Employee Experience vs Employee Engagement: What’s the Difference?

Whether it’s employee engagement or employee experience, every organization wants to understand what makes people get out of bed and come to work each day with consistent motivation.

Employee experience is considered to be every minuscule step in the overall employee lifecycle, which includes onboarding, regular performance reviews, team analysis, exit interviews, and offboarding.

Employee engagement, on the other hand, can be defined as the validation of an employee’s feelings when they’re in the workplace, such as their motivation, their willpower to lead the team towards the goals aligned with the company, and much more.

While it sounds very complicated, we’re here to make it easy to digest so you can implement the best practices at the workplace and be able to put everything in the experience and engagement bracket accordingly. Let’s dive in!

What is Employee Engagement?

Driving employee engagement has become the most talked-about topic by employers and HR professionals in the management world. Since there are many opinions surfacing across the web regarding how to define employee engagement, here’s the definition we believe will sum up the engaging success every employee deserves.

Employee Engagement is a systematic approach to each employee’s individual growth, resulting in their best contribution to work in thriving conditions. This way, they can not only contribute but also motivate themselves and others to achieve organizational success with healthy career growth in mind.

While the benefits of employee engagement are widely spoken and established, this approach is curated and organized for specific purposes in a particular time frame.

Even though it’s all about how an individual feels at their workplace, every employee engagement program is customized to fulfill the employees’ wants and needs to keep their well-being and mental health intact.

What is Employee Experience?

Employee experience is deeply connected to your company’s brand identity. Since it is intertwined with your brand identity, improving your employee experience can certainly help improve your brand identity as well.

In fact, an article by Harvard Business reviewed the impacts of employee experience on organizational growth and concluded a correlation between happy employees and satisfied customers. This means that your employee experience can directly impact your organizational profitability.

To put it into perspective, when companies aim to build a highly engaged workforce, it’s crucial to prioritize employee experience first. A highly motivated workforce is keen on satisfying customer demands and building trust, which becomes a long-term commodity for any organization.

Additionally, when a company provides its best employee experience, it seamlessly aligns with its brand promise and organizational goal. When someone contributes to a certain task, they not only feel satisfied but also liberated to do better every time they face a new challenge.

Therefore, a company’s goal must be to ensure that its employees love their job, grow their careers, and feel recognized and encouraged when they are in the game. That’s where job satisfaction comes in. Employee experience is all about attention to detail and relentless planning to set new processes to measure employee satisfaction, starting right from the onboarding.

Employee Experience vs Employee Engagement: Key Differences

While employee engagement and employee experience are fundamentally different, they share an intricate connection in improving the quality of life in the workplace. By understanding the obvious difference between the two, you can grow your business strategy exponentially to foster engagement at its peak.

Simply speaking, employee experience is all about the process from the beginning of onboarding until the employee leaves the company. The experience covers the overall interaction, feelings, and moments lived by the employee.

On the other side, employee engagement encompasses the motivated, dedicated, and passionate aspects of employees during their journey at an organization. Let’s understand this from a side-by-side perspective to understand the difference between employee experience and employee engagement.

Action	Employee Experience	Employee Engagement
Responsibility	This aspect covers the shared responsibilities among the employers, such as senior leaders, HR professionals, and other high-level positions in the company, to establish the benefits and work culture.	Carried out solely by the managerial efforts.
Scope	A holistic approach to the entire journey of an individual from onboarding to exit.	Solely focused on an employee’s commitment to their job and the company’s goal.
Timeline	Dynamically studying behavioral patterns by linking past interactions with current scenarios for potential future predictions.	A static approach where patterns are referred to the moments where employees have either engaged or disengaged.
Measurement	Everything is dynamically measured through various points, and feedback that is valid across the employee life cycle.	Typically, the potential is measured by focusing on the satisfaction level, commitment & alignment toward company goals.

Important Note: Since employee experience and engagement are intertwined, every aspect is crucial for growth, and neither should be ignored or taken for granted in any organization.

Mapping the Employee Journey to Improve Both Engagement and Experience

Mapping the whole journey of the employee experience will help us understand the process of onboarding until the exit. Let’s understand the employee lifecycle by digging into each step along the way:

1. Talent Acquisition: The employee experience lifecycle starts before the individual’s onboarding. Since maintaining the brand identity is the utmost priority of any organization, potential talent acquisition through employee branding, job listing, and reputation becomes crucial in this phase.


2. Recruitment & Onboarding: Most people think of this as the first step to the employee experience, which shows how important it is after talent acquisition. Right after shortlisting the right talent, the first interaction with the talent sets the tone for the overall company goals. A smooth, respectful, and informative approach to the hiring process, followed by a structured confidence and connection, sets the tone for your organization’s brand identity.


3. Development: After completing the onboarding process, it’s all about providing growth opportunities to the talent. A clear career path, along with the strategic use of the provided resources, is crucial for building skills that are beneficial in the long run. This process helps employees to stay engaged and motivated at the workplace.


4. Retention & Engagement: Employee retention is solely based on their mental and physical strength, along with their job satisfaction, to be taken care of by the company itself. A well-deserved recognition, feedback, and a healthy work-life culture are the key drivers of psychological safety during the day-to-day experience.


5. Exit & Alumni: When employees leave, it deeply impacts their perspective toward your company. That’s why it’s equally crucial to make it a positive exit experience. A positive exit strategy can make good former employees into advocates of your company. A long-term positive impact that is otherwise neglected by many companies.

As each step serves a greater purpose in fostering individual and organizational growth, it’s a chance to build trust, loyalty, and performance that you don’t want to miss. By mapping and improving the employee experience lifecycle, companies can create a workplace where people genuinely want to stay and grow throughout their journey.

Why Are Companies Focusing More on Employee Experience Today?

There are many important reasons for companies to focus more on the experience of their valuable employees. One is that companies are fighting against higher employee turnover rates. Another is social media’s widespread awareness of tackling the internal strife that has been happening in some companies for years.

It’s crucial to know that your company’s experience is no longer a private venture, but a public entity, and that it should be a positive example of well-being. In the age of the internet, companies that prioritize growth and well-being are the ones likely to succeed further.

Here are some of the other examples you should know:

1. Shifting Workforce Expectations (Gen Z & Millennials)

Younger generations that are entering the workforce value more than just salary and job titles. It’s meaningful work, why not get more than just the bare minimum? This mentality is important to manifest flexibility, an inclusive culture, and purpose-driven leadership that drastically contributes to the requirement of improving the experience.

2. Rise of Remote and Hybrid Work

The pandemic has largely become the reason for the rise of remote work and hybrid work. No doubt, it’s crucial to understand how employees have evolved in communicating their concerns to the organization, shaping the employee experience for flexible growth.

3. Increased Focus on Mental Health and Work-Life Balance

In the era of extreme market ups and downs, workers’ mental health is affected the most. After realizing how crucial that is, the employee experience program has emotional and psychological well-being as a core component.

4. Link Between Experience and Employer Brand

Looking more closely at this, you can find many employee reviews on sites like Glassdoor to get a quick glimpse of their perspective of their organization, like their working conditions, wellness programs, and, of course, their personalized employee experience.

While this information is readily available online, companies that offer the best experience and brand identity shape the cutting edge of global business.

How to Measure Employee Engagement and Employee Experience

Measuring employee engagement and experience has become crucial for building a people-first workplace. While these two concepts are closely related, different tools for different needs have been assigned to them individually. Tools like data sources, metrics, and analytics are used to understand how employees feel, behave, and interact with the organization.

For Measuring Engagement

Employee engagement stems from the brand’s identity and mission toward employee motivation, commitment, and method of communication. Programs that fuel this aspect are:

• Pulse Surveys: Short and frequent surveys are conducted to track and establish effective engagement throughout all quarters.
• eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) measures how likely an employee is to recommend a company as a legitimate place to work and thrive.
• Feedback System Platforms: These anonymous tools are deployed and used to share company insights, ideas, and workplace concerns that need attention regularly.

For Measuring Experience

While employee engagement is an outer layer of it all, employee experience is even deeper, touching every interaction across the employee lifecycle. Here are the processes that you can use to measure this:

• Journey Mapping: This helps visualize all the key touchpoints, such as onboarding, promotion, exit programs, and more, to identify any experience gaps that can be filled.
• Sentiment Analysis: Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), we can conduct an emotional assessment survey to further improve employee communications.
• Experience design platforms: Platforms such as Qualtrics or Medallia are in the market to help track the experience holistically.

How to Analyze and Act on Data

Gathering the data through various surveys is just the first step. Everyone aspires to gain valuable insights from that data since patterns, pain points, and, most importantly, the strategy built from this foundational data serve a greater purpose to the organization. Taking these actions means closing the feedback loops that foster trust and loyalty, drastically reducing turnover rates.

KPIs for Each Metric

Here are the KPIs that are discussed above:

• Engagement KPIs: Survey participation rate, eNPS score, turnover rate.
• Experience KPIs: Onboarding satisfaction, time-to-productivity, internal mobility rate, and exit feedback scores.

How to Improve Both Employee Experience and Engagement Simultaneously

As we said before, employee engagement and experience are like two sides of one coin. Improving one can lead to a broader perspective on improving the other. When effective strategies are used, we can improve them both together to fuel even stronger performance, higher retention, and a much healthier workplace culture. Let’s discuss some proven strategies and actionable steps to elevate both at once:

1. Actionable strategies that impact both

• Feedback Loops: Conducting regular feedback and acting on it is the widely proven step to show employees that their voices matter.
• Transparency: Open communication goes both ways. Filling out the communication gaps between employees and employers is essential for building trust and reducing uncertainty.
• Personalized Development: Well-tailored programs for growth and flexibility, based on individual strengths and aspirations, keep them motivated and invested in the long term.

2. Creating a Culture of Belonging and Psychological Safety

Everyone wants to feel like they belong in a place where they spend one-third of their lives. When employees feel accepted, safe to express ideas, and free from unnecessary internal politics, they’re more engaged and likely to stay.

3. Aligning Employee Goals with Organizational Values

We can’t emphasize this enough! When employees see how their work contributes to the bigger purpose, they feel connected to the greater cause. Clear goal-setting frameworks like OKRs or SMART goals link to personal contributions to company outcomes, boosting both morale and the meaning of working as a team.

4. Role of Leadership in Shaping Both Areas

Leaders shape the organization. Managers who coach rather than command are the most in demand. Since engagement values core principles, listening is more appreciated than lecturing at the workplace. Those who lead with empathy are more likely to create conditions where people can not only thrive but also develop an instinct that goes beyond the workspace, becoming a cascading effect across all aspects of life.

Final Thoughts: Choosing the Right Focus for Long-Term Success

As many companies realize the impact of employee engagement and experience in their workplace, the word is getting out and garnering more interest among people who also want to get in the game. These organizations are becoming more aware every day after reading about the exceptional improvements that are making the headlines.

This will also help initiate both short-term and long-term engagement and experience strategies that are progressively and collectively designed after getting much feedback from other companies. This will have a collective impact that will positively affect and give meaning to the experience lifecycle in all quarters.

We predict this change will have a massive impact in the coming years, resulting in a more satisfied and engaged workforce that is also productive and relentless in getting the work done.

Revaluate180 helps companies uncover blind spots in their people strategy through AI-powered insights and analytics. From uncovering team dynamics to optimizing onboarding and retention, R180 gives you actionable data to build both a great experience and high engagement.

Connect with us today to book a free demo to see how your employee journey aligns with performance and retention goals.

FAQs

What is the difference between employee experience and employee engagement?

Employee experience refers to an employee’s entire journey in the organization. It encompasses all the stages from hiring to their final day of exit, such as Onboarding, daily work, relationships, technology, communication, benefits, and even the way they leave the company. It is shaped by how employees feel, think, and interact with their workplace environment.

Employee engagement, on the other hand, is all about an employee’s emotional commitment to their work and the organizational goals. It’s an aspect where the value is based on the level of motivation, enthusiasm, and involvement they bring to the role.

Although different, they both contribute to each other at the same time.

What are the five C’s of employee engagement?

Here are the 5 C’s of employee engagement that represent the key drivers for motivation:

1. Connection: Employees need to feel connected to their team, manager, and the company’s mission. This also helps build trust and loyalty towards the company.
2. Clarity: Clear and precise goals are needed to help employees stay focused and aligned with their expectations.
3. Confidence: Employees feel confident and capable when they feel confident in what they are doing.
4. Contribution: Motivation comes from recognition, and recognition is only earned by contributing to the company's values. Remember why you’re hired, and your efforts should be reciprocated.
5. Career: Having an opportunity for growth is not a privilege but a reasonable commodity in the organization. While development is essential, employees who see a future at a company are more likely to thrive and sustain themselves in the workplace.

What is meant by employee experience?

Employee experience refers to an employee's complete journey in the organization, from the moment they apply for the role until the day they leave. It includes every interaction, process, and feeling they adhere to across the organization's lifecycle.

Here’s what the experience covers:

• Recruitment & Onboarding
• Daily work environment & culture
• Tools & technology to improve communication and more
• Manager & team relationship
• Well-being, benefits, and support also come under the employee engagement program
• Soulful Exit & Alumni experience

Employee experience is not just about perks but also about how an individual feels at the workplace. A positive employee experience leads to higher retention and an overall stronger company culture!

What are the 4 types of employee engagement?

The four main types of employee engagement are reflected by different levels of emotional and behavioral commitment in the workplace:

1. Highly Engaged: These employees are enthusiastic, proactive, and passionate about their work. They go above and beyond to advocate for their company.
2. Moderately Engaged: These employees generally like their jobs and perform well, but they may not show the same level of motivation and commitment as highly engaged employees.
3. Disengaged: Disengaged employees put in less effort and often feel disconnected from their work and the core organizational goal.
4. Actively Disengaged: These employees are unhappy and may negatively influence others. They often voice dissatisfaction, resist change, and potentially abuse their performance in and out of the workplace.