TL;DR: The concept of employee experience (EX) allows organizational leaders to broaden their focus and take a more holistic, empathetic approach to improving team members’ everyday working environments. Creating a positive EX involves taking a closer look at the five major stages of the employee lifecycle, starting with recruitment and attraction and ending with offboarding. Companies that succeed in their EX efforts can achieve more meaningful, quantifiable business results that lead to improved resiliency and adaptability.
This playbook should serve as a comprehensive yet straightforward resource that C-level executives and leadership can use to improve the employee experience at every phase.
In a time when organizations are experiencing historically low employee engagement (1) and increasing team member burnout (2), business leaders are looking for new strategies to retain their people and keep them happy. Why, then, do their initiatives often fail to work? It may be because they’re missing a key component — the employee perspective.
That’s why the employee experience (EX) is gaining so much traction in the people operations world, with 47% of human resources leaders making it their primary focus this year (3). Prioritizing EX involves leveraging staff insights to optimize the entire journey, from first contact and recruitment to offboarding. In doing so, people teams can deliver more of what employees want and design workplaces built on mutual trust, transparency, and empowerment.
The employee experience comprises all the interactions team members have with their employer — as well as the impressions those interactions generate — across the key stages of their tenure:
Essentially, the concept of EX allows organizations to understand the employer-employee relationship from the employee’s point of view. Companies that want to prioritize EX strive to identify and address the friction points within that relationship. If they’re successful, they’ll have more developed, empowered team members with the skills they need to move the business — and their careers — forward.
Building a positive EX shows staff members that you value them as much as your customers and clients. People who have a great experience at their workplace are more likely to feel connected with their company’s mission and purpose. It’s also possible they’ll act as an ambassador on their employer’s behalf and encourage more attraction and recruitment.
The impact a great employee experience can have on organizations is also quantifiable. For instance, they may see an improvement in:
This playbook is for C-level executives, HR and people ops professionals, managers, team leads, and any other relevant stakeholders who are working to improve engagement survey scores and increase unfavorable employee experience metrics. It's also a great starting point for leaders who want to understand the five key stages of the employee journey, from attraction and recruitment to offboarding. We suggest returning to this playbook when crafting engagement surveys and developing more effective enablement strategies, ideally twice a year.
HR and people ops teams can also use this playbook as a go-to reference when they map the employee journey or conduct a six-month or annual review of the employee lifecycle.
HR and people ops teams shouldn’t be the only ones driving EX efforts. Rather, senior leadership and executives should have buy-in and support making the employee experience a top priority. To do so, they can work with their people teams to gather employee data, collect honest feedback from team members, and develop EX initiatives that benefit both employees and the overall company.
Dispersed teams need software like Leapsome to help manage and optimize the employee experience. With our holistic, multi-feature platform, you’ll have the tools you need to conduct a more comprehensive, data-driven assessment of your current EX. Leapsome also makes it easier to collaborate on and implement effective employee experience strategies so you can design a more equitable and satisfying EX.
From the moment someone learns about a job opportunity to the instant they receive a formal offer, they form expectations about your company. Organizations that care about nurturing trust and prioritizing transparency should be keenly aware of this fact — failing to meet those expectations can feel like a betrayal to people and lead to disengagement. That’s one reason why 75% of companies struggle with recruitment.
Considering that so many job seekers have been let down by former employers in this way, companies need a better understanding of how they can improve on their own processes — and on the mistakes of other organizations. Here’s how you can get more insight into and optimize the recruitment process:
During the recruitment phase, new team members mostly interact with the hiring manager and spend time having high-level conversations about your company’s mission and values. Unfortunately, they’re too often thrust into an overwhelming torrent of paperwork, training, and other tasks immediately after being formally brought on board. That can feel jarring at best and misleading at worst.
Instead, use onboarding as an opportunity to focus on what new team members — not managers and senior leadership — need to know at this stage. Before bombarding them with policies, procedures, and compliance training, go in-depth about your company’s culture, ideals, and mission for the future, ensuring team members thoroughly grasp their place in all of it.
According to recent Gallup research, these five elements can help you address employees’ needs during the onboarding stage and beyond:
🛣️ Help new hires discover the road to advancement
Leapsome’s Competency Framework feature helps employees focus on the skills they need to improve in their current role and progress within your company.
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Opportunities for growth not only play an integral role in motivating employees — they also influence well-being and mental health. They instill confidence in team members and reassure them that there’s stability in their chosen role, that doors are open to them, and that they won’t stagnate.
At the same time, employees’ career goals naturally change and evolve over time, which is why they expect employers to offer flexible, ongoing development opportunities. In its 2023 Work in America survey, the American Psychological Association found that 91% of professionals wanted a job that provided consistent growth opportunities, but only 47% had access. In addition, according to SHRM’s 2022 Learning and Development report, 38% of respondents said they wanted training that was directly relevant to their roles, and 32% said they prioritized having access to the most up-to-date content.
If this is an area where your company needs to improve, you can make the development experience more impactful by:
🔧 Adjust learning content to fit employee needs
Leapsome’s Learning module lets you design engaging multimedia learning courses to target specific skills and knowledge gaps.
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During the previous three stages, managers and leadership have ideally been gathering all the information they can about individual employees, particularly regarding what they want from their role and their place in the company. Now, it’s time to take genuine action on what you’ve learned and give team members the support and tools they need to excel and feel supported so that they stick around long term.
To keep your best people, fostering a sense of belonging is essential. Based on McClean’s 2022 Great Attrition survey results, 51% of employees said they left their jobs because they didn’t feel they belonged, and 54% thought their company didn’t value them. Indeed, the lack of a sense of belonging is so widespread that organizations have made it central to their diversity initiatives, moving from diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEI&B).
To cultivate more belonging and improve EX at the retention stage:
Turnover is an inevitable aspect of the employee experience, and yet it’s something that many organizations don’t want to acknowledge. While it may be hard to stomach the loss of knowledge, skills, and expertise when someone moves on to another opportunity, being transparent and realistic about turnover can help you create an offboarding program that genuinely serves both your company and exiting employees.
Far too many businesses treat offboarding as an afterthought, and a staggering amount fail to do it all. Consider how Google’s parent company Alphabet laid off 12,000 team members by email right before disabling their security badges and data access.
To avoid ending on an abrupt or unproductive note and make the most of offboarding:
Gaining a comprehensive understanding of the employee experience can help you address it holistically throughout every stage of a team member’s journey. At a time when your competitors are trying to retain their top talent, EX strategies are crucial to help you stay resilient and create the best work environment for your people.
Forward-thinking companies recognize that every employee’s needs are distinct, and they don’t exist in a vacuum. They require technology and regular process flows to keep up with changing demands and expectations. The employee experience is also different for everyone, so employers need tools that can help them customize and optimize EX for as many people as possible.
With modules built to address every facet of the employee journey, Leapsome can help. With customizable surveys, real-time feedback, and structured meetings, our platform helps you listen to team members and gain valuable insights from their feedback. In addition, our performance review, goal-setting, and compensation management modules allow you to automate processes that drive meaningful, strategic outcomes for your company.
Adding Leapsome to your tech stack means you’ll have a well-integrated suite of employee experience and people enablement tools at your disposal, empowering you to address the diverse and ever-evolving needs of your team members.
🌻 Help employees flourish at every EX stage
Leapsome’s suite of tools helps you gather data and design EX initiatives that drive engagement and unlock employee potential.
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