The Definitive Guide to Employee Experience: What Really Matters

"At the end of the day, all businesses are about people first — because the only way we can build genuinely successful businesses is to build lasting relationships inside and outside the company."

Mary Barra, CEO General Motors

Employee experience is a buzzword. Every tech vendor and consulting firm tells you they have the solution to this problem, and CEOs are talking about it, too. The business case is clear: employees are in the driver's seat today, and if you don't give them what they need, they will just take their talents elsewhere. With unemployment rates trending towards pre-pandemic lows and as many as 40% of employees intending to switch their employer this year , your company has to do more than just pay well. Study after study shows the return on investment in employees beyond engagement — more satisfied customers, better products, more profitability, less safety issues, increased innovation, to name but a few. Fortune 500 CEOs such as Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Unilever’s Alan Jope, and GM’s Mary Barra all cite employee experience as critical for achieving business success.

Becoming a Best Place to Work: A Moving Target

Best Place to Work lists abound, and we compared four of them: Great Place to Work: World’s Best Workplaces; Forbes’ The World’s Best Employers; Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For; and Glassdoor Best Places to Work. What we found: only six of 1,020 companies were on all four lists (or 0.5%). If you don't know what good looks like, how will you ever get there?

So, we decided to study this topic, partnering with Microsoft. Based on many hours of discussions with our Big Reset groups — where executives from 1,000+ companies come together for what participants now call "Friday HR date night", we did a massive organizational survey, with responses from 981 companies around the world studying 83 employee experience (EX) practices, from work design over management practices to workplace solutions and cultural strategies, and also covering technologies. What we found was fascinating.

The Irresistible Organization: A Framework for EX

A great employee experience is about the work we do, the teams we're on, our direct managers, and how they coach and support us. It's also about our health and wellbeing; the digital, physical, and cultural workplace; how we grow and develop; and how much we trust the organization.

Our Framework for Employee Experience defines what we call “the irresistible organization”, and it's a tool to understand the elements, dimensions, and practices of EX.?

The goal of employee experience is to help people DO their best and BE their best.

How are companies executing on these practices? And where do you fit in?

The Employee Experience Maturity Model

Based on statistical analysis and many hours of discussions with HR, EX, and business leaders, we developed a four-level maturity model for EX.

Companies fall into four distinct levels of EX maturity, with level 1 the least impactful and level 4 the most. These levels are found across industries, geographies, and organizational sizes (although there are some distinctions, with innovation-depend industries performing much better).

Only 20% of the companies we surveyed were at high maturity, where employees are truly seen as individuals who will bring future sustainability and success through innovation.

We know employee experience matters, and moving from one level of maturity to the next is important to business, people and innovation outcomes. But it is also a lot of work and often takes years, working on cultural and leadership topics, HR programs, and supporting technologies. Implementing the most impactful practices can help get you there.

Why The Right EX Practices Really Matter

So, what practices matter most? We identified fifteen practices that have an outsize impact on business, people, and innovation outcomes. We call them “essentials” because without them very little else will matter. When they’re deployed, many of the typical investments work well. But when they’re not, a focus on “digital tools,” "competitive rewards," or “EX programs” simply doesn’t drive much impact.

What really matters in employee experience is fostering trust, a culture of helping others, caring for each other, creating a sense of belonging and equity, investing in people in any business climate. And HR capabilities and the right technologies are key, too.

Companies that use these strategies have much better business, people, and innovation outcomes.

Six Surprising Truths of EX

As we evaluated all the practices, strategies, and tools that support employee experience, we identified six key findings which also serve to bust six myths of employee experience.

Myth 1: EX is all about technology.

Truth: While technologies matter, gadgets and cool tools alone are not enough to inspire people to do their best and be their best.

Myth 2: Managers are key to a great employee experience.

Truth: Sure, managers are important, but they are not the sole carriers of your culture or the environment you create; leaders are more impactful.

Myth 3: Helping people reduce stress is at the heart of EX.

Truth: Yes, employee wellbeing has to be a priority - but taking a yoga class after a 60-hour work week won't do a lot to de-stress your people.

Myth 4: If we pay them, they will come (and stay).

Truth: You can't buy your way into becoming a great place to work. We don't look at our paycheck for the day-to-day inspiration to do the work of our life.

Myth 5: Keeping employees healthy means they can be productive.

Truth: Absolutely, the pandemic showed us that physical health and safety are critical - but what's even more important is psychological safety.

Myth 6: We can just lift and shift customer experience practices to EX.

Truth: Your customer experience can never be better than your employee experience, but EX is deeper than CX because employees vote for you with their lives.

"It's the soft stuff that's the hard stuff."

Companies around the world and various industries - Deutsche Telekom, IBM, Kraft Heinz, Microsoft, and Unilever - told us about their challenges, lessons, and strategies of creating an irresistible experience.

The Important Role of Technology

Although EX is not just about technology, the right technologies are important to support and scale EX practices. We've identified which technology practices most correlate to different maturity levels.

The most impactful technology practices - people analytics and action taking, advanced knowledge tools and adaptive learning tools - help identify roadblocks and personalize the experience, enable people to help each other by contributing to the learning of others, and create an environment where everybody can grow.

Time for Human-Centered Leadership

Employee experience can be a slogan used in tech vendors' marketing, or lip service from CEOs to win the war for talent. Topics of trust, transparency, culture, and inclusion are most important. How much are you investing in these topics? Who is even focusing on them? How do you measure success?

Above all, leadership is critical. Without the right leadership mindset, capabilities, and behaviors, any progress in EX will be short-lived and unsustainable. It’s a choice to make. Are you prioritizing business-centered leadership, in which the business is first and people second, or enabling human-centered leadership, in which people come first and the business second? Human-centered leaders inspire trust in the organization, communicate transparently, behave with integrity, are authentic, and model the culture of helping others.

If you invest just one thing in employee experience, focus on driving human-centered leadership to make your company truly irresistible.

Where You Can Go Next

• Read the full complimentary Definitive Guide: Employee Experience . You'll find a full description of the Irresistible Organization framework, the fifteen essentials of EX, a comprehensive maturity model, and actionable steps how to operationalize EX.
• Join 30,000+ HR professionals in the Josh Bersin Academy to amp your capabilities, including our Voice of the Employee and Hybrid Working programs
• Read more research samples on Employee Engagement, Experience, and Hybrid Work
• Contact us for help in making your organization irresistible