How to improve Employee Experience in your organisation

Employee experience is an employee-centred way of thinking that focuses on how people perceive every stage of their journey with your organisation. It’s shaped by the emotions employees feel at each touchpoint, from their first interaction as candidates through to their final day and beyond.

Your physical workspace, culture and technology are all components of employee experience (often shortened to EX). According to Josh Bersin’s research, organisations that excel at EX are around twice (!!!) as likely to exceed financial targets and delight customers, and more than five times as likely to engage and retain employees.

In this article, we’ll explore how to improve your employee experience, why it can help you stand out in an uber-competitive talent market, and how to build a strategy that actually works in practice.

Table of content

What Is the Employee Experience?
6 Benefits of a positive employee experience
Why is employee experience important?
Creating an employee experience strategy
How to create a great employee experience
How to measure your EX
Using scalable HR tools so you can deliver consistently, measure impact (and iterate)

So, What is the Employee Experience?

Employee experience (EX) is the journey a person takes within your organisation, covering every interaction across the employee lifecycle. It’s the sum of all the moments that matter (from recruitment and onboarding), through day-to-day work and development, right up to how you handle their exit and what happens afterwards.

EX spans an employee’s role and workload, their wellbeing, and the workspaces they use, the way corporate communications impact (how informed and involved they feel), and the tools that help them (or not) do their job.

Done well, EX aligns employees’ everyday experience with your organisation’s purpose, brand, and culture, so that every interaction they have with leaders and managers feels consistent and authentic. But that, as you know now, it not happen as often as you desire.

6 Benefits of a positive Employee Experience.

Improving employee experience brings a range of benefits closely linked to job satisfaction and productivity.

# More engaged employees: Disengaged employees are REALLY expensive. Gallup estimates that a disengaged employee costs around 18% of their annual salary in lost productivity and increased absence. By contrast, engaged employees are more productive, stay longer and contribute positively to culture and performance.

# Stronger talent attraction: Candidates now research employers and companies in depth before applying, from review sites to social media (have you checked your Glassdoor profile?). They want to understand what it actually feels like to work for you and whether you invest in a positive experience. Something top candidates will notice.

# Better communication and collaboration: Employees want to feel supported, though. Managers and leaders need to create genuine open environments beyond the office walls, and be honest and clear about when and how they communicate. Only the right technology can make it easier to gather feedback and understand what employees are experiencing.

# Lower absenteeism: Unmotivated employees are more likely to stay away from work, which hits productivity and team morale. When you invest in engaging your people and giving them work that feels challenging and meaningful, absence rates typically drop,

# Higher quality of work: Engagement has a powerful impact on performance. As happiness researcher Shawn Achor notes, engagement often influences job success more than technical skill. When people are happy, they care about the quality of what they deliver and even actively look for ways to improve.

# Improved customer experience: Employee experience and customer experience are tightly linked. Engaged employees listen carefully, are more proactive in solving problems, and pay more attention to customers´ issues. Simply put: when your people are thriving, your customers tend to feel it.

But, do you know the real real benefit? It helps you avoid getting the side-eye from your employees after a performance review.

Why is employee experience important?

Employee experience has a direct impact on companies. That´s why negative experiences can reflect on the end of the sales season. With the right employee experience strategy, companies may create tailored, authentic experiences that strengthen employee morale and help them stay longer with you.

New research from the Corporate Leadership Council revealed that happy employees are four times more motivated and less likely to resign.

What’s more: by running pulse surveys or performance reviews (with easy-to-use performance management software, like OpenHR), you can measure and boost staff engagement and satisfaction. MIT Cisr indicates that those companies scoring high in employee experience are lowering costs and/or increasing revenue to stand out against competitors.

That being said, achieving an effective EX is key to boosting performance and customer success. A customer’s experience will only ever be as good as the experience you give your employees.

Creating an employee experience strategy

Your Employee Experience strategy shouldn´t be another HR initiative piled up with the rest of the “best intentions” for next season. It’s the way you design how it feels to work in your organisation, from the moment someone reads your job ad on Linkedin, to the day they decide to leave (and, ideally, still recommend you to other companies).

In a world where a big salary is no longer the only extrinsic motivator, but still the primary one, experience has become a serious competitive advantage. It’s not fluff; it’s a performance lever.

Kick off with clear, business-level goals

Identify your Employee Persona

Let´s be honest: there is no average employee. A graduate in their first role, a mid-career specialist, and a long-tenured manager... all of them experience your organisation differently.

This is where employee personas come in. Using people analytics, performance review trends and feedback from your HR surveys and conversations, you can sketch out different groups with distinct needs, pressures and aspirations.

The point isn’t to stereotype; it’s to help you step into their shoes.

Map the employee lifecycle in detail

Mapping the employee lifecycle is the next step. Rather than looking at isolated employee touchpoints (remember: recruitment, onboarding, performance reviews, development and exit), you trace the full journey and the moments that matter.

You might notice, for example, that your onboarding is strong but the experience flattens out after the first year, or that people feel recognised when they first join but not when they’re quietly doing their work three years in. Find the gaps and create opportunities for employees.

Build on the core cultural pillars

Julian Lute from Great Place To Work® talks about the pillars of trust, credibility, respect, fairness, camaraderie and pride as the backbone of any strong employee experience strategy.

Now, it´s probably fair to say that if people don’t trust their leaders, don’t believe what they’re told, don’t feel respected or fairly treated, no amount of clever process redesign will fix that.

Don’t make it all about technology

Technology (obviously) has a big role to play here. A well-designed and easy-to-use tool can remove a lot of noise from people’s working lives. That’s sweet music to an HR manager’s ears.

But bear in mind that some technology can be quietly disruptive, so you might not spot its impact at first glance. Tools should support those human moments, not replace or disrupt them.

Create ongoing feedback loops

Because people change, and expectations shift, an employee experience strategy has to be a living thing. Regular pulse surveys, performance and development conversations, and even informal listening sessions, all help you keep a finger on the pulse of the organisation.

The critical piece is what happens next. When employees see that you’ve heard their feedback, you are ACTUALLY changing, and you can clearly link them to proper actions (“you told us X, we’ve done Y”), that’s where trust and credibility grow.

Turn insights into a living roadmap

Creating an employee experience strategy is about alignment. You line up business goals, employee needs, lifecycle moments and cultural pillars, and you could use that to guide decisions about processes, policies, leadership behaviours and technology.

Done well, it doesn’t just make people “happier at work”; it removes friction, supports performance, and makes your organisation a place where talented people choose to stay. And for HR and finance leaders in the UK market, under pressure to do more with less, that’s not a nice-to-have. That’s your edge.

How to create a great employee experience.

With 79% of employees crying out for help, the pressure is on for HR to explore what they can do for employees who are struggling to make ends meet

Combine staff experience with Employee Lifecycle.

Great employee experience isn’t a list of benefits; it’s how it all feels across the entire employee lifecycle.

Look at the journey in distinct stages:

# Join – recruitment, offer, onboarding and first 90 days

# Grow – performance, development, promotions, lateral moves

# Day-to-day work - manager interactions, team culture, ….

# Change – restructuring, role changes, parental leave, sickness, relocation

# Leave – exit, handover, and even future references

For each stage, ask yourself:

🟠 What does a good experience look like here?

🟠 What moments really matter? (e.g. first day, first review, first promotion, return from leave)

🟠 What do we already do well, and where do people currently hit a brick wall?

Gain support from management

None of these could work in isolation, and they certainly don’t work without visible backing from the top. To create a meaningful employee experience, senior leaders need to do more than check and tick the list of tasks on your project management tool; they need to treat EX as a business priority, not an HR side project.

That means making time to understand what the data is telling you, framing the work in terms of hard outcomes (retention, productivity, quality of hire, customer experience, etc) and leading by example, demonstrating the very behaviours you expect from managers and teams.

When your managers are genuinely on board, growth, quality, wellbeing, flexibility and belonging start to feel like part of how the business competes.

Being open to change

HR surveys are useful for companies to find out what their employees need to work in a pleasant environment and make the most of them.

However, it is not enough to ask our employees and come back to your desk. We also need to show a willingness to make changes, even though not all the ideas can be carried out for practical, financial, architectural or business reasons. Not showing any reaction to their wishes can lead to negative experiences.

Track and measure key HR KPIs

Forget about annual employee engagement surveys. Now, to measure the Employee Experience, you need to regularly monitor and connect feedback with engagement surveys, performance reviews and exit interviews.

The company can have an overview of all the problems, and HR can turn that insight into visible action.

Identify archetypes

An archetype is a way of describing the typical behaviour patterns of a group of people. It’s shaped by cultural and personal circumstances, which means it’s not permanent (and lasts 3-4 years maximum). The differences between archetypes help you understand what really drives each group and what they expect from work.

They let you look beyond job titles and grades.

Start by listening systematically:

# Run regular employee experience surveys (at least one annually, but we recommend mixing them with short pulse checks in between).

# Keep them confidential and consistent over time so you can spot trends, not just one-off reactions.

# Combine survey data with qualitative insights – focus groups, manager feedback, exit interviews, stay interviews,...

Boost growth and development

People want to see a future with you. That means clear development paths, learning built into the day job, and access to coaching and stretch opportunities – not just for senior leaders, but for new managers and your key talent too.

Measure Manager quality

Be clear about what good management looks like in your organisation, invest in ongoing development, and give managers simple tools for conversations, feedback and recognition. Managers shape what employees feel and experience daily. And remember, a bad manager could make the best employee resign tomorrow.

Improve flexibility in your organisation

Flexibility is now a basic expectation for many roles. Be clear about what hybrid or remote working looks like for different groups. Offer options where you there is an option, and equip managers to lead hybrid teams so remote staff don’t end up as second-class employees.

Create a work environment where they can feel included

This is the core of employee experience. Craft diversity, equity and inclusion into every stage of the journey, support employee networks, and equip leaders to create psychologically safe teams where people can speak up. When people genuinely feel respected (not just tolerated), almost every metric improves.

Improve Employee Experience with HR Software

How to measure your EX

If employee experience is now a core part of your people strategy, the obvious follow-up is: how do we know if it’s actually working?

Josh Bersin makes a sharp point in his research on Employee Experience: “We are missing the measurement of EX—and relating it back to what’s working and what’s not.” That’s the gap many HR teams are still wrestling with. We measure engagement, we obsess over headcount and turnover, but we don’t always have a clear, joined-up view of the experience itself.

So what does measuring EX really look like in practice?

Start by defining what “good” looks like in your organisation. Is your EX strategy mainly about reducing friction in everyday processes? Building a stronger sense of belonging? From there, measurement becomes less abstract. You’re essentially looking at three layers of data and tying them together:

Signals from employees

This is the obvious one: pulse and engagement surveys, eNPS, onboarding and exit feedback, focus groups, and comments on internal forums. The shift, though, is to design these around the employee journey and your personas, not just the generic yearly review. How does the experience feel at 30 days in? At 12 months? After a promotion?

Operational and people analytics

This is the “quiet” data that says a lot about the lived experience: time-to-productivity, internal mobility rates, absence, grievances, use of learning platforms, uptake of flexible working, Jira tickets about HR/IT processes. If your EX strategy is meant to improve, say, onboarding, you should see fewer “How do I…?” tickets and higher early-tenure retention.

Business outcomes

This is where leaders have their high ground. The point of EX is about impact on performance. That might show up in lower regretted attrition, better customer satisfaction scores, improved productivity, or fewer safety incidents. When you look closely at those kinds of KPIs, you’ve moved beyond HR vanity metrics into serious decision-making territory.

The key is in connecting these three layers rather than treating them as separate reports. For example, you might see that a particular persona (say, mid-career technical specialists) scores low on “growth” and “recognition” in surveys, has higher voluntary turnover in years 3–5, and leaves mostly for roles with clearer career paths. That’s not just interesting; it’s an EX measurement story, with a clear action focus.

Using scalable HR tools so you can deliver consistently, measure impact (and iterate)

Even the best-designed experience will fall over if it relies on heroic effort and spreadsheets.

To make EX stick, you need scalable, integrated tools:

# People platform (like OpenHR) as your single source of truth for employee data.

# Modules like onboarding, recruitment, performance, and development that give you the insights you need, and talk to each other rather than sitting in silos.

# An HR survey tool that lets you run ongoing pulse checks and link insights to actions.

# Seamless integration with other systems so access feels effortless – single sign-on, shared data, and no need for people to jump between five different logins.

This gives you two big advantages:

# Consistency – every employee, manager and location gets the same core experience, with room for local nuance.

# Measurement – you can actually see what’s working: e.g. “Teams using the new onboarding checklist show 20% higher 90-day retention.”

From there, you can iterate: test, measure, refine, and scale the impact. That’s how you move from “EX as a one-off project” to EX as an operating system for how your organisation works.