Employee Engagement vs Employee Experience

Employee experience entails your employee’s journey in the organization, from the interview to the onboarding and current employment in your company. This entire experience then results in the level of employee engagement, which highlights the employee’s motivation to work towards the organization’s vision.

This difference between employee engagement and employee experience is key to understanding how one works with the other.

And why is this important, you ask? Let’s consider the following statistics:

• Employee engagement in the U.S. is at an all-time low at 31%
• Global employee engagement dropped for the second time since 2009 (Source: Gallup)
• A 2024 Gartner survey found that only 13% of employees are happy with their work experience.
  
  

These statistics indicate that work culture around the world is in decline, and needs a serious boost if you want to keep your employees happy and productive.
So, in this post, we’ll discuss the differences between employee engagement and employee experience, and how you can improve both for better long-term results!

Components of Employee Engagement

There are a few core pillars of employee engagement that every organization needs to recognize:

• Purpose: Employees want their work to have a tangible impact on the world
• Autonomy: If you micromanage your employees, you’ll frustrate them easily. Trust their work ethic and provide complete autonomy.
• Growth: Employees will feel stagnated if they’re stuck in the same role for too long. 
• Recognition: Reward high-performing employees with promotions and raises.
• Leadership: Your decision-making instincts must be strong and provide employees with direction and clarity.
• Work-Life Balance: Employees will be productive if their personal boundaries are respected
  
  

Metrics to Measure Employee Engagement

Since employee engagement refers to the psychological commitment that the employee has towards the company’s goals, it’s measured slightly differently than employee experience.

Here are the metrics you can monitor to know about your organization’s employee engagement:

• Employee Engagement Surveys: Quarterly or annually held, anonymous surveys

• Absent Employees: High number of absentees signal poor engagement

• Attrition: High attrition means less engagement

• Productivity: Low productivity can signal less motivation

While these metrics are important to track, it’s even more important for you to be seen on ground zero, engaging with employees and understanding their concerns. Not everything can be quantified, and employee engagement is tricky to measure until you’re able to find patterns of organizational engagement.

Components of Employee Experience

Although employee engagement is something that’s a tad more difficult to control or measure, employee experience depends totally on how the organization handles its business. 

The employee experience factors in everything, from the interview process to the exit. This also includes their experience with your workspace and the technology you’ve used to streamline various workflows.

An easier way to understand this would be the “user experience”, where the employee is the end user. If you’re designing a gadget for the end user, you’d want to make it as intuitive as possible, and that’s what the employee experience entails.

Here are the key components of employee experience:

• Recruitment: The interview and hiring process set the tone for the employee
• Onboarding: Needs to be structured and clear
• Daily Tasks: Defined daily goals keep the employee experience smooth
• Development: Does the organization encourage employees to upskill themselves?
• Recognition: Employee motivation and engagement take a hit if they aren’t recognized or rewarded for their efforts
• Offboarding: The exit experience should also be smooth, not unnecessarily extended to benefit the organization at the employee’s cost

Key Differences Between Employee Engagement and Employee Experience

Most organizations often confuse employee engagement and employee experience as one and the same. But this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Of course, they’re both closely related to each other, but that doesn’t entail that they serve the same purpose.

Employee engagement refers to the motivation that employees have towards the organization’s goals. If their engagement is high, they’d be more open to ideas and provide their own initiatives to help the organization reach its goals.
On the other hand, employee experience is about their interactions with your organization, from the beginning (interview) to exit. It also encompasses your organization’s policies, tools, assets, and more.

In short:

• Engagement is the Emotional Connection that the employee has to your organization and how aligned they are to its values.
• Experience is the Holistic Journey they have with your company

Employee engagement is often the short-term aspect to consider, since it’s about what the employees feel in the current organizational situation.

In the long term, employee experience matters, as it sets the tone for why and how your employees engage. 

Think of it like this: The employee experience is the set of strategic decisions you’ve taken to ensure that your employees feel valued, and remain engaged with the organization’s values.

If your employee experience is great, your employee engagement will improve.

Here’s a table to give you a quick summary and comparison:

The Role of Interactive Video in Enhancing Both

Interactive video isn’t just your usual video content format. Thanks to the level of personalization and customization that it offers, it can change the way your employees perceive the brand. Here’s how it changes both employee experience and employee engagement:

For Employee Experience

How you approach employee recruitment sets the bar for the employees’ expectations. You can use interactive videos to create customized onboarding videos, with interactive elements that redirect them to videos on their burning questions.

These paths are personalized and help them understand their role and the organization better. 

Apart from this, you can employ interactive videos that give the new recruits a virtual office tour. This is great to highlight their usual workspace and the amenities on offer. Apart from that, you can showcase work culture through current employee testimonials as well.

For Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is important to understand how committed the employees are to your brand, and how much they’re aligned with the organization’s vision and values. This also helps them improve their motivation levels for tackling role-specific problems.

With interactive videos, you can provide a transparent look at policies and processes for the employees. Live Q&As or brand-specific videos with the founder/upper management will give employees better clarity on the brand’s direction. 

Besides this, interactive videos simplify feedback collection. You can use videos with interactive elements like polls, quizzes, and forms to acquire unfiltered employee feedback to understand their sentiments, psychology, and motivation.

In either case, interactive videos can change the way you engage with your employees and how they experience your organization’s culture. It enables two-way communication, which makes employees feel heard and respected, which is essential to foster a healthy work culture.

How Life Inside Helps with Employee Experience and Engagement

Life Inside supports all the interactive video formats that we’ve mentioned earlier, including polls, quizzes, onboarding, employee testimonials, and more.

This is an interactive video platform that helps you create thoughtful, engaging content for your employees, all through an intuitive and lightweight dashboard. You can integrate the software seamlessly into your current tech stack as well.

Plus, if you’re facing any issues, Life Inside’s dedicated in-house team can set up the tool and collate all organizational videos into a single dashboard for easy access and use. You’ll also be able to run A/B testing with Life Inside’s analytics tools to understand which videos truly engage and inspire your employees!

If you want to change how your employees perceive your brand and align their sentiments with your organization’s vision, sign up for Life Inside today! 

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. Can employee experience exist without engagement?

Yes, employee experience can exist without engagement. However, this will result in poor employee experience, leading to low retention rates, bad online reviews, and possibly lower revenue.

2. How do you measure the success of interactive video in employee training?

You’ll know that your interactive video in employee training was successful if you see a high engagement rate. Employees will constantly interact and engage with the video, especially if you’ve introduced gamified elements, to reach a high score. This connects with their competitive spirit, keeping the engagement levels high.

3. What role does feedback play in both engagement and experience?

When you receive feedback from employees, during both the engagement and experience scenarios, you’ll know how well your workers understand the brand’s vision. You’ll gain better insight into their psychology, what makes them tick, what motivates them, and what can hamper their productivity.
You can then design the employee experience and employee engagement decisions in such a way that it benefits the brand, while satisfying the needs of the employees. Overall, it leads to better long-term strategies and steady growth.