How to Design Your EX plans in 2023

Employee experience is a vital element of organizational success. It encompasses culture, productivity, and even retention efforts. Employers must understand employee experience and how they can create effective strategies to improve it.

Continue reading to learn how to improve employee experience efforts within your organization.

What Is Employee Experience?

Employee experience (EX) includes every experience an employee has from when they are hired to when they leave. EX is the journey that an employee takes with a particular organization. This experience involves every interaction, responsibility, and relationship during the employee's tenure.

Elements like the physical environment, culture, hierarchy, and technology are all factors that impact an employee’s experience with an organization.

Is Employee Experience Different than Employee Engagement?

Engagement concerns an employee's ability to perform at their best. When engagement is effective, it can motivate employees to achieve greater potential. A skilled employee may meet all expectations and even outperform their colleagues, though they will never meet their full potential so long as they are unengaged.

Engagement differs from EX in that it is only one aspect of EX. Engagement is crucially important in developing positive EX within an organization. It can lead to productivity boosts, positive relationships, and improved culture.

Why Does Employee Experience Matter?

EX has remained a top priority for HR professionals despite the great resignation and has proven to be one of the most important factors for employers in overcoming it.

Employees maintain substantial leverage in the workplace. This has forced employers to reevaluate policies and benefits. EX is one of the most valuable ways to hold onto employees and improve attrition rates. Lack of engagement can lead to burnout, lack of motivation, and even carelessness.

Employers must find ways to improve their EX and incorporate them into their annual strategies. This might seem simple enough, but efforts to improve EX should go beyond simple benefits and perks.

What Factors Most Impact Employee Experience?

To improve EX, you have to dig deep. Surface-level change, such as offering new perks or more lenient policies, may help in the short term, but they will eventually fall off, leaving you with questions about how to adapt once more.

To ensure you maintain strong levels of EX, you must instill strategies that prompt change from a foundational level.

Employees take on new roles for several reasons. They may want a different culture, a different work schedule, more money, better benefits, better locations, improved hours, and the list could go on. But regardless of what those reasons are, at the core, each employee is after the same thing—fulfillment.

EX is the amalgamation of every employee experience within an organization, and all efforts should focus on employee fulfillment. Organizations need to look deep and discover what it is that makes the work they do so important. They must then develop strategies to incorporate those reasons into their EX improvement efforts.

How Can Organizations Improve Employee Experience?

How can organizations help employees feel a greater sense of accomplishment each day? This is, perhaps, the most crucial question employers can ask themselves. Because even if they don't know it, every organization puts money, time, and resources into improving their EX.

Employee engagement, company culture, retention efforts, recruiting strategies, benefit offerings, employee perks, performance reviews, gamification, and even employee communication platforms are all directly tied to employee engagement. When employers hone in on any of these efforts, the goal is always to improve organizational success.

The best way for organizations to improve employee fulfillment and purpose is by understanding what drives it. According to Meghan Stetler, director at the O.C. Tanner Institute, fulfillment can be broken down into four primary parts:

Community
Growth
Purpose
Balance

These elements can all be easily threatened, and if efforts to maintain them are not established, they can begin to break down.

Here are a handful of ways your organization can target these elements to improve EX efforts:

All strategies should incorporate individual successes into the success of the company. How are your individual employee efforts impacting the organization's wins?
Encourage individual ideas and thoughts. Let your employees know that you want them to make informed decisions and bring their own ideas to the table.
Set your employees up for success. Distribute tasks and projects based on employee strengths, goals, and abilities. Allow your employees to push themselves with a project that excites them. Employees want opportunities to succeed, and when they feel they are being given chances to show their abilities, they most often delight in the challenge.
Recognize employee success. Employers must recognize employees when they have succeeded. The feelings of accomplishment can stay with an employee and translate into greater productivity and drive when moving forward. Allow employees to build off of their success and continue to grow. EX is not about employees accomplishing company goals. It is about employees reaching their individual potential.

Remember that every experience an employee faces throughout their tenure can be accounted for in the EX cycle. There is no one right decision or particular element that can make a sizable difference. It takes many factors, time, resources, and repetition to get it right. Be sure to focus your energy on the foundational properties of fulfillment and press forward one step at a time.

Additional Resources

You can also stay informed, educated, and up-to-date with EX and other important topics by using BerniePortal’s comprehensive resources:

BernieU—free online HR courses, approved for SHRM and HRCI recertification credit
BerniePortal Blog—a one-stop-shop for HR industry news
HR Glossary—featuring the most common HR terms, acronyms, and compliance
HR Guides—essential pillars covering an extensive list of comprehensive HR topics
HR Party of One—our popular YouTube series and podcast, covering emerging HR trends and enduring HR topics