Employee Experience vs Employee Engagement

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Employee Experience vs Employee Engagement: Understanding the Key Differences

Kartikay Kashyap

March 28, 2025

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

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In today’s world, human relations are not easy to understand. In fact, as per some experts, it was never easy since it involved human emotions. Mind you, they can get tricky! Also, when understanding different aspects of employee engagement and what it takes to keep our employees motivated, two terms are widely used interchangeably. Employee Engagement and Employee Experience are widely discussed and used in many conversations and debates about how to keep employees motivated and engaged in the workplace. But are they the same? Not exactly! Though, to many, these terms may sound similar, they are different.

Let us understand how they are different and dig deeper into it.

Employee Experience and Employee Engagement – What Is The Difference?

HR professionals and employee engagement specialists need to know the different aspects of employee engagement and how they impact human relations strategies. This knowledge is vital to developing and implementing employee engagement strategies and creating an appropriate environment where employees can thrive.

What Is Employee Experience?

Since employee experience is much broader, let us understand it first. Gallup has defined an employee’s lifecycle by dividing it into seven stages. Employee experience significantly contributes to their journey, including how a person experiences the brand during the pre-hiring and post-exit stages and everything that comes in between.

Let us learn more about the employee lifecycle and its different stages.

1. Attracting Talent: The recruitment process of hiring employees.
2. Hire: Selection of employees or talent one wants to hire.
3. Onboard: The onboarding process involves basic orientation, training, and development, as well as equipping employees with all the tools to carry out their tasks.
4. Engage: This stage is about building relationships and purpose.
5. Performance: Motivating employees to perform well.
6. Develop: Helping the employee’s career grow through gaining experience and learning.
7. Depart: Giving a positive exit to an employee when they leave the company.

What kind of experience an organization gives employees in all these stages contributes to their engagement and motivation. This also decides their longevity in an organization.

How Can You Assess The Employee Experience

How employees experience their workplace has become critical. According to the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report, 84% of employees acknowledge the importance of having a positive employee experience. Since employees are looking for a positive employee experience, organizations should also be prepared to deliver it. To keep improving their employee experience, organizations must keep measuring it.

1. Employee Engagement Surveys: Employee engagement surveys are conducted periodically in many organizations. They include a questionnaire that helps the company understand how engaged employees are at the workplace regarding their work, teammates, compensation, and the organization’s culture. The survey gives the company quantitative and qualitative data regarding how employees feel or perceive their employer.

2. Exit Surveys: Organizations conduct exit surveys when an employee decides to leave the company. The HR conducts an exit survey, which contains a questionnaire that aims to find out why an employee wants to leave the company. It works like a self-check for the company, and if necessary, a course correction can be made.

3. Pulse Surveys: Pulse surveys are short questionnaires used to gather real-time feedback from employees. AdvantageClub.ai also has a mood-o-metre that asks an employee after login, ‘How are they feeling today?’ This gives employers real-time data about their employees’ moods on a daily basis.

Tips for Delivering a Great Employee Experience

Delivering a great employee experience is all about making all the processes smoother at all touch points of the employee lifecycle journey.

1. Hiring: The very first stage of employee experience starts with ‘What was the experience of an employee during the hiring process?’ When an employee applies for a role and gets an interview call, we need to think about how we can give a great, smooth, and not too completely complex employee experience.
2. Employee Onboarding: Then comes the employee onboarding experience. It is very important that employees are onboarded smoothly, which allows them to get acquainted with the culture of their future employer. Onboarding is all about how a new employee assimilates into a new environment.
3. Employee Engagement: After the employee gets used to the environment and settles down entirely into their new role, creating mechanisms to keep the employee motivated becomes essential. This is one of the most vital stages of the employee lifecycle, where they spend most of their time with the organization. Organizations need to create R&R programs that can help build employee engagement and motivation levels. AdvantageClub.ai gives that platform to companies where managers can reward their employees through points and supports peer-to-peer rewards through non-monetary appreciations.
4. Career Development: The next thing is how an organization helps the employee build a solid career and become an experienced professional. Apart from rewarding an employee in monetary terms, it is important to build a career trajectory for an employee’s longer-term relationship.
5. Employee Exit: Lastly, it also matters what kind of experience an employee has while leaving the company. Whether an employee leaves on a good note or a bad one, there should be no biases at play. Building mechanisms to give an employee a smooth exit without much trouble builds a better relationship for the future as well.

What is Employee Engagement?

Employee Engagement is more about finding value and purpose at work, building positive relations, and aligning with the organization’s missions. An engaged employee will go above and beyond their required duties or tasks. Employee Engagement is a long-term success program where only some initiatives, such as team-building activities occasionally, do work. One must keep introducing certain activities that motivate employees to perform at their best.

Employee engagement is one stage of a company employee’s lifecycle.

What Is More Important – Employee Experience or Employee Engagement?

We know that Employee Experience and Employee Engagement are different. Having an engaged workforce is more critical.

It’s tough to say which of these is more essential or requires more attention from HR professionals or Employee Engagement Specialists. Both are significantly important in achieving the end goal of keeping employees engaged and increasing retention in the organization.

According to the experts, employee experience is fundamental to keeping employees engaged. An engaged and motivated workforce is almost only possible if it is provided with a good experience. It is easier to have an engaged workforce equipped with the right tools and given a positive environment in which to work.

However, more than solely relying on positive employee experience is required. An organization can have the best benefits, perks, and technology to provide a supreme employee experience. However, if the employees are not enabled, energized, and driven to perform their tasks, a positive employee experience can fail to result in an engaged workforce. For instance, an employee can be given the best benefits and perks, but if not given autonomy, an excellent work-life balance, or getting overworked at the workplace might result in disengaged employees.

Nevertheless, employee experience and engagement may have different meanings, but they are interconnected and interrelated. They are interdependent in achieving the end goal of any employee engagement strategy, which is to retain the company’s best talent and draw maximum employee performance. Companies will need to focus on both of these equally to create a driven and motivated workforce.