationships with coworkers are an important part of organizational integration. Coworker relationships are social as well as work-related.

6. Compensation – Measures include the fairness, transparency of pay determination and competitiveness.

7. Advancement – This refers to the assessment of promotion and advancement opportunities in a worker’s organization, as well as career development opportunities and support.

8. Work Support – Work support includes things such as job training, guidelines and the availability of resources.

9. Leadership – Leadership refers to the attitudes and the behavior of the people in a company who are in the position to define values, missions, visions, strategies, norms, etc.

10. Corporate Culture – This refers to the key values, assumptions, understandings, and norms shared by members of an organization and the employee’s self-assessment of his or her cultural fit.

11. Empowerment –  This refers to an employee’s perception of the freedom, power, and authority to better perform the job.

Employee Journey Map

Before setting the strategies how to enhance Employee Experience it is very important to understand the employee journey map, which outlines the 10 steps employees go through in engaging with a company.

1. Sourcing and Recruiting

2. Pre-boarding

3. Onboarding (orientation and initial training)

4. Compensation and Benefits

5. Ongoing Learning and Development

6. Ongoing Engagement, Communication, and Community Involvement

7. Rewards and Recognition

8. Performance Planning, Feedback, and Review

9. Advancement

10. Retirement, Termination, or Resignation

6 Strategies on How to Create a Holistic Employee Experience

According to the article The employee experience: Culture, engagement and beyond by Josh Bersin, Jason Flynn, Art Mazor, and Veronica Melian HR and organization leaders should now start here.

Elevate the employee experience and make it a priority

The recognition of Employee Experience as a valuable player in influencing organization productivity as the customer service does.

Designate a senior leader or team to own it 

A senior leader for employee experience should be responsible to compose the many different functions of the EX, such as engagement, learning, career development, etc. into an integrated strategy for the entire employee experience.

Embrace design thinking

Employees must express and show their everyday tasks and must develop new ways to simplify work and improve productivity, performance, and engagement.

Many leading firms including design thinking to their policies to improve the employee experience. Nike, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Telstra, Deutsche Telekom, etc. have redesigned their onboarding, recruitment, and employee self-service applications.

Consider experiences for the entire workforce 

All parts of the company’s workforce—candidates, full-time, part-time, freelancers— have created expectations over the elements of the employee experience to be designed to attract and engage them.

Innovative companies attract inspiration from their own employees. Cisco, IBM, GE, Airbnb, and many other companies have used hackathons to gather employee ideas and design new approaches concerning different areas of management and working design.

The collaborative approaches engage employees directly in designing a “perfect” employee experience.

“People are much less likely to resist the change when they’ve had a hand in shaping it.” Diane Gherson Senior Vice President, Human Resources at IBM

Consider the impact of workplace

Successful companies are approaching the study and the development of the workplace quiet carefully, seeking a flexible, collaborative, humanistic environment.

Examples like Facebook’s, with the new campus beautiful, personalized, and filled with places to eat, collaborate, exercise, and work together, or Apple Inc., Google, LinkedIn, which have introduced innovative new workspaces that integrate recreation, collaboration, and individual work in novel ways, express the importance of workplace in the creation of Employee Experience.

Measure it

Now organizations must not restrict their research on annual or biannual engagement surveys but should include regular pulse surveys and open feedback systems.

20 Tools to Measure Employee Experience

Committing resources to conduct an employee experience survey (pulse or open) is pointless unless the proper questions are made. According to Murad Salman Mirza research on self-assessing employee experience, some very important key areas of investigation are:

1.   Employee Value Proposition experience

2.   Hiring experience

3.   Orientation experience

4.   Performance Management experience

5.   Career Development and Growth experience

6.   Relationship with Peers experience

7.   Relationship with Supervisors experience

8.   Relationship with Leadership experience

9.   Organizational Processes experience

10. HR/Talent Management Function experience

11. Reward and Recognition experience

12. Employee Engagement experience

13. Organizational Culture experience

14. Physical Workplace Experience

15. Organizational Politics experience

16. Employer Branding experience

17. Technology experience

18. Psychological Contract experience

19. Inclusion experience

20. Employee Exit experience

5 Types of Digital and Mobile Tools to Provide employee Experience

At the same time digital and mobile tools have been developed to help HR create and provide a great employee experience:

Tools to increase productivity and collaboration

Products such as Facebook’s Workplace, Slack, Microsoft Skype for Teams, Google G-suite, and solutions from companies such as Basecamp, Trello, and Asana can enhance collaboration and provide platforms that help in learning, setting goals, manage the performance and assist HR tasks.

Tools to create engagement and provide feedback

Pulse survey tools are provided by a great number of companies based on the strategies mentioned above, replacing the traditional ones.

Tools for performance and management

Vendors like Reflektiv, BetterWorks, Zugata, Highground, Workboard, and SuccessFactors have offered products that concern mainly feedback tools related to performance management.

Well-being tools

Companies like Limeaid and VirginPulse provide wellness apps which combine competitions, fitness, groups, wearables integration, and micro-learning.

Platforms concerning employee service

Chatbots and natural language processing with case management, content management, and easy-to-use mobile and web portals offer to employees a wide range of services.

6 Outcomes of Perfect Employee Experience

The measurement of the Employee Experience enables companies to understand how changes in engagement drivers and employee satisfaction are likely to impact future employee behaviors.

Depending on the goals of an organization, there are 6 outcomes of perfect employee experience:

1. Intent to stay—the wish to remain, member of the company’s workforce,

2. Advocacy—the support and acceptance of the organization’s culture

3. Initiative—the effort to achieve on behalf of the organization

4. Recommend brand—the willingness to recommend the company’s brand

5. Recommend employer to job seekers—the willingness to recommend the organization to job seekers

6. Customer orientation—the commitment to customer service

Realizing the nature and the effects that the Employee Experience has on the company and the difficulty to quantify and measure it, the voice of the employees’ feedback appears highly challenging and valuable.

Anna E.

Anna EfstratiadiOpens in a new tab. : Academic writer / Economist / Architect

Steve Todd

Steve Todd, founder of Open Sourced Workplace and is a recognized thought leader in workplace strategy and the future of work. With a passion for work from anywhere, Steve has successfully implemented transformative strategies that enhance productivity and employee satisfaction. Through Open Sourced Workplace, he fosters collaboration among HR, facilities management, technology, and real estate professionals, providing valuable insights and resources. As a speaker and contributor to various publications, Steve remains dedicated to staying at the forefront of workplace innovation, helping organizations thrive in today's dynamic work environment.

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