The crucial elements of a successful employee experience strategy

How do you ensure your employees are having a good experience?

It’s a question that’s being asked more than ever, with a growing focus on employee experience set to be one of the key trends for communicators in 2025.

It was certainly one of the main areas of discussion at our Comms Reboot event in London in October, with much debate around what the term means and who should be responsible for it (see our recent blog for more detail).

What’s certain is that you can’t create a high-performing organisation without creating an excellent experience for your employees.

Employees thrive in environments where they feel secure, informed, and valued. A great employee experience (EX) boosts engagement, retention, and motivation, ultimately leading to higher organisational performance. If employees feel supported and informed, they are much more likely to feel part of the bigger picture and, in turn, more motivated to work towards an organisation’s goals.

A poor experience, on the other hand, can result in disengaged employees, posing risks to brand reputation and productivity. ‘Insider risk’ is a much greater problem if people are not having a good experience at work. Studies show that for every six engaged employees, there’s one disengaged individual who could be undermining the organisation.

If you want to attract and retain the very best talent, employee experience needs to be a part of the entire employee lifecycle, yet so often we only seem to focus on it at the very beginning of someone’s experience – in the attraction and recruitment stages.

It's what led us to develop our Employee Experience Model, which we have been successfully implementing in organisations for the past 18 months. I thought it might be useful, as we head into 2025, to share the basics of it here, so that you can benchmark any of your plans for the year against it.

The key factors affecting employee experience

There are three core areas that impact employee experience:

-??????? Relationships: This includes communication and culture, the parts of work that are based around human connection. Think line manager relationships, internal communications channels, strategies and leadership.

-??????? Tools and processes: These are the things we use every day to get work done – like the equipment, the software, the internal processes. These are particularly important to Gen Z but they may have also been a source of frustration for other employees for years. It might be tailored tools to the business or generic IT solutions. It also includes the internal processes and perceived bureaucracy within the organisation.

-??????? Environment: Environment is both physical and virtual. This is about where we work and to some degree, how we work. What is our environment like if we work at home, if we work in a store in a shopping centre, a hospital, or are fully nomadic and work from anywhere?

Mapping experience to the employee lifecycle

The three elements listed above make up the employee experience, but for them to come to life we must map them to the employee lifecycle.

Our model helps to illustrate which of these is most important to people at each stage – starting from attraction right through to the point where they leave the company.

We define the six key stages of the employee lifecycle as follows:

1.?Attraction:?Ensuring prospective employees are excited about the opportunity

2.?Recruitment:?Delivering a seamless, transparent hiring process

3.?Onboarding:?Making the transition into the organisation smooth and welcoming

4.?Development:?Providing opportunities for growth and learning

5.?Retention:?Creating a workplace where employees want to stay

6.?Separation:?Managing offboarding and maintaining goodwill with alumni

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In our model each of the three core elements of employee experience is represented by a different colour. At each stage of the lifecycle, the amount of that colour in the circle changes depending on importance. This will be different for different people but, as a general guide, we wanted to be able to show how the employee experience evolves through the lifecycle and how different areas need a different level of focus at different times.

If you’re unsure where to get started or where to go next with your employee experience work, I’d highly recommend looking at the way your organisation is currently structured and how much time is spent on each of the three areas at each of the six stages. Does it align with the diagram? If not, what could you do to shift the dials?

How can you ensure success with your employee experience strategy?

Creating a good experience for your employees throughout the entire lifecycle requires continual work – and lots of creativity!

Providing stand-out, meaningful moments at regular touchpoints throughout an employee’s day, week or month are essential in maintaining motivation and satisfaction. This can be as simple as a regular check-in with a manager or as elaborate as an annual awards ceremony, but the best employee experience strategies never lose sight of the importance of these key moments.

Finding the opportunities to create these becomes much easier when employee experience is viewed as a shared function, with input from individual departments, HR and the communications team. While comms teams may have the creative brains to come up with new ideas, we may not have the vital insight needed into the day-to-day working practices to be able to spot where the opportunities for these pockets of joy lay.

Another crucial part of any successful employee experience strategy is the need to cultivate a culture of psychological safety. Open communication and clear expectations help employees feel supported, valued and able to articulate their true opinions without fear of repercussions.

Employees thrive in organisations where they feel safe and looked after, where they know what to expect and when they’re not fearful of what could happen next.

If you’d like to chat more about employee experience and how we could help your organisation please drop me a message on here. I’d also love to hear your experience of creating employee experience strategies. What has worked well? How do you divide it up among your teams? What moments of surprise and delight have you created that others could learn from? Let us know in the comments.