Enhancing the employee experience: Optimising moments that matter 

Business people shaking hands in the office.   
Navigating internal job opportunities. The first day back from parental leave. Updating your home address in the employee portal. The team meeting detailing the company’s plans to restructure.

Each of these emotionally charged moments, the informal and formal, planned and unplanned, influence how an employee feels about their employer. Taken together, these moments form the employee journey both within and outside of the daily grind. In turn, these moments that matter impact employee engagement and sentiment – for better or worse.

Historically, the spotlight has been on the experience at the start and end of the employee journey. But employers are increasingly broadening their design and measurement of moments that matter to better understand employees demand for customer-level employee experience (EX) and the need to address retention challenges that see employees increasingly move to indirect competitors.

Despite their efforts, employers face a downward trend in engagement, with rates declining since 2020.1 Meanwhile, there’s a need to bolster design capabilities within HR: According to executives, the third most important transformation challenge is shifting from process-driven to a human-centric mindset.2 Technology holds the promise of real-time measurement so employers can efficiently refine the EX.

But before we can really harness the power of timely insights and measurement to optimise moments that matter, there are some key challenges to overcome to effectively track engagement.

What’s holding employers back from providing exceptional EX?

Often, the following challenges can derail plans to optimise moments that matter:
  1. Analysis paralysis
    The sheer possibilities that arise from extensive amounts of data (such as data cuts and comparisons) can be overwhelming.
  2. Lack of continuous strategic listening
    Listening is a key tool but it isn’t always deployed strategically to capture the insights that will actually drive better business outcomes.
  3. Lack of dedicated resources
    Employers may not have the budget or resources to rollout the actions they want, whether that’s creating the right culture, increasing transparency of benefits or improving career pathing. 
  4. Treating surveys as the finish line instead of the starting line
    While standalone surveys are valuable as part of a broader employee listening programme, they should not be seen as the end goal. Sustainable change comes from digging deeper into why the results are what they are, and how to use the information to inform the plan and enhance the EX.
Optimising the moments that matter to enhance the EX can be approached in two phases: What is foundational and what will accelerate your efforts.

Phase one: Build a strong foundation

Measure lived experiences across the talent lifecycle

With the definition of moments that matter expanding, there is an opportunity to elevate the EX. It can be helpful to keep in mind that not every moment that matters is created equal. To mitigate analysis paralysis, focus on the most common (and memorable) moments — or those which are an obvious pain point — within the talent lifecycle.
infographic    
Employees expect their employer to support them in ways that allow them to develop and grow, support and enable, perform and inspire across their time with their employer.

Strategic lifecycle listening seeks to understand critical experiences during the employee's tenure, such as their perceptions of career growth and internal mobility. This approach means companies can target moments that matter to key personas to support and enhance employee experience. By taking survey insights as a directional signal, employers can better activate an appropriate solution And with targeted, continuous measuring across the employee lifecycle, employers can allocate resources more efficiently, take targeted actions to improve the EX during these impactful moments.

An example of this is that eighty-two percent of employees report they are at risk of burnout. They point to work being designed with well-being in mind as the number-one action that would truly make a difference to their experience at work.3

Simplify EX design

The vast majority of employees are looking to make progress against their goals, connect with others and be fairly rewarded in a predictable and safe environment that does not overwhelm them. Yet despite 47% of employers investing in employee listening, 42% of workers say their employer is not meeting their needs.4

For example, one employer used qualitative analysis to understand the entire employee lifecycle during their implementation of a large-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) replacement. This process found that, while the employer’s benefits offerings were desired by employees, the enrolment experience was cumbersome and not inclusive. Employees could only enrol directly on their desktop, causing frustration for those who typically turned to mobile. An already over-capacity HR team were on the receiving end of the employees’ frustration, with an influx of enquiries in their inbox that could be resolved by improving the user experience surrounding benefits enrolment. The employer leveraged the learnings from their listening programme within their vendor selection process for a new cloud-based ERP system, identifying key demonstration scenarios for the vendors to showcase to best meet workforce needs.

Phase two: Accelerate progress

Once you’ve strengthened your foundation, go further to enhance targeted moments that matter.

What do employees need outside of lifecycle moments that matter? 

Companies need to be there for employees in times of personal crisis (such as an individual or family health challenge, an environmental catastrophe or a bereavement) or in times of ‘typical’ life events (such as parental leave, relocation, menopause or elder care). These are moments that can truly build loyalty, which is a challenge for businesses today given one in four (26%) employees plan to leave in the next year despite being satisfied with their employer.5

Driving desired employee behaviour by balancing tech and the human touch

Determine where it is appropriate to use tech to automate certain processes. For example, some of the activities that support the employee journey are inevitably more administrative, transactional or manual. Consider virtual interview scheduling or automating 'Take Action’ notifications. It’s tasks like these that can be switched to ‘autopilot’ to free up HR capacity for more strategically-focused work, or hiring tasks where the human touch is an essential part of the experience such as interview feedback or diving into an employee experience gap.

With freed up capacity, HR can truly be there to help people navigate complex scenarios and support them at all parts of the employee lifecycle. When considering what to automate, consider what you want people to feel, think and do. This will drive the behaviour that you want to see in the long term.

The heart, heads, hands model

Infographic   
Employers can follow the hearts, hands, heads model: The heart is emotional buy-in, the head is intellectual buy-in, the hands is behavioural effort. 

Improving strategic planning with connected data

Build design capabilities and give the appropriate teams, in HR or other parts of the business, access to data and interactive dashboards for strategic forecasting and better action planning.

For example, employers rightfully focus investment on their employer brand, with success defined by lower hiring costs and improved candidate opinion scores. But this is just one part of the puzzle — what happens when that candidate steps through the door and becomes an employee? Do they leave within the first 90 days because the recruiter’s communications and hiring managers’ behaviours don’t align to their lived experience on the job?

To address this, ensure an interdisciplinary team is responsible for connecting the dots between key moments that matter uncovered by strategic listening, with HR as both a core strategist and implementer. In this instance, organised onboarding, supportive connections and key development opportunities can be connected to valued outcomes such as employee retention at the one-year mark, or their intent to build a career within the company.

Insight into where and when an organisation can intervene in the employee lifecycle will allow companies to target actions and deliver the experiences employees need to thrive. A comprehensive employee listening programme will remove the guesswork from designing a compelling employee experience. These experiences increasingly need to be customer-level and HR (and other support functions) will need to deliver on these employee expectations to achieve its strategic outcomes. This can be achieved by creating a well-defined strategy, supported by survey data and listening as well as providing tools and resources to empower teams to activate your strategy.

Designing moments that matter for development and growth

To understand whether your initiative helps employees feel like they’re growing, are supported and they belong, consider this example journey map focused on internal mobility:

During their search for internal job opportunities, an employee should…

 
Know


What internal positions are open to them within a talent marketplace tool

Feel


Supported by their manager and mentor to make an internal move, or develop themselves to make a future move

Do


Simply apply via the talent marketplace tool and get an email immediately from HR with an outline of the next steps

30 days after transferring to a new internal role, an employee should…

 
Know


Who their new team are and the files, tools and resources they need access to

Feel


Supported by their old and new manager and teams

Do


Build relationships with their new manager and team, learn new tools and be empowered to dedicate 100% of their time to their new role

Intrigued to learn more about the moments that matter the most in your organisation? Get in touch

1 Mercer’s 2023 normative data, an aggregate of survey responses from 2019-2023.

2 Mercer. Global Talent Trends Study, 2024.

3 Mercer. Global Talent Trends Study, 2024.

4 Mercer. Global Talent Trends Study, 2024.

5 Data from Mercer’s Global Talent Trends Survey, 2024.

About the authors and contributors
Jens Ballendowitsch

Head of Employee Experience Insights, DACH

Megan Connolly

Employee Listening, US and Canada

Deena Harvanek

Partner, US Change and Communication Solutions Leader

Tyler Mullins

Global HR Transformation Strategy & Employee Experience Design

Queenie Chan

Principal, Employee Experience Solution Design Lead, Mercer

Adam Pressman

Regional Engagement Solutions Leader

Marieke van Raaij

Regional Employee Engagement Solutions Leader, Mercer

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