Enhancing the employee experience: Optimising moments that matter 

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.

Often, the following challenges can derail plans to optimise moments that matter:

Optimising the moments that matter to enhance the EX can be approached in two phases: What is foundational and what will accelerate your efforts.

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.

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

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.

Once you’ve strengthened your foundation, go further to enhance targeted 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

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.

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.

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.