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Employee Experience

 Strategies for Improving the Employee Experience

Improving employee experience means intentionally shaping the everyday moments that drive engagement, retention, and performance.
Article
August 08, 2025

From an employee’s first day until their last, their experience of working with your organization is constantly shaped by a series of moments.

These moments — good or bad, and big or small — define the employee experience (EX). 

EX is the sum of every interaction, feeling, and perception your employees develop throughout their employee journey. It’s shaped by everything from a restorative chat with a coworker, a moment of recognition, feeling overlooked for a promotion — or just an uncomfortable chair.

Understanding what motivates your employees is essential to building a high-performing workplace.

In this article, we break down why EX matters, how to measure it, and five practical strategies to improve it.

Key Takeaways

  • A great employee experience improves employee retention, performance, and customer loyalty. 
  • Fixing a poor employee experience hinges on solving root causes of friction, rather than just addressing the symptoms. 
  • HR leaders can drive the greatest impact by focusing on operational levers, like process design, manager enablement, and tech infrastructure. 

The ROI of a Great Employee Experience 

A great employee experience creates the conditions for your employees to do their best work. It creates a culture of trust, autonomy, and friction-free working that enables high performance. 

And when organizations get the building blocks right, it offers a measurable competitive advantage across all areas of the business: 

  • Retention: Turnover is one of the biggest — and most avoidable — workforce-related costs. When employees feel valued and connected to their organization, they’re less likely to quit. In fact, Paylocity found a strong link between improved engagement and improved retention amongst client data.
  • Organizational commitment: Retention means little if your people aren’t invested in your success. A 2023 study of Korean employees found that a strong employee experience leads to higher organizational commitment by improving psychological well-being and job satisfaction. In other words, EX doesn’t just influence who stays — it influences how much they care about your mission.
  • Employee engagement: According to 2023 Gallup data, employee disengagement costs the global economy an estimated $8.8 trillion each year. A great employee experience leads to an engaged workforce — driving higher productivity, profitability, and performance.
  • Customer outcomes: When employees bring their A-game, it doesn’t just impact their morale — it shows up in customer interactions. A 2022 study found that highly engaged employees have a positive impact on customer satisfaction and retention — which has a direct impact on the bottom line. 
  • Employer brand: Your employee experience defines the strength of your employer brand — which directly impacts your ability to attract top talent.

Where Employee Experience Efforts Get Stuck 

Investing in the employee experience has some clear benefits, but many HR teams fall short in turning that business value into lasting change. 

It’s not a lack of awareness or urgency holding teams back. Instead, it’s the harder-to-solve realities: unclear ownership, poor diagnosis, and no way to prove that it’s working. 

Siloed Ownership Over the Employee Experience 

While it may seem that the employee experience falls under HR’s remit as a workforce issue, the reality is far more complicated.  

EX is co-created by nearly everything (and everyone) in your organization. It’s embedded in your leadership style,  policy and processes,  decision-making practices,  IT systems, workplace design, and how people live your culture every day.  

Lack of Root Cause Diagnosis

Many employee experience efforts take a symptoms-focused approach instead of solving deeper structural and operational issues. And logically, this makes sense: HR teams are just trying to fix the problems they can see.

But most of the time, focusing only on these visible issues that rise to the top obscures the bigger ones.

Increasing burnout and attrition aren’t a signal that your employees need a switch-off day and a retention bonus — they’re a sign that your processes and ways of working aren’t working. And in the end, these surface-level efforts cost you twice: once to implement, and again when you haven’t solved the issue.

But because it spans so many functions, it often lacks a clear owner. This means that no one is accountable for it as a whole, and critical touchpoints often fall through the cracks. 

No Clear Way to Prove Impact

EX’s broad scope and dynamic nature mean that there’s no one way to evaluate its impact. This trickles down into three interlinked problems for HR and EX leaders:  

  1. Pinpointing the exact levers that positively and negatively influence your employee experience relies on guesswork or symptom analysis. 
  2. When changes are made, it’s much harder to quantify their impact. 
  3. Without data on the impact of your changes, it’s difficult to frame them in terms of their business impact. 

And this is exactly what was found in a study conducted by Forrester Consulting and Paylocity.

A survey of 522 director-level-and-above decision-makers in finance, HR, EX, IT, and operations roles found that while 99% of respondents agree that their people are their company’s most important asset, 40% believe that their executives don’t see the value in EX investment.  

This gap between belief and buy-in is exactly where HR leaders need to focus to build an employee experience that serves both the workforce and the business.

How to Measure the Employee Experience

There’s no one single metric that captures the full scale of the employee experience. But you can track the right signals and patterns through qualitative data, behavioral insights, and regular feedback loops. 

Lagging indicators such as voluntary turnover, absenteeism, internal mobility, and performance, give teams a sense of what has happened historically. These are useful for identifying patterns and problems in processes. 

Leading signals, including feedback loops, engagement surveys, pulse survey data, and sentiment analysis, help teams see what’s happening with their workforce in real time.

Combining both gives you visibility on what isn’t working and where to act next.

Try these approaches to measure and track EX:

  • Run targeted pulse surveys to gather feedback on key employee lifecycle moments, like onboarding, growth conversations, or exit and offboarding.
  • Analyze open-text responses from surveys and community channels to identify sentiment and themes across teams or locations.
  • Segment employee engagement survey data across teams, locations, tenure groups, or diversity characteristics to identify localized issues.
  • Act on findings with small, measurable changes, and track their impact over time.

Learn More: See how Paylocity measures employee engagement.

5 Strategies to Improve your Employee Experience

1. Diagnose Root Cause Process Issues 

Great employee experiences are built on systems. But to get to the root causes of what’s letting yours down, you need to think about it like a product. 

This means reframing your employees (and candidates) as your users, and designing the processes, toolsets, and workflows that create value for them, as well as the business. 

Start by mapping every system in the end-to-end employee lifecycle, from hiring and talent acquisition to performance management, talent development, offboarding, and exit. Then, map out each process within those broader processes — like onboarding, check-ins, or growth conversations.

Identify other key processes central to the employee experience, such as communication, decision-making, and feedback. 

Use survey data and broader data from the employee lifecycle to look for signals of other process issues — such as feedback on role clarity, or increasing absenteeism. Then, use the following questions as a guide to identify your EX gaps:

  • Where are our biggest friction points? 
  • Are there points in our processes where employees get stuck or confused? 
  • What outcomes do we want to achieve with each process? How well are we achieving these outcomes? 
  • What messages do our processes send about what our organization values? 
  • Do our processes serve our core users? 

2. Make Recognition and Rewards Meaningful

According to the Forrester study, 75% of respondents felt that recognition was a critically important factor in improving the employee experience. This is because recognition tells your employees that their contributions are meaningful and valued.

But when the level of effort doesn’t match the recognition — or rewards and incentives feel misaligned — work starts to feel transactional. Over time, employees will become disengaged and demotivated, which could lead to increased turnover.

Improving your rewards and recognition strategy doesn’t have to be a huge spend — it’s about being intentional with the systems you already have:

  • Create a public praise communication channel where achievements are celebrated.
  • Encourage peer-to-peer recognition — whether that’s through dedicated tools, or a shout-out in team meetings.
  • Ask employees how they prefer to be praised or recognized for their contributions.
  • Design perks and benefits structures so that employees have greater autonomy over how they use them — such as stipends for fitness memberships, cash rewards, or flexible benefits.
  • Where possible, design more transparent compensation structures that help employees understand how pay decisions are made and where they sit within their salary band.

Convenience store chain Family Express already had a recognition system in place that directly tied into their culture of kindness and respect. But Paylocity’s Community tool helped them centralize those stories and “create a snowball effect” across their 81 locations. 

“Not only does the employee see it, but their supervisor sees it, and their colleagues see it, and these things are contagious,” said Alex Olympidis, President of Operations. “Positivity is contagious. Appreciation is contagious. Gratitude is contagious.”

Read the full case study

3. Support Managers to Strengthen the Day-to-Day Experience

Managers shape the moments that matter most in their employees' daily lives. They set the pace for performance, support growth, and help people feel seen and valued.

But many of them aren’t being set up to succeed. A 2023 report found that 82% of managers have never received any formal training to do the job well. 2023 Gallup data found that managers already have 51% more responsibilities than they can handle.

HR teams can support managers to create a great employee experience by:

  • Coaching managers in core people leader skills including communication, empathy, and feedback.
  • Creating structured frameworks to help managers check in with direct reports.
  • Providing managers with the tools to make high-volume, highly repetitive tasks more scalable — such as using generative AI to write performance reviews, or log one-on-one notes.
  • Creating self-serve access to team engagement data and feedback loops that help them see emerging challenges at a team level.

Learn More: Is There a Leadership Crisis? Making the Case for a Leadership Development Program

4. Create the Conditions for Connection and Belonging

Belonging is one of the strongest indicators of a positive employee experience. But belonging doesn’t come from a few team socials or Zoom quizzes — it comes from how safe people feel to speak up and show up as themselves at work without judgment.

Psychological safety is what makes belonging possible. When people feel safe to be themselves, they engage differently — they ask more questions, give honest feedback, and feel safe making mistakes. Over time, this leads to authentic connections that drive a positive employee experience.

HR teams can’t force belonging to happen — but you can create more opportunities for genuine connection to occur.

Try these strategies:

  • Create informal community spaces and other opportunities where peers can connect authentically over interests beyond their immediate teams. 
  • Enable mechanisms for knowledge-sharing that foster cross-functional trust and belonging, such as community channels, lunch-and-learn sessions, and segments in all-hands meetings. 
  • Recognize individual achievements in public channels, such as community spaces, meetings, or messaging channels. 
  • Actively involve employees in decision-making practices through focus groups, passive listening sessions across your communication channels, and office hours. 

5. Build a Tech Infrastructure that Supports EX

Your employee experience is only as strong as the tech that supports it. Multiple logins, disconnected tools, and outdated systems ultimately mean your employees can’t find what they need to do their job. That friction builds up.

In the Forrester report, 73% of respondents said that employees spend too much time on low-value work. Sixty-one percent said that time is wasted by trying to find information — while 68% are losing time on broken, outdated, or difficult-to-use technology.

The fix here isn’t about tearing your entire tech stack down — it’s auditing all your tools to ensure they add value to your employees’ work. That goes for everything from your HRIS to your performance management, feedback tools, project management, communication and everything in between.

A great EX tech stack prioritizes interoperability, information flow, and ease of use. While auditing your stack, ask:

  • How integrated are the tools our employees currently use? 
  • How well does data flow between our tools? 
  • Which tasks or processes require employees to switch between tools? 
  • Where are employees finding workarounds with their current tooling? 
  • Can employees easily find the information or resources they need to get their work done? 
  • Can employees easily complete routine tasks, like booking time off, without jumping through hoops? 

Designing the Systems Behind Great Workplaces

Great employee experiences aren’t built through surface-level fixes — but by redesigning systems, tools, and structures that shape how work gets done.

Listening to employee feedback and identifying root causes of issues will help organizations solve process-level issues. But pairing this with the right tech infrastructure will remove the invisible points of friction that prevent employees from doing their best work.

Paylocity’s suite of employee experience tools helps HR teams diagnose systemic challenges, connect with their workforce, and create the conditions for a highly engaged, high-performance culture. With Paylocity, teams can:

Learn more by requesting a demo!

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