What is an Employee Experience Platform?

What is an employee experience platform? It’s a comprehensive solution where all members of an organization–HR professionals, leaders, managers, and employees–engage in the most important aspects of their company’s employee experience.

It provides one simple place for goal setting and tracking, asking for and recording feedback, facilitating management conversations, conducting employee listening surveys, and giving recognition. The right employee experience platform can absolutely transform your people management. Let’s take a look at the reasons why.

What is the employee experience?

Let’s start with the basics. Here’s how we define the employee experience in WorkTango’s handy Human Resources Glossary:

The employee experience is an employee’s total experience (i.e., perceptions, emotional and intellectual stimulation, and challenges) of every touchpoint in their employee life cycle, including career growth, workload, company culture, and relationships with peers, managers, and leadership.

Those touchpoints include a complex array of overlapping human resources programs, such as continuous Employee Success (out with the old, annual “performance management”, and in with the more agile, continuous Employee Success program), Recognition & Rewards, Surveys & Insights, Goals & Feedback, and more. In short: the processes, people, and programs that make up an employee’s day-to-day experience in your company all live in one place–and all are visible at a glance.

The specifics vary from organization to organization, and even from one employee’s experience to another. But at the heart, you can find the same key areas at the heart of every great employee experience.

Key areas that shape the employee experience

Connection: The relationship between a person and their manager, team members, leadership, and the organization’s mission, culture, and values.

Performance: A person’s clear understanding of what they need to do to be successful at their job in alignment with broader organizational goals.

Appreciation: A person’s confident knowledge that their work has value and that  they’ll be recognized and rewarded for their contributions.

  Growth: Learning opportunities, continuous feedback, and ongoing support for career development.

When all four of these areas are strong, the people in your workplace will be inspired, aligned, and thriving. Want more employee experience philosophy? Then check out our manifesto. 

What is an employee experience platform?

An employee experience platform is a comprehensive, cohesive solution you use to manage all aspects of your employee experience in a single place.

Rather than acquiring yet another piece of HR tech — another license, another log-in for your employees to keep track of, and another system you’ll have to motivate them to adopt — the employee experience platform unifies everything into one.  easy to use solution. It’s configurable to your needs and provides the data and insights that will  drive employee engagement and productivity.

What are the benefits of an employee experience platform?

Human resources thought leader Josh Bersin heralded the arrival of the employee experience platform in early 2019, just months before the WorkTango Employee Experience Platform arrived on the market.

At the time, Bersin pointed out, the HR tech market was just over $8 billion in size. But was all that tech helping? “The answer,” said Bersin, “is ‘somewhat.’”

Because at the time of Bersin’s report, the average L&D department had 22 different tools to manage candidate recruiting and onboarding, talent review, benefits administration, and more. It was overwhelming, and it wasn’t transforming the employee experience.

Besides saving organizations from the overwhelm, the real power of an employee experience platform is the transformation that happens when all parts of your employee experience are working together.

Need examples? Here are the parts of your employee experience you could be managing and tracking in your platform:

Which parts of the employee experience can you manage with tech?

Feedback

Key employee experience area: Growth

Employee feedback takes many forms. This includes coaching and mentoring through 1-on-1 Sync-Ups and quarterly performance Check-Ins, peer-to-peer feedback, and more. An Employee Experience Platform like WorkTango’s enables you to request, give, and record feedback in the same place you track your goals, so you can easily refer to your progress. It also stores your feedback for easy reference during your performance Check-Ins. It’s all accessible with a click in the Goals & Feedback area of the platform.

Goals and OKRs

Key employee experience areas: Growth, Performance

Rather than tracking goals manually or in an isolated tool, use a unified employee experience platform. You’ll be able to view organizational level OKRs (and SMART goals– or any other format you choose), shared goals for the team or department, and individual goals– 24/7. Setting and tracking goals in an integrated space means they’re viewable right alongside previous performance assessments (like quarterly Check-Ins), Recognition & Rewards,, and feedback. That makes future assessments even more accurate. By keeping goals constantly integrated and a single click away, you move them from the theoretical into the everyday. And you drive alignment and success. That’s the power of having a Goals & Feedback solution in your platform.

Recognition & Rewards

Key employee experience areas: Appreciation, Connection

Think about your current employee appreciation practices. What do employees get recognized or rewarded for? Traditionally,  the answer was service anniversaries and workplace safety. While these are important, this limited style of recognition misses a huge opportunity. Instead, connect employee Recognition & Rewards to employee effort, accomplishment, and even attitude.  You can recognize people for anything that’s relevant to organizational objectives or culture–from completing goals, to tackling a challenging new project with gusto, to going the extra mile in preparation for a client meeting, to birthdays, to demonstrating personal alignment with organizational values.  When Recognition & Rewards exist in the same platform with Goals & Feedback, it’s simple to click over in real-time and offer a team member a word of praise or a gift of reward points for a job well-done.

Check out WorkTango’s real-time Recognition & Rewards to see how we make the motivation magic happen.

Nominations and awards

Key employee experience area: Appreciation

Your organization’s core values are at the heart of everything you do. So make sure your awards reflect them. Just enter your core values into your employee experience platform. Then link them to your recognition feature so that each recognition, whether from peers or managers, highlights the demonstrated core value. Then, it’s easy to see who should be nominated for company culture awards, and why. 

Want to build in certain behaviors to your organizational culture? Well… what gets rewarded gets repeated. So, why not create an Incentive using WorkTango’s Recognition & Rewards? It’s a light form of gamification that allows individuals to choose to complete a certain activity that supports organizational values. It might mean attending an unconscious bias webinar, serving as an on-boarding buddy, or exercising as part of a workplace wellness program. When they’ve completed the action, they get a certain number of reward points.

Employees can use their points to choose the item or experience from the rewards catalog that means most to them. That means maximum ROI for your rewards program (and easier administration too). 

Surveys

Key employee experience area: Connection

The state of your employee experience shouldn’t be a mystery. Your employees have a voice — and you need to listen. An employee experience platform with integrated surveys allows you to measure and track employee sentiment around all kinds of key issues like engagement and productivity, effectiveness of management, DE&I concerns, the state of employee wellness (including mental health), fairness of organizational policies and processes, and more.  With pulse surveys you can know exactly where you stand and address challenges before they become issues. WorkTango’s Surveys & Insights presents the data as an instantly-accessible easy-to-read report (no cumbersome spreadsheets or manual computations). Make comparisons by slicing the data according to department, region, team…or any other designation you choose. With a glance, you’ll know what’s working and what’s not. Once you know, you can act. And that’s where the real power is. 

Performance discussions (Sync-Ups and Check-Ins)

Key areas of the employee experience: Growth, Performance, Connection

Regular 1-on-1 Sync-Ups and quarterly performance Check-Ins are central to employee growth. If you’re still using the annual performance review model, step away and consider a more flexible, frequent approach. In fact, we recommend that employees and managers Sync-Up on a weekly cadence, and do performance reviews quarterly. That can be a lot for managers to handle though. WorkTango’s employee experience platform makes the lift lighter by providing reminders about upcoming performance conversations, a shared place to collaborate on an agenda, space for note-taking or naming items for follow-up. During Sync-Ups and Check-Ins, goal progress and previous items of feedback are only a click away in the Goals & Feedback solution.

The benefits of an employee experience platform

It’s a new age for the employee experience. The movement we’ve seen toward a more human mode of work has only accelerated in the post-COVID-19 work era. So increasingly, organizations are looking for simple solutions that embrace the whole employee.

That’s why we built the all-in-one Employee Experience Platform.