Imagine a dilapidated car that you’ve spent a fortune repainting, upholstering, and enhancing its outward appearance. While the car may now look elegant and impressive, its ride and performance remain the same as that of a broken-down vehicle. If you want to improve its functionality, you need to replace the engine. Organizations worldwide spend significant resources on initiatives such as corporate culture programs, office redesigns, employee engagement innovations, and employee well-being strategies. Yet, these efforts often have minimal impact on how employees perform and operate. Organizations frequently confuse employee engagement with employee experience. Employee engagement involves superficial, short-term organizational actions aimed at improving employee work practices. However, just as this approach is ineffective for fixing a car, it does not yield meaningful results for organizations. If we consider employee engagement as short-term adrenaline shots for organizations, then employee experience represents long-term organizational redesigns (Morgan, 2017).
Employee experience is about creating a great workplace for employees, encompassing trust in employer-employee relationships and ensuring employees’ voices are heard (CIPD, 2020). It is also defined as the sum of all touchpoints employees have with their employer, from when they apply to join the organization to the end of their membership in it (Bersin, 2019). Employee experience is the "user experience" of employees concerning their expectations, environment, and events that shape their career journey within the organization (Mercer, 2019). Gallup defines employee experience as the journey employees undergo within an organization, covering all interactions before, during, and after their tenure (Gallup, 2019). In another sense, employee experience is the intentional design and engineering of a valuable, integrated, end-to-end experience. Using comprehensive employee experience as a lens allows organizations to optimize long-term interactions with employees, fostering a deep sense of belonging and collaboration aligned with achieving optimal performance and successful business outcomes (Witter, 2019). Bridger and Ganaway believe that employee experience is all about creating more good workdays in the workplace (Bridger & Ganaway, 2012).
Lahi and Barnes describe employee experience as the collective reality of what employees find favorable across all levels of the organization. The value of employees and the employer brand should reflect this reality; otherwise, the authenticity of the employer brand will be questioned. Employee experience is the distinguishing factor that wins the war for talent (Lahi & Barnes, 2018).
Morgan argues that this concept is not merely the "relationship between employees and the organization" but can be defined in various ways: from the perspective of employees, from the perspective of the organization, and as the overlap between these two viewpoints. From the employees’ perspective, workplace experience reflects the reality of the work environment and the truth of the actions and events from their viewpoint. From the organization’s perspective, employee experience is what is designed and created for employees or the organization’s belief in what employees should be. Discrepancies and challenges can arise between these two perspectives. Merely designing and implementing initiatives for employees does not result in the desired employee experience, as employees’ perceptions often differ from the organization’s designs. The best perspective on employee experience is the overlap between the employees’ perceived reality and the organization’s design of that reality. In other words, the organization designs something, employees perceive something, and the employees’ perceptions have a greater impact on their experience than the organization’s design (Morgan, 2017).
The IBM Institute defines employee experience as employees’ perceptions of their experiences at work and their interactions with the organization (IBM, 2017). Employee experience is the sum of employees’ perceptions of their interactions within the organization. Many managers equate employee experience with the employee lifecycle. While the lifecycle is part of employee experience, it does not encompass its entirety (Millet & Wride, 2017). Employee experience is deeply influenced by perceptions and expectations. It is based on employees’ perceptions of ongoing events rather than the objective reality of those events. Thus, the following equation holds true:
Perceptions + Expectations + Experiences = Employee Experience
According to this equation, employee experience is not just a factor of what the organization provides to employees but the result of employees’ perceptions of these efforts and how well they align with their expectations.
Millet and Wride used Lewin’s field theory to explain how employee experiences occur. Field theory posits that behavior is a function of personality and environment. Lewin described the "life space" as a combination of factors influencing an individual at any given time, including life experiences, memories, needs, personality, health, aspirations, and more. Since these factors vary from person to person, each individual’s life space is unique. Conversely, the "field" is the mental environment of each person, which changes over time and with experiences. Field theory explains why two individuals or groups may interpret the same conditions differently (Millet & Wride, 2017).
Employee experience refers to an organization’s ability to connect with employees’ logic, emotions, and purpose behind all interactions. Providing a compelling and sustainable experience requires understanding employees’ needs, desires, and motivations, as well as addressing them through meaningful interactions within the organization, influenced by effective job factors (North Highland, 2016).
Employee experience can be defined as the totality of interactions between employers and employees as perceived, understood, and remembered by employees. It reflects the actions and circumstances before, during, and after their tenure in the organization. Consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally, and whether positive or negative, every organization offers an experience to its employees. Traditional views of employees overlooked the dynamics of employer-employee relationships and the evolving nature of the social contract. Today, providing employees with a compelling experience requires organizations to understand the factors influencing these dynamics and the increasing complexity of the systems in which employees operate (North Highland, 2016).
Millet and Wride clarify that employee experience extends beyond employees’ feelings about the organization. It focuses on attracting the right talent and providing an environment that aligns with their needs and desires so they want and can give their best toward organizational goals. The goal is not to create a utopia for employees or to spend all resources solely on employee happiness, as happiness alone does not guarantee their best effort (Millet & Wride, 2017).
In a 2018 study of over 250 organizations on employee experience, Fitch found that only 15% of respondents had a defined concept of employee experience, with no two definitions being alike. Regardless of how it is defined, all definitions recognize that experience evokes a feeling in individuals that requires serious organizational effort to articulate, define, and interpret. While the concept of employee experience is inherently simple and transparent, its connection to each individual’s unique personal experience makes it something only they can truly understand for themselves (Bridger & Ganaway, 2012).
The Temporal and Spatial Dimensions of Employee Experience
Employee experience is shaped across temporal and spatial dimensions. The temporal dimension corresponds to employees’ work journeys or lifecycles. Throughout this journey, employees constantly experience, assess, and compare organizational events, behaviors, and actions with their pre-established expectations. Positive or negative experiences emerge based on the degree of alignment between these expectations and reality.
The spatial dimension pertains to the work environment, encompassing conditions, human relationships, physical space, technology, organizational culture, and the general atmosphere. Structural and content design of the work environment serves as the framework for employees’ lived experiences and plays a crucial role in bridging or widening the gap between the organization and its employees. While the process of perception and experience formation is abstract, internal, and personal, there are tangible, external, and modifiable organizational factors that significantly influence the creation of these experiences.
