How to measure employee experience?

Face it, you’ve been chasing organizational success for so long and it keeps eluding you. What if we tell you the secret to it has been right in front of you this whole time?

We’re talking about employee experience.

In this article, we’ll explore why measuring if your employees are motivated, engaged, and satisfied while working for your company is important and how to stop guessing and measure and track employee experience accurately.

What is employee experience?

Employee experience is the sum of how employees see, feel, think, and engage with the company and their role throughout their journey with it.

This covers every touchpoint from the initial hiring interview with HR, through onboarding, interactions with the supervisors, other team members and teams, internal promotions, and training, to the exit interview.
However, HR and non-HR employees often have different views of what drives employee experience.

For instance, according to one survey, the number 1 factor of employee experience for HR professionals is “feeling you’re a part of the team,” while for non-HR employees, that’s “feeling you’re fairly treated.”

Why measure employee experience?

Measuring employee experience gives you the insight to better understand what makes your employees engaged, satisfied, and motivated.

By listening to employees at every stage of their employee lifecycle, you create the foundation of your business success and can transform your workforce into a competitive advantage.

Here are the benefits of measuring employee experience:

• Improved employee engagement

Measuring employee experience helps identify employee engagement drivers and leads to stronger connections between employees and the organization.

Improving engagement has proven to reduce absenteeism rates in organizations by nearly 80%.

• Increased retention rates

By understanding employee needs and addressing their concerns, businesses can reduce employee turnover and save on hiring costs.

For example, Emakina BE reduced turnover, and measuring employee experience played a large role in this.

• Strengthening productivity

When employees have a positive experience, they have higher motivation, are more efficient, and perform better.

• Better talent attraction

Companies that pay attention to how their employees feel and work to improve their experience naturally have a reputation of great places to work, which makes attracting top talent much easier.

• Informed decision-making

Measuring employee experience provides important data and insight the organization can use to make strategic decisions and actions to make the workplace even better.

• Stronger workplace culture

Employee feedback helps organizations align their values with employee expectations and needs, thus creating a workplace culture that benefits both sides.

We can see the importance of measuring employee experience, particularly employee satisfaction in the example of Balkan Bet which was able to significantly improve this aspect by implementing HeartCount’s tool and conducting a weekly survey which allowed them to better understand employees.

• Cost savings

Better employee experience means fewer employees are dissatisfied or disengaged, reducing absenteeism and turnover. At the same time, performance and productivity skyrocket.

• Innovation

When employees have a positive experience, they feel more valued and motivated to propose new ideas that drive innovation.

• Better customer experience

Happy employees = Better service = Satisfied customers

Challenges in measuring employee experience

While measuring employee experience is crucial, don’t expect it to go without a hitch. Many organizations face different obstacles, such as:

• Lack of buy-in from leadership to prioritize employee experience

Leadership is usually the first one that an HR director or manager has to convince to pay attention to employee experience and not just lip service. 

The biggest reason they might be reluctant or even against it is that they’re afraid that it’s just another extra cost or they don’t consider it a strategic priority. However, if you successfully tie in employee experience to business outcomes like customer satisfaction, employee retention, or productivity, you’ll be speaking their language.

• Not getting honest feedback from employees

Once you have the leadership’s voice, you need to get employees on your side as well. Without this, it’s going to be difficult to get honest feedback from them. This means the data you gather will be wrong, and you won’t be able to use it to make actionable decisions.

If employees are afraid to provide honest feedback, assure them there will be no repercussions and ensure anonymity in surveys and other feedback tools. Furthermore, communicate that the feedback will be used to improve their workplace, so they know what they stand to gain.

• Measuring employee experience across diverse teams or locations

Measuring employee experience can further be complicated if we have to do it for different departments or locations.

You can’t use the “one-size-fits-all” approach here.  Instead, be sure to customize the methods you’re using to address the specific needs of each team.

• Using the  data they collect to form actionable strategies

Even getting the right data doesn’t matter if you can’t align it with actionable strategies.

The best way to do this is to focus on a few key metrics tied to business objectives, assign timelines and responsibilities for results, and communicate progress to employees.

Methods of measuring employee experience

Methods are the “how” you measure employee experience. They are tools to collect data and provide actionable insights, such as surveys or interviews.

1. Employee surveys

Employee surveys, such as pulse surveys or engagement surveys, offer important insight into how employees feel, their satisfaction, and engagement. Through these surveys, HR can identify employee pain points and discover areas for improvement in the employee lifecycle.

2. Interviews

Personal, one-on-one interviews can deliver an even deeper look into employee experience that surveys can’t. For instance, stay interviews help answer the question “Why employees are thinking of leaving?”, while exit interviews answer “why they are leaving”.

3. Focus groups

While interviews offer specific individual insights, it’s still important to hear what the team is thinking and to explore collective perspectives through focus groups.

4. eNPS (employee net promoter score)

eNPS or employee net promoter score is a unique case as it’s both a method and a metric for measuring employee experience. As a method, eNPS is a tool to gather employee insight about loyalty and satisfaction using a simple question like “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our organization as a great place to work to others?”

5. Journey mapping

Employee experience starts with the hiring interview and concludes with the exit interview. It covers every stage of the employee journey, making it critical for the organization to monitor every touchpoint through employee journey mapping.

6. Observation

Finally simply observing how employees behave and interact with one another or with managers and other teams can illuminate areas for improvement that employees don’t verbalize through surveys or interviews. 

Key metrics to track employee experience

Where methods are “how you measure”, employee experience metrics explain “what you measure.”

These provide the data you should analyze and act upon.

1. eNPS (employee net promoter score)

As a metric, eNPS is a quantifiable score used to evaluate employee loyalty and satisfaction. 

eNPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of scores from 9 to 10 (promoters) from the percentage of scores from 0 to 6 (detractors). Those with scores 7 and 8 are “passives”.

For example, if there are 424 employees and of those 163 are promoters (9-10) and 78 detractors (0-6), with the remainder “passives”, the eNPS is:

% of promoters (163) – % of detractors (%78) = 38.4% – 18.4% = 20

The eNPS score for this company is 20.

2. Employee retention rates

Retention rates are a good indicator of a positive (if it’s high) or negative (if it’s low) overall employee experience in the company. 

This is calculated by dividing the total number of employees subtracted by the number of employees who left), dividing by the total number of employees, and multiplying the result by 100.

For example, if there are 600 employees in total and 30 left,

Employee retention = ((600 – 30)/600) x 100 = 570/600 x 100 = 0.95 x 100 = 95%.

The employee retention rate in this company is 95%, very good.

3. Employee engagement index (EEI)

Employee engagement index (EEI) helps organizations assess how willing are employees to make an extra effort in their roles.

Calculating EEI is done by grading responses on a 1-5 Likert scale (1- Strongly disagree, 5 – Strongly agree), From there, we take the averages across engagement scores.

For example:

Employee A: (4, 5, 4, 3, 5)

Employee B: (3, 4, 3, 4, 3)

Employee C: (5, 5, 5, 4, 5)

Employee A average = (4 + 5 + 4 + 3+ 5)/5 = 4.2

Employee B average = (3 + 4 + 3 + 4 + 3)/5 = 3.4

Employee C average = (5 + 5 + 5 + 4 + 5)/5 = 4.8

EEI = (4.2 + 3.4 + 4.8)/3 = 4.13

EEI percentage = (4.13/5) x 100 = 82.6%

4. Absenteeism rate

The absenteeism rate is another good way to indirectly gauge employee experience. Simply put, if the absenteeism rate in the organization is close to or below zero, that’s a signal of positive employee experience, while the more it goes above zero, the more negative EX is.

Let’s say the company had 45 absences in a year. Their absence rate is:

Absenteeism rate = (45/250) X 100 = 0.18 X 100 = 18%

A rate of 18% is considered high, indicating underlying problems that affect employee experience in the company.

5. Onboard success rate

The initial experience that the new employee receives often sets the tone for their entire journey. This is why it’s vital to nail the onboarding and ensure that new employees are integrated into the team quickly.

The onboarding success rate can be calculated with different metrics such as the new hire retention rate, time-to-productivity, training completion rate, and others, but the overall formula for OSR looks like this:

Onboarding success rate = Successfully onboarded employees/Total new hires) X 100.

For instance, in a company that had 50 new hires and successfully onboarded 48, the onboarding success rate is:

(48/50) X 100 = 0.96 X 100 = 96%

Luckily, you don’t have to drown in all these mathematical operations. All you need would be employee experience management software that’ll help you get individual employee overviews, as well as data insights on separate teams, departments and/or branches, as well as semiannual reports on the whole company and over time comparison. 

Best practices for measuring employee experience

It’s easy to get lost in all the different methods and metrics you can use to measure employee experience. The problem is that not all may work for your organization. That said, certain best practices have time and again shown results.

• Look at the whole employee journey, not just a part of it

Each part of the employee journey shapes the employee experience. But they do it together. It doesn’t matter if your onboarding is great if career growth or development is lacking.

You need to understand each step to identify pain points and implement improvements to create a better employee experience.

• Start with the basics and  build from there

It can be tempting to start measuring employee experience using some less-used metrics such as social connectivity score, flexible work satisfaction, or innovation contribution score.

While these can have their value, they shouldn’t form the basis of your employee experience measurement but rather be supplemental.

Focus on the tried-and-true metrics like the eNPS, retention rate, absenteeism rate, and others, and build from there.

• Set clear goals and objectives

Measuring something doesn’t help if you don’t know why you’re measuring it. Are you trying to improve retention rates or absenteeism or increase productivity? Setting a goal

Start with clear goals and objectives that are aligned with your overall business strategy. For example, a goal could be “improve  employee retention by creating a workplace culture that encourages loyalty and satisfaction”, and an objective could be “reduce turnover rate by 15% within the  next 12 months.”

• Use different metrics

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and rely on a single metric. Be versatile when measuring employee experience. Consider different facets of employee experience like work culture, leadership, diversity, well-being, etc to get a more thorough look.

• Cover different employee groups

Your workforce is filled with people of different types of employees, backgrounds, on different job levels, roles, and departments. Even employees in the same role will have different skills or tenures with the company.

This is all something you need to consider when gathering data for measuring EX and conducting interviews or surveys as doing so promotes cultures of belonging and collaboration in the workplace.

• Revisit and update your measures

An organization is an evolving organism, teams change, employees leave or get promoted, and needs change and you have to account for all of that and more when measuring employee experience .

Don’t get stuck on the same methods and metrics when measuring employee experience. Regularly revisit them to discover what works and what doesn’t and update them.

• Act on your findings!

Your action plan can’t be just words on paper. You need to act on it! Nearly half (49%) of employees in one survey felt their employers don’t provide the employee experience they promised.

Not doing so and not implementing changes is the best way to show your employees you don’t care about their needs and concerns.

Want to improve the employee experience? Measure it

You can’t fix or improve what you don’t measure. And when it comes to employee experience, there’s always something you can fix or improve. 

Improving EX often takes very little, but it pays off tenfold as employees will be happier, more loyal, and better motivated and will give back in higher performance, which means increased productivity, satisfied customers, and higher revenue for the company.

It’s a win-win for all.
Do you feel you can do better with employee experience in your organization? Sign up for a HeartCount free trial today!