What Is Employee Experience (EX)?

Employee experience (EX) is the full employee journey someone takes while working for a single company. It starts before they even apply and continues through to the day they leave, and sometimes even beyond, if their word-of-mouth and recommendations, positive and negative ones, reach potential new employees. Employee experience encompasses every touchpoint of the employee life cycle. It includes the job advert they read. The application process. The interview. The onboarding process. The manager relationship. The team engagement. The feedback. The growth opportunities. The way problems are resolved. All of it, put together, is employee experience.

EX is not one big initiative. It is hundreds of small moments that add up over time. Some moments are planned, like an induction programme. Others happen organically, such as a colleague welcoming a newcomer on their first shift or checking in with them after a difficult day. It is a lot about the basics, having answers to these questions:

• Do people have the tools they need?
• Is the rota predictable?
• Can they book annual leave without a battle?
• Do they know what good performance looks like?
• Is there proper cover when someone calls in sick?

They all sound so simple, but they shape how work feels every single day.

What Is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement refers to the level of dedication and enthusiasm employees feel toward their work and their employer. Engagement shows up in behaviours and attitudes that you can see and feel across a team. It is the difference between someone simply doing their job and someone caring deeply about doing it well. Engaged employees bring energy to their work throughout the employee lifecycle. They contribute ideas without being asked. They help colleagues who are struggling. They go the extra mile when it matters. They speak positively about the company culture when someone outside the company asks what it is like to work there.

Engagement is also an emotional commitment. It is a quiet decision to give your full attention to work, even when no one is watching. Two people in the same role on the same team can experience completely different levels of engagement due to confidence, life and work circumstances, values, or how supported they feel by their manager. You cannot force someone to be engaged. But you can create an environment where engagement becomes the natural response. When people feel seen, supported, and treated fairly, engagement tends to follow. On the contrary, when they feel ignored, overloaded, or repeatedly let down, engagement drops, no matter how much they might love the actual work itself.

Employee Experience vs. Employee Engagement: Key Differences

In simplest terms, the difference is this:
Employee experience is what the company creates and delivers.
Employee engagement is the response back, how people react to the system and the environment the company has created.
If a strong experience is built, the engagement usually follows. If the experience is poor, no amount of engagement activities would fix the broken foundations. It is more like planting a seed. If the soil is poor, no amount of watering would make that seed grow. In workplace terms, that means fixing the experience first.

Engagement tells you how people are feeling.
Experience tells you what is shaping those feelings.

Strategic vs. Emotional Focus

Employee experience has a strategic focus because it is built through decisions made at an organisational level:

• How do you structure roles?
• How do you train managers?
• How do you set rotas?
• How do you handle pay reviews?
• Have you established a learning process or platform?
• How clear are your promotion criteria?
• Do you have regular feedback meetings, such as one-on-ones?

On the other hand, employee engagement is built with an emotional focus in mind, because it lives inside people. It is about pride, trust, belonging, motivation, and whether someone feels their work matters. You can create the right conditions for those feelings to develop, where employees feel safe, respected, and supported enough to invest themselves in the work, but you cannot force them through policy or a one-off initiative.

This is why engagement perks often fall short. Free tee and coffee, and birthday vouchers, are nice gestures, but if someone is doing back-to-back shifts with no proper handover, or their manager never provides feedback, those perks feel hollow. People see through surface fixes. What they want is for the basics to work properly. If you gett the strategic foundations right, the emotional connection often follows naturally.

Input vs. Outcome

EX is the input, the foundation. while engagement is the outcome.
If that feels too abstract, think about a new starter in week two. If they still do not have their logins, they are guessing processes, and nobody has explained what good looks like, the best attitude in the world will not survive that for long. Onboarding is part of the input, and it is also where many companies accidentally lose people early.

This is why it is fair to say that a positive employee experience leads to higher employee engagement over time: people stop spending energy on avoidable stress and start spending it on doing the job well. The same goes for work-life balance. When the experience respects people’s lives outside work, work becomes sustainable, not just survivable, and engagement has room to grow.

Ownership

Employee experience is everyone’s job, but not in a vague way. Leadership owns the resourcing and the standards. HR owns the frameworks, consistency, and support. Managers own the daily reality because they control the moments that matter most, such as feedback, clarity, fairness, flexibility, and how problems get handled in real time. An engaged workforce also shapes EX through the relationships they build and the way they treat one another, which is why company culture can rise or fall within the same company.

Engagement is shared as well, but it is more personal. People choose how much of themselves they bring. A manager can open the door for that, or close it without realising. If you want a practical sense check of ownership, ask one question in your next manager’s meeting: “When someone in the team struggles, what happens next, and who owns it?” The answers usually tell you whether you have a supportive employment relationship or a system that relies on individual heroics.

How Employee Experience Influences Employee Engagement

Employee experience shapes engagement in predictable ways, and once you see the pattern, it is hard to unsee it. When employees feel:

• clear on priorities, they tend to commit.
• they can speak up without being labelled difficult, they tend to contribute.
• their manager follows through, they tend to trust.
• decisions are fair, they tend to stay engaged even through change.

The biggest lever is often the manager. A team can have decent pay and benefits and still lose people if the day-to-day environment is tense, unpredictable, or dismissive. So if you want to improve employee engagement, do not start with a campaign. Start with the moments that drain people:

• Is the workload realistic?
• Are rotas stable?
• Are tools fit for purpose?
• Are expectations clear?
• Is there time to learn?
• Is feedback regular and specific?

There is also a difference between listening and acting. Employee engagement surveys can also help you measure employee experience and provide valuable employee feedback. And most importantly, be open. Tell them what you will change now, what will take longer, and what you cannot change, with honest reasons. That is how you protect trust, and trust is what motivates employees far more than any employee engagement campaign.

How to Improve Employee Engagement Strategy

A good place to start is to stop treating engagement as a campaign and treat it as a habit. To improve employee engagement, first identify the moments when employees feel most frustrated: unclear priorities, frequent rota changes, a lack of feedback, or no time for learning. Then, build small, consistent practices around those points, regular one-to-ones, honest employee feedback loops, simple recognition that actually means something, and realistic workload planning. When you tie those habits back to your company culture and the broader business outcomes you aim for, you move from a “once a year survey” approach to a living, breathing strategy that people can feel in their everyday work.

Why Recruiters Should Care About Employee Experience?

Recruiters sit at the start of the employee journey, and candidates notice more than we give them credit for. A slow process, unclear communication, or shifting expectations will not only cost you a hire but also damage your employer brand. When candidates talk to each other, and they do, your process becomes part of your reputation.

There is also the retention angle. If you recruit someone into a poor experience, you will likely recruit the same role again soon. This is not a hiring problem. It is an experience problem that shows up as churn. The companies that hire well in the long term tend to be those that can describe their culture honestly and back it up with real examples:

• What does the first week look like?
• Who supports new starters?
• How is training handled?
• Do you have career development opportunities, and what do they look like in practice?
• How is work-life balance supported when life happens?

Which Matters More for Retention: Experience or Engagement?

If you have to choose one, choose experience.
Engagement can spike for short periods, especially when a team bonds or a new manager arrives, but if the day-to-day experience stays frustrating, engagement will eventually slide. Retention is shaped by repeated moments, not one-off events, and those moments sit inside the employee life cycle.

Onboarding is a good example. It is a process that can span weeks to months, designed to help new hires acclimate to their roles, understand departmental functions, and integrate into a positive workplace culture. Strong onboarding practices can improve new-hire retention by up to 82%, underscoring the value of investing in this phase of the employee lifecycle. That is experience in action – it influences employee satisfaction, confidence, and whether someone can picture themselves still being there in six months.

Engagement still matters for retention, but treat it like a signal. If engagement drops, ask what changed in the experience:

• Was there a restructure that made priorities unclear?
• Did the workload creep up?
• Did flexibility tighten?
• Did communication become patchy?
• Did recognition disappear?

Fixing those root causes drives better business outcomes, because retaining top talent is one of the most direct routes to stronger business performance.

Find Talent with Olive Recruit

We believe that a good recruitment process starts with honesty. If the role is demanding, we say so. If the culture is supportive, we show proof. The strongest businesses are clear on their company’s mission, communicate it in a human way, and can explain what the role really feels like on a normal Tuesday, not just on induction day.

At Olive Recruit, we look at company fit through the lens of the full employee journey. That means asking about support, clarity, management style, and what success looks like in the first 30,60, and 90 days. A positive experience doesn’t happen by accident. It is built. When you get it right, you tend to boost employee engagement, strengthen employee satisfaction, and build more stable teams, leading to more predictable business outcomes.

Ease your recruitment process and find a productive workforce ready for your next business endeavours.
Contact Olive Recruit today.