If your company wants to attract and retain the best talent, it’s important to understand what employee experience and employee engagement mean and how they relate to one another. Positive employee experiences lead to highly engaged employees, who are in turn more likely to be productive team members.
In this article, we’ll discuss employee experience vs employee engagement, explain the difference between the two concepts, and explore Jotform tools that can help you create a good experience for employees from their first day at your organization to their last.
Employee experience vs employee engagement
Employee experience refers to an employee’s entire lifecycle with a company, from recruitment and hiring to onboarding, from performance reviews to the employee’s exit from the company, and everything in between.
Employee engagement refers to an employee’s level of dedication and commitment to their employer, the company’s goals, their team, and the day-to-day work they do. Employee engagement is the happy byproduct of a positive employee experience.
A healthy working environment creates a positive employee experience, and that leads to employees who are satisfied, engaged, and invested in their work and the organization’s success.
Engaged employees help boost company productivity, improve business performance, and contribute to increased sales and profitability.
The factors that influence the employee experience and the impact of employee engagement
The employee experience encompasses the entire employee lifecycle, from recruitment to exit.
Factors that contribute to the employee experience include
- Company culture
- Workload
- Leadership style
- The physical work environment
- Training and professional development opportunities
- Flexible work arrangements and work-life balance
- The availability of tools, technology, and other resources employees need to succeed
- Communication practices among both coworkers and managers
- Feedback systems
- Recognition and rewards
Employees demonstrate they’re engaged in a number of ways:
- Active involvement in team meetings and projects
- Commitment to company values and goals
- Passion for the company’s mission and the employee’s role in it
- Initiative in bringing new ideas to the team and to their role
- A high performance level and excellent work
- Investment in the outcomes of their work and the overall success of the organization
- A sense of purpose and belonging within the company
- Trust in senior leadership
Creating a positive employee experience and fostering employee engagement as a result leads to increased levels of employee retention, greater employee satisfaction, and improved business outcomes, among other beneficial results.
To get that circle started — and to maintain it — it’s important to determine where your organization is in terms of employee satisfaction, engagement, motivation, and other elements of the employee experience so you can see what’s working well and what might need to be improved.
Surveys are a great way to do this, and that’s where Jotform can help.
Jotform tools to help you foster a better employee experience
Jotform is a powerful online form-building platform. You can use its drag-and-drop interface to easily customize 10,000-plus form templates or to quickly build a new form or survey from scratch.
Jotform makes it simple to take the temperature at your organization. Jotform lets you create different types of employee surveys, including surveys for management and workplace feedback, satisfaction, motivation, and more.
You can also use Jotform tools to facilitate HR processes, like 360-degree feedback reviews, onboarding documents, and more.
Let’s take a closer look.
Employee feedback surveys
The first step to fostering employee engagement, which in turn creates a strong employee experience, is assessing the current state of employee satisfaction at your company. Surveys are an excellent way to do that.
It’s incredibly simple to design an employee feedback survey with Jotform. Add your own branding to your survey with your company logo or a background image, drag and drop to add survey fields, customize colors and design, add widgets, integrate the survey with other platforms, and more.
You can also customize one of Jotform’s employee survey templates. Use Jotform’s employee satisfaction survey template to get a better understanding of how employees view their work environment. Customize the template in minutes with no coding, embed it on your employee website or share it with a link, and collect survey responses from any device.
Measure employee motivation by conducting motivation self-assessments with an employee motivation survey template. This survey can measure employee motivation levels, uncover obstacles to employee progress, and help you come up with ways to boost employee productivity.
Happy employees are engaged employees. You can get a clearer idea of how engaged your team members are by using an employee engagement survey template. The questions can help you gauge how satisfied your employees are, learn more about their expectations, and determine steps you may need to take to improve employee morale and working conditions.
You can also gather feedback about company benefits using an employee benefits survey template. It can help you determine whether your benefits package adequately meets employee needs. (With Jotform, you can also make it easy for your team members to submit benefits requests using an employee benefits request form.)
Not sure which questions to ask or what to do about the answers you get? Review essential employee engagement survey questions to help you get started, and check out our guide on how to improve employee engagement.
Employee onboarding and HR processes
A smooth onboarding process is essential to starting the employee experience off on the right foot — onboarding creates the new employee’s first impression of the company. You can design a smoother onboarding experience by using Jotform to manage onboarding documents.
When you build forms with Jotform, it’s easy to gather important information from new employees, including job and position details, contact information, emergency contact information, and more.
Jotform even lets you gather e-signatures for important documents.
While it’s easy to build a form or survey from scratch, you can also customize existing templates, like the employee information form template and the new employee details form template.
Jotform can also help your company conduct performance reviews. Make it easy for your employees to provide honest feedback to both colleagues and managers by creating a 360-degree feedback survey with Jotform.
Employee access to important forms
Another way to support your employees is by creating an employee app that gives your team access to important company information in a central location. You can host multiple important employee information forms in an easily accessible app interface with Jotform Apps, a no-code, drag-and-drop app builder.
You can customize existing employee app templates for a quick start or build an app from scratch.
This ready-to-use employee app template features multiple forms, including employee referrals, leave requests, meeting reservations, COVID-19 screening, expense reimbursements, and more.
The employee training app template allows you to monitor employee training progress from a central location. Employees can download the app onto any device and document when they’ve completed individual training courses.
You can easily customize ready-made app templates—drag and drop new fields, create app pages, choose fonts and colors, and personalize the app icon and splash screen with your unique branding.
Tracking and reports
After you’ve gathered employee feedback, you need to analyze it to find trends and themes and develop a plan for what to do next. Jotform’s tools can help you do that, as well.
Once employees have completed surveys, you can easily track the results with Jotform Tables, an automatically generated database that lets you organize, search,and filter submission data.
You can also easily transform employee feedback data into visual reports with Jotform Report Builder. By automatically generating customizable reports, you can quickly capture the main trends and results of your feedback surveys and develop a plan for what to do next.
Positive employee experiences foster employee engagement
When your employees have healthy experiences at an organization, they’re more likely to be highly engaged with their jobs. Engaged employees are productive and positive team members and will want to stay at your organization longer. Happy employees lead to strong business outcomes.
Use Jotform’s suite of tools to assess employee satisfaction and develop an action plan for creating an engaged workforce. Try it today — it’s free.
Photo by UK Black Tech on Unsplash
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