Once upon a time, a good salary plus a few perks like company vehicles or gym memberships was all it took to attract talent. Nowadays, attracting and retaining the best people in the hybrid workforce is far more complex. To avoid the domino effect of the Great Resignation, companies must deliver a truly great employee experience that engages and retains top performers.
In this post, we share the essential insights on employee experience management. We explore why it’s more important than ever in today’s evolving workplace and provide actionable best practice tips every HR manager should know.
What Is Meant By Employee Experience?
The employee experience (EX) encompasses every interaction a worker has with an employer, beginning from the first contact about a job opportunity. It continues throughout all five stages of the employee life cycle and only concludes when the employee leaves or retires.
The employee experience reflects how your people feel, think, and learn at each stage. Deloitte sums up the importance of EX perfectly:
At its core, EX is about making work better for humans and making humans better at work.
The customer experience is a top priority for CEOs worldwide, recognizing that emotional connections drive customer loyalty. The same principle now applies to employees. It’s no longer just about salaries, perks, and incentives – to get the best out of your workforce, you need to listen, value, and connect with your people.
Ultimately, employees’ day-to-day experiences directly influence how hard they work and how invested they are in your company’s success. This is why employee experience matters so much.
What Are The Elements Of Employee Experience?
In The Employee Experience Advantage, best-selling author and EX expert Jacob Morgan identified three critical components that shape EX. The pandemic has dramatically reshaped all three, requiring a fresh, innovative approach.
Technological Environment
Providing the right digital tools boosts employees’ confidence and ability to perform their roles effectively. Technology is especially crucial in hybrid workplaces, where communication, information sharing, and collaboration must be seamless regardless of location. Ensuring all staff have equal access to technology creates a level playing field and enhances the overall employee experience.
Physical Environment
The workplace environment significantly impacts employee well-being and motivation. Modern, bright, and airy offices foster happier, more productive workers. And, of course, having a quality coffee machine is a small but meaningful perk.
With more employees working remotely at least part-time, the home office setup is equally important. Providing your workforce with the tools and environment they need to be productive and comfortable, whether at home or in the office, is vital to maintaining a positive employee experience.
Culture
Company culture is the atmosphere and vibe you sense when entering a workplace. It can energize or drain, motivate or dishearten. Culture includes your company’s values, leadership styles, organizational structure, and daily interactions–even informal conversations on the shop floor contribute.
To optimize your employee experience, reflect on these key questions:
- Do our people feel heard by management?
- Do their supervisors provide support and guidance?
- Are employees recognized and rewarded regularly?
- Are there clear pathways for growth and development?
What Is Employee Experience Management?
Employee experience management refers to the collective efforts and strategies used to monitor and improve EX continuously. The goal is to maximize positive and minimize negative experiences throughout the entire employee life cycle.
The five key stages of the employee life cycle align closely with effective EX management:
- Recruitment
- Onboarding
- Development
- Retention
- Offboarding and exit
Typical employee experience management activities include but are not limited to:
- Gathering feedback through pulse surveys, engagement polls, and exit interviews
- Promoting two-way communication between employees and leadership
- Conducting employee-centered performance reviews
- Monitoring and improving how supervisors support their teams
- Ensuring technology platforms align with employees’ work needs
- Implementing targeted learning and development programs
Collecting staff feedback and analyzing business processes uncovers invaluable data and insights. This allows you to identify gaps in employee experience and target areas for improvement, whether through minor tweaks or large-scale company initiatives.
What Does An Employee Experience Manager Do?
Employee experience (EX) is such a powerful driver of business performance that many organizations have appointed a specialist employee experience manager.
The job holder takes overall responsibility for EX strategy and execution. While tasks vary by company, here are some common responsibilities:
- Managing staff compensation, perks, and benefits
- Developing rewards programs and employee recognition schemes
- Onboarding new employees effectively
- Overseeing employee professional development, including leadership training for managers
- Collaborating with executives to ensure company policies are effective and correctly applied
- Collecting and analyzing employee feedback to provide actionable recommendations to company leaders
The employer-employee relationship must be nurtured and cultivated like any important relationship in life. Employee experience managers build and sustain positive EX throughout every stage of the employee life cycle.
What Is An Employee Experience Solution?
Managing and sustaining employee experience doesn’t just happen organically. It requires strategic planning and implementation of an effective EX solution. An experienced EX manager is a great place to start, but there are practical steps HR teams can take immediately to initiate progress.
Listen To Your People
The best way to improve employee experience is to actively listen to your workforce. Find out how they are doing, and encourage ideas for simplifying and improving their work. Invite staff to share insights on how to make the employee life cycle more personal and meaningful.
Using employee survey software is a simple and effective way to gather feedback. According to survey software companies, these tools enable you to create custom questions or use scientifically validated templates. You can also decide whether surveys should be anonymous, depending on what works best for your organization. Collecting employee feedback is so essential that we will explore this topic in detail later.
Plan
Use the data gathered from your employee surveys to start small with quick wins, then gradually implement high-impact strategic initiatives. For example, introducing an onboarding checklist can dramatically improve the onboarding experience, ensuring staff receive a consistent and comprehensive introduction to your company. Always keep the overall employee experience as your guiding principle when enhancing any part of the employee life cycle.
Be Ready To Invest
Investing in your workforce pays dividends. Whether it’s upgrading office furniture or implementing a new collaboration platform, be prepared to allocate budget so employees want to come to work. However, improvements don’t always require large expenditures – even simple swaps like replacing uncomfortable meeting room chairs can boost morale. Don’t forget your remote workers; many organizations now offer a home office setup allowance to support them.
Measure Progress
Use pulse checks, engagement surveys, and continuous performance conversations to gather real-time data. This helps benchmark your current status and measure the impact of changes over time, enabling data-driven decision making.
Report Back
Celebrate your successes openly. Keeping employees informed about improvements and achievements fosters trust and engagement, and can convert even the most skeptical team members into advocates.
Types Of Employee Experience (EX) Surveys
Understanding how your employees feel is critical to effective employee experience management. Gathering these insights also helps you track progress and identify areas for improvement. Here are some survey types tailored to different stages of the employee life cycle:
Candidate Surveys
Capture feedback on your ad-to-hire process by surveying both successful and unsuccessful applicants. This reveals how well your job ads attract top talent and how effective your branding, interviews, and recruitment processes are. Giving unsuccessful candidates a voice also benefits your employer brand reputation.
Onboarding Surveys
The onboarding experience sets the tone for the entire employee journey. Regular check-ins with new hires through quick pulse surveys or snap polls ensure onboarding is smooth, positive, and effective, while avoiding survey fatigue.
Training Feedback Questionnaires
Professional development is key to employee retention. Collecting feedback after training sessions helps map individual growth and optimize future learning opportunities.
Employee Engagement Surveys
Usually conducted annually, these comprehensive surveys give employees a voice, help steer company objectives, and assess your performance on employee engagement.
Exit Interviews
Departing employees often provide honest feedback. Use exit interviews to gain insights into the offboarding phase, identify strengths and weaknesses in your company culture, and uncover ways to improve turnover and retention.
Pulse Checks
Short, frequent surveys that can be deployed at any employee life cycle stage. They provide timely, qualitative data that can be tracked to monitor trends and sentiment over time.
Ad Hoc Surveys
Deploy quick surveys on specific topics, such as new wellness programs or leadership training effectiveness, to get instant employee feedback.
Always-on Feedback
On-demand, brief surveys that allow employees to provide in-the-moment insights. These tools offer real-time snapshots of staff morale and engagement levels.
Employee Experience Management: Quick Summary
Hybrid working requires a fresh approach to the employee experience (EX). Your remote workers’ EX may differ significantly from those working in the office, demanding tailored strategies to address both environments effectively.
There are three main elements to the employee experience:
- Technological environment
- Physical environment
- Culture
Employee experience management is a comprehensive approach that spans the five key stages of the employee life cycle. Gathering feedback and data at each stage helps you identify what truly matters to your people.
It also guides and shapes EX initiatives to ensure your physical workplace, technology, and company culture are optimized for all employees, regardless of their location or role.
According to McKinsey, up to 40 percent of workers plan to quit their jobs within the next 3-6 months. The ongoing Great Resignation is making it increasingly difficult to retain top talent. Investing in robust EX management offers an effective solution for HR teams to navigate these turbulent times.
What Is B2E?
Business-to-employee (B2E) refers to the activities, digital workplace systems, and processes that employers implement to attract, retain, and engage their staff.
B2E initiatives include recruitment and retention policies, onboarding, professional development opportunities, and employee wellness programs. Internal communications and employee engagement are also essential components. Additionally, B2E involves providing digital platforms and tools that help employees work more efficiently and effectively.
As a broad concept, B2E encompasses any operational activity where the employee is the central focus.
Why Is Business To Employee Marketing Important?
Richard Branson famously said that employees come first, customers second. There is ample evidence supporting the critical link between engaged employees and satisfied customers.
A compelling B2E strategy positively impacts B2C and B2B marketing efforts. Employees who feel valued and strongly aligned with the company vision and values consistently deliver superior customer service. This leads to enhanced brand reputation, higher customer satisfaction, increased profits, and a stronger competitive advantage.
In today’s competitive, globalized marketplace, attracting and retaining top talent is more challenging than ever. Employees are changing jobs more frequently, with data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing the median tenure at current employers is just 4.6 years, and even lower at 2.8 years for workers aged 25 to 34.
Furthermore, Glassdoor reports that the average U.S. company takes about 52 days and $4,000 to fill a vacant role. Given these figures, it’s clear why recruitment and retention budgets are escalating rapidly.
Employee expectations are also evolving. Gallup research confirms that employees now seek jobs that fit their lifestyle, offer growth opportunities, and connect them to greater meaning and purpose. Competitive salaries and perks alone no longer suffice to attract and retain talent.
Business To Employee Tools
Digital platforms and tools are at the heart of an effective B2E strategy. A well-designed B2E platform enables employees to quickly and easily access all necessary tools for their daily work.
Moreover, it serves as a vital channel to communicate and connect staff with the company’s mission, vision, and values.
When selecting the best B2E digital platform, an intranet stands out as the ideal choice. It provides a personalized, single gateway to all digital tools and delivers a range of other valuable business benefits.
5 Ways An Intranet Can Support B2E And The Employee Experience
1. Onboarding New Employees
When it comes to employee retention, the journey starts with onboarding. A dedicated onboarding space within your intranet acts as a one-stop-shop for all new hires. Instead of overwhelming new staff with a pile of paper on day one, the intranet streamlines and accelerates the dissemination of essential information.
By using a self-service onboarding checklist and personalized resources, employees can easily access the tools and knowledge they need. The intranet’s intuitive navigation and powerful search function, combined with an engaging interface, ensure that all necessary resources are at employees’ fingertips.
The intranet provides the flexibility and accessibility today’s workforce demands. Thanks to cloud technology, staff can access onboarding materials anytime, anywhere–whether during their daily commute or working remotely from home.
Online approval forms make completing paperwork – such as HR documents, payroll details, or IT setup – faster and more accurate through automation.
Additionally, the intranet’s online staff directory helps new employees quickly familiarize themselves with colleagues, avoiding confusion and awkward mistakes.
A well-designed onboarding process not only boosts retention rates but also accelerates new hire productivity, making it a critical element of your overall B2E strategy.
2. Promoting The Company Culture
Promoting a strong company culture is crucial not only during onboarding but continuously across your workforce. Regular reminders help reinforce a shared sense of purpose and clarify how each employee contributes to the organization’s mission and values.
The intranet serves as an excellent platform for communicating these important messages using a wide variety of media formats. Options include videos, webcasts, podcasts, interactive webinars, wikis, infographics, surveys, checklists, and online manuals.
Personalized video messages or vlogs from the CEO or president add authenticity and foster connection. Since the shift to remote work, these video communications have become vital for keeping staff informed, reassured, and engaged.
A CEO blog offers a direct line of communication between leadership and employees, sharing company goals, corporate milestones, and success stories. Inviting feedback and comments encourages transparency and engagement.
Implementing an employee recognition scheme on the intranet, such as public shout-outs on news feeds, strengthens morale and demonstrates the company’s commitment to celebrating staff achievements.
3. Providing Opportunities For Employee Development
Professional growth and development opportunities are essential to a positive employee experience and effective B2E strategies.
Organizations with strong professional development programs enjoy higher retention. According to a survey published by Forbes, 86% of respondents would consider changing jobs if better development opportunities existed.
The intranet supports flexible, continuous learning far beyond costly traditional classroom sessions. It offers varied learning formats that suit diverse preferences, lifestyles, and remote working setups, including:
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- How-to videos
- Internal apprenticeships or mentoring programs
- Infographics
- Interactive checklists and surveys
Many companies empower employees by providing development budgets and freedom to choose learning paths aligned with corporate goals, making the intranet a hub for self-directed professional growth.
4. Offering Employee Wellness And Benefits
Top-performing B2E companies take a holistic approach that integrates employee wellness initiatives with benefits packages. A healthy workforce experiences fewer sick days and is generally more productive.
Absenteeism costs employers an estimated $225.8 billion annually, making investment in wellness and benefits financially sound.
A strong wellness offering can also differentiate your company in the talent market. Benefits such as subsidized gym memberships, healthcare plans, workplace health screenings, or flu vaccinations increase employer attractiveness.
The intranet is the perfect platform to showcase these offerings with online roadmaps, toolkits, and resources addressing mental health, ergonomics, occupational safety, and chronic disease management.
Engage employees by creating wellness blogs or dedicated #wellness channels on team chat platforms. These spaces allow sharing healthy recipes, local class reviews, or organizing fitness activities like lunchtime running clubs.
5. Facilitating Knowledge Management
A core aspect of successful B2E marketing is equipping employees with the right tools and resources to perform their jobs efficiently. Searching for the latest documents or navigating poorly structured files wastes valuable time and frustrates staff.
Establishing effective corporate knowledge management systems is critical for fostering productivity and collaboration.
The intranet acts as a single source of truth for company information–whether databases, standard operating procedures, manuals, presentations, or training guides–consolidated into one user-friendly digital library.
For example, Kenect Recruitment uses its intranet to host Google Slides training presentations, enabling staff to self-serve information and freeing management from repetitive queries.
Single Gateway For A Positive Employee Experience
These examples highlight how an intranet can significantly enhance your B2E strategy. The standout advantage of an intranet over other tools is its single sign-on functionality, providing seamless access to multiple office systems and apps like G Suite, Office 365, DropBox, and Salesforce.
Offering personalized homepages with favorite news feeds, #channels, and productivity tools, an intranet is a truly integrated, all-in-one platform that simplifies and enriches the employee experience.
When it comes to business-to-employee marketing, the intranet is indispensable.
Discover how MyHub can help your organization with a free demo or 14-day trial. Explore the powerful possibilities and kickstart your B2E strategy today–commitment free.
FAQ Section
What is employee experience (EX)?
Employee experience refers to the cumulative interactions an employee has with the organization, spanning recruitment, tools, culture, collaboration, and offboarding.
Why is enhancing employee experience important?
A strong EX boosts engagement, retention, productivity, and loyalty. Happy employees tend to perform better, stay longer, and contribute more positively to company culture.
How can organizations improve employee experience?
High-impact EX strategies include deploying user-friendly intranet platforms, enabling social and community features, offering training and development tools, and establishing continuous feedback mechanisms.
