Employee engagement vs. employee experience - what's the difference?
Employee engagement and employee experience are not the same! One is the means to achieve the other. Focusing on both will benefit you, your business and your employees.
Let’s take a look at both employee engagement and employee experience, why they’re different and why you need to know about them.
What are employee engagement and employee experience?
Employee engagement is a term that’s been around for some time. Most people are familiar with it as a measurement taken at a particular moment in time of how employees feel about various aspects of their work, including leadership and their workplace.
Employee experience is a long term strategy that aims to increase employee engagement. It involves looking at the employee lifecycle from their perspective and improving engagement across each stage. It’s often considered alongside customer experience.
Ultimately the goal is to increase the engagement of your employees; you’ll achieve that by focusing on your employee experience.
Why is employee engagement important?
Highly engaged employees are proud of the business they work for, do their best work, are committed to stay with the business, actively speak positively of and recommend the business to their peers, and care about the business’ future.
Compared to businesses where engagement is low, high levels of employee engagement achieve…
- 2.5x greater revenue growth
- 2x annual net income
- 50% less absence days
- 40% lower employee turnover
- 62% less accidents
- 18% higher productivity
- 12% higher customer advocacy
- 24% higher Net Promoter Score™
(Source: www.engageforsuccess.org)
Why is employee experience increasingly important?
Employees are looking for employers that offer more than good pay.
If you want to attract and keep the best people you need to understand what it is that they want. Employees want to have opportunities to grow and develop, to connect with something of greater meaning and purpose, and a job that fits with their lifestyle.
You need to be able to provide a consistently good employee experience to build your employer brand reputation. Your business is more transparent than ever before – employees can write reviews on social media and the consequences can be harsh.
What does employee experience involve?
Your employee experience is the result of your culture, brand values, fairness, the tools provided for the job, physical environment, products and services, what they’re told, how they can contribute, teams, relationships, wellbeing, reward and recognition, leadership, development and technology.
Whether you’re actively managing your employee experience or not, your business has an employee experience! By giving it your attention you can work to align all of the above.
There is no quick fix. It isn’t the result of any short term ‘feel good’ initiatives. No events, incentive programmes or fun perks like a Foosball table or beer Fridays will improve your employee experience in isolation.
Your leadership is key. You need to put yourself into your employees shoes, understand your employees’ perceptions of each stage of their journey with you from applying for a job through onboarding, performance, growth and exit.
We can help
If this is something you want to focus on, we offer a 1-hour free, no obligation consultation service to talk to you about your current situation. We’ll send you a report detailing your next steps towards increasing your employee engagement and improving your employee experience. Simply contact us by clicking here and we’ll be in touch to arrange your free consultation.