Understanding the Difference Between Employee Engagement & Employee Experience

In today’s highly competitive, global labor market, the best talent can be discerning talent. Top-quality employees are routinely motivated by many considerations other than just pay. And chief among these are the Employee Experience, and the amount of Employee Engagement they get at the jobs they consider. World-class firms know that to attract and retain the kind of talent that allows them to remain world-class, they have to be able to offer both, and offer them well. Well, key to offering them is first understanding them, how they’re distinct, and what HR departments can do to foster better Experience and Engagement all the time.

Understanding the Difference

The Employee Experience is the broader terms to cover all the parts of an Employee’s life with the firm, from the very first contact until an exit interview. How is the workplace physically and socially structured to improve and foster a robust employee experience? Some firms build an employee experience that’s more lively and vibrant, where other companies choose to create an experience that’s more reflective and focused on individual focus.

Employee Engagement centers on the channels and processes and cultures around how employees interact with the firm, its ideas, its objectives and its people. Just like with Employee Experience, there are multiple ways to do it, but what’s important is that engagement is open and transparent. In order to stay engaged, it’s crucial that employees trust that it will work for them.

The Right Experience for your Company

All companies have distinct, unique cultures, and so the employee experience that comes from them is also distinct. Some international companies, like Facebook, foster active, entrepreneurial, privateering collaboration, summed up in its famous slogan “Move Fast and Break Things.” Other companies choose to have a culture that’s more formal and tailored to quiet, personal work.

For both of these companies, the culture follows from the mission, and the Employee Experience follows from the culture. Employees at your firm should feel that the experience of working there is supportive, comfortable, and consistent with the culture of the company. How are meetings organized? What kind of noise level is the work environment? Is the experience conducive to the kind of work they have to do?

At Kazi, we encourage HR departments to understand how employees navigate the day-to-day work experience and find out if they find it reasonable or helpful for their work life and personal and professional growth. Build an Employee Experience that fits your companies, and inspires your employees.

Engaging People Right

Modern and Contemporary management science has taught us that work life can’t just be a unidirectional process of receiving orders and then performing them. This is dull and uninspiring, and sure to create unengaged employees. Improving performance comes from improving Employee Engagement: how connected do employees feel to the mission and ideas of the company? How valued do they feel as members of a team? If employees feel like their input doesn’t matter, engagement will suffer. According to Gallup, only 15% of white collar employees globally feel “engaged” at work. There’s a lot of room to improve. Managers play a huge role in improving and sustaining employee engagement, through team monitoring, regular conversations, and individual employee attention.

At Kazi, we help managers provide the right employee feedback and recognition to ensure that employees stay engaged and connected to the company’s work, and not left out of processes that matter to them. Engaged employees are happy, productive employees.

The Ideal Combination

When employees have a work environment that is comfortable, responsive, challenging and conducive to personal and professional growth, they return the favor to the employer many times over. But it’s crucial for employers to make sure they have sufficient attention to Employee Experience and Employee Engagement. The most gorgeous office and fun company culture won’t do any good if employees feel ignored. And even the best management practices can suffer if your workforce is stuck in a dispiriting dump.

Survey after survey shows that companies with better employee experience and engagement consistently outperform those without it. So this isn’t just an issue of altruism. Your ability to compete for talent, and compete in your market, depend on it!

Employees: The Most Valuable Resource

In the 21st century, the biggest key to a company’s success won’t be its control of some kind of physical space, or even a patent. It’s going to be the intangible asset of the team itself. Can you attract, train, retain, and grow the best talent on the market? The better your Employee Experience and Employee Engagement is, the better fit you’ll be for some of that talent.

And at Kazi, we know a thing or two about getting the right fit for your employees. If you want to know more about how to improve Experience and Engagement, drop us a line at Kazi, and we would be glad to help you out!