Employee Engagement vs. Employee Experience: Why Both Matter for Retention

As a business leader or manager, you probably know that employees are the lifeblood of the business. And while you might have layers of management and an HR team between you and them, keeping all those layers happy is a key requirement for business success.

Creating an environment that keeps workers productive and adding value to the business requires a mix of employee engagement and a strong employee experience. A successful blend will boost retention and make your business more attractive. Failure to do so will see a company dragged down by its worst behavior and weakest elements, which is not a place any motivated worker would want to stick around.

Turn Your Employees Into High-Value Assets

Hoping your workers will turn into rockstars is not a particularly noteworthy ambition. In reality, if a business can get an extra 10%-15% out of each worker by making them feel valuable and giving them space to contribute, it is more worthy than relying on one "rockstar" adding 100% and leaving in six months for those inevitable better job offers.

To achieve that wide-focused goal, there are the twin levers of employee engagement and the employee experience, pillars that build equity, equality, and empathy within a business. They can be divided broadly as:

Employee Experience	Employee Engagement
Day one: Workers are welcomed, given the tools they need to do their jobs and access to performance boosters to do it efficiently.	Hiring process: Do the interviews and hiring process feel like the new hire is valued for their skills and potential
Weekly: Do business leaders, managers, and team members take an interest in each other, their efforts, and the market?	Coaching: No worker should start their role without onboarding, specific training, and ongoing coaching to improve performance.
Monthly: At least once a month, there should be something fun on the schedule. A check-in is also needed to monitor progress, address issues, highlight opportunities for efficiency/innovation, or discuss career goals.	Contributions: Are worker efforts to the business recognized? Whether they go above and beyond their role description or suggest innovations that can improve small or large processes.
Let workers be themselves: Is there room for self-expression, space for workers to chill out, with occasional freebies and unexpected benefits?	Congratulations, by nominating others, from a quick email and a $20 Amazon voucher to a presentation at an end-of-year party, workers who can see their colleagues’ efforts rewarded are more likely to work harder.
Extra perks: Are there seasonal events to break up the normal working patterns, can workers create their own events or is everything left to HR or management?	Empowerment: Are workers allowed to make decisions or feel confident enough to make suggestions to managers or leaders? If not, company culture does not lean toward engagement.

No business is perfect, but too many are set in their ways, focused on never-changing targets or goals. And if workers see intransigent or lazy management, their efforts will reflect that. It can be up to HR to lead the change with the support of a few progressive leaders. From adding some rewards to the office experience or focusing on employee development, they can drive experience and engagement changes that impact retention and productivity.

Bringing Engagement and A Positive Experience to A Startup or SMB

Small teams, especially remote workers at startups, typically have more motivation and focus than larger organizations, but the HR advisor, consultant, or in-house team can drive leadership to ensure that effort is captured and rewarded.

Using innovative remote workspaces adds a social setting and gets workers away from digital collaboration applications like Slack and Teams. Getting people together adds outsized value to meetings at coworking spaces that are dedicated to teamwork compared to bland hotel meeting rooms or short-term rental offices.

As the business grows, HR can focus on expanding collaboration, diversity, and productivity, in part by hiring non-typical workers and outliers who are better at engagement, or who bring experience from companies renowned for a strong culture and identity. In this context, the organizational structure of the company becomes crucial. As the structure becomes more complex, it’s essential to maintain clarity around roles, decision-making, and communication to ensure that employee engagement and experience remain strong.

Within teams, key characters who enthuse, drive forward, and encourage others will become clear among the workforce. These people should be encouraged to discuss and integrate their efforts with management, and if they are likely to leave, there should be a strong focus on retention efforts.

Flexibility Helps Workers and Teams Grow Together

The bad points of any business will be clear to HR, from a toxic culture to constant overwork and often poor-quality micromanagement to bad leadership communication skills. Where these exist powerful figures from the top to the bottom of the business can drive change by challenging the status quo, building their own routes to change, and making the workplace more flexible to navigate around blockers.

Such efforts come with some risk, but a company where all levels of employees help reinvent or reinvigorate becomes a more powerful entity. One that offers a more attractive experience with better engagement. That in itself becomes a tale worth telling as part of the origin story, “we weren’t perfect, but we changed, and now our people love it.”

All of these will help attract the right sort of worker as the company grows and help the business move away from bad habits before they become too large to change.

Conclusion

Enterprises have an army of HR workers trying to fight inertia to make companies great places to work. Where there is a sense of purpose and a good work/life balance, it is easier for them to build engagement and progress the employee experience into something that attracts and retains the best workers.

Smaller companies, especially those that are struggling in a complex or turbulent market, need to take the time and effort to focus on that looming deadline or the bottom line for just a minute and see how it can be a better place where change and innovation can happen more easily to help that business out of its current predicament.

Employee Engagement vs. Employee Experience: Why Both Matter for Retention

Turn Your Employees Into High-Value Assets

Bringing Engagement and A Positive Experience to A Startup or SMB

Flexibility Helps Workers and Teams Grow Together

Conclusion

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