You want to meet your business goals, but can that happen without people?
The answer is a resounding no!
Engaged employees build a thriving organization.
41% of employees leave organizations, citing issues with company culture and lack of professional development.
Statistics like this highlight a critical truth: investing in employee wellbeing strategies is not only beneficial—it’s essential.
In this blog post, we will explore strategies to improve the people experience (px) in the workplace, improve employee retention rates, and fulfill promises of a good work-life balance.
How to Enhance People Experience to Improve Workplace Culture
Summarize this article for me please⏰ 60-Second Summary
- Encourage a positive culture: Create a supportive, inclusive, and engaging work environment
- People experience (PX) is about how employees feel. The goal is to make them feel welcome, happy, heard
- Strong PX leads to: Lower turnover, better hires, higher engagement, improved customer experience, innovation
- 7 pillars of PX strategy: Understand workforce, cultural alignment, leadership buy-in, personalization, feedback mechanisms, learning & development, well-being initiatives
- Measure PX: Use surveys, analyze performance feedback, track retention and turnover
- Address challenges: Hostile work environment, undervalued employees, and remote work
- Use technology: Employ HR software like ClickUp to streamline processes, automate tasks, and track employee data
- Prioritize feedback: Implement regular feedback loops and act on insights
Summarize this article for me pleaseUnderstanding People Experience
Suppose you just joined a new marketing team. People experience is about how you feel during your time with that cohort—not just about planning campaigns but about how the team lead treats you, how friendly your colleagues are, and even how comfortable your log-in and log-out timings are.
It’s about:
- Feeling welcome: Does the team recognize your achievements and what you bring to the table?
- Feeling happy: Do you enjoy brainstorming sessions and spending time with everyone?
- Feeling heard: If you’re feeling uneasy or stuck, does someone notice and help you?
When everything feels good, you want to stay on the team, try harder, and have fun. But if things feel unfair or lonely, you might want to leave.
Also Read: 15 Best Employee Pulse Survey Tools
Differences between people experience and employee experience
Let’s stick with the marketing team example. Employee experience is the sum total of all the steps and moments you go through as a team member. It’s about your journey with an organization. Businesses try to set up this journey in a way that makes your experience of working for them smoother and better.
This journey includes:
- Joining the team: How you’re welcomed in the work environment
- Engaging with the team: How the schedule is organized to help you improve and focus on personal growth
- Resigning: What happens when you call it quits—how easy do they make the transition for you?
Employee experience focuses on specific steps throughout your work lifecycle, seeing whether everything is well-organized. It’s more about simplifying the process, while people experience is about how all those moments make you feel.
Here is a table to make the comparison easier for you:
| People experience (px) | Employee experience |
| Focuses on emotions, relationships, and the overall experience: how employees feel about their workplace environment, purpose, and connections with others. | It focuses on processes and systems, including specific touchpoints such as hiring, onboarding, and leaving the organization. |
| Example: Did you feel like you belonged with the team? Did the team lead support and motivate you? | Example: Did the team lead organize meetings well in advance? Were all perspectives heard? |
| Goal: To create a sense of belonging, happiness, and trust. | Goal: To make each employee’s journey smooth, efficient, and consistent. |
Simply put, employee experience is the ‘what’ of the workplace journey, and people experience is the ‘how it feels’ to be part of that journey.
Benefits of strong people experience
When organizations encourage their people, it boosts engagement, morale, and productivity—key ingredients for positive employee engagement.
Small gestures like organizing learning and development programs or employee engagement activities can contribute to their holistic well-being, which adds to your organization’s reputation.
Here are five tangible benefits of investing in employee well-being programs:
- Lower turnover rates: Prioritize people experience and see reduced turnover while also saving costs associated with hiring and training new staff.
👀 Did You Know? Companies can take up to six months or more to break even on their investment in a new hire.
- High-quality hires: Before applying, research companies and engage with former employees—the quality of your company culture is directly proportional to the applications you will receive
- Higher engagement: Value your employees, make their career development a priority, and they will start actively contributing to business growth
- Improved customer experience: Happy employees are invested in the company’s products and services enough to deliver personalized experiences and contribute to customer satisfaction
- Positive employee surveys: Promising and delivering a positive people experience (px) will reflect in internal company surveys, eventually attracting the top talent
- Innovative mindset: Happy employees think outside the box, try new approaches, and push boundaries. This is essential for developing new services/products and upskilling in a competitive market
Don’t these benefits seem brilliant for uplifting your organization? Continue reading to have a structured and detailed PX plan for your next quarter’s HR goals.
Also Read: 10 Effective HR Strategies and Examples
Summarize this article for me pleasePeople Experience Strategies
🧠 Fun Fact: Employee engagement initiatives can increase profitability by 23%.
This increase is a simple correlation between employee experience and engagement. The happier and more enthusiastic employees are at your company, the better their work experience will be.
Consider Spotify—the famous hyper-personalized music platform.
Spotify has built its people experience strategy by encouraging a growth mindset culture emphasizing continuous advancement, development, and career growth.
The Spotify Band Manifesto outlines the company’s commitment to learning from failure, embracing challenges, and encouraging employees to take risks.
The staff takes charge of their performance management by creating a personal development plan that outlines their aspirations and actionable steps. Managers review these plans, update them regularly, and help individuals climb the ladder.
🤖 To support career growth, Spotify offers employees opportunities to explore new roles within the company through Echo, an internal talent marketplace powered by AI.
Therefore, Spotify’s growth mindset approach demonstrates how performance management and career mobility can be integrated into a people experience strategy, creating a culture where employees feel motivated, valued, and supported in achieving their full potential.
You can also design a strategy like Spotify and many other successful brands. Just adapt or modify these seven pillars to create an effective employee experience strategy to improve your workforce’s job satisfaction and business performance.
1. Understanding your workforce
Knowing who works for you is necessary to craft a people experience (px) strategy. You can start by gaining a deep, nuanced understanding of your workforce to know the employee sentiment.
This goes beyond demographic data and involves:
- Conducting comprehensive surveys and assessments to identify general and personal challenges
- Creating detailed employee personas to evaluate their compatibility with organizational culture
- Mapping employee journeys and identifying key touchpoints and critical moments
- Recognizing the diverse needs, motivations, and expectations of individual employees to customize experiences
💡Pro Tip: Use the feedback received in the surveys for employee personas and create fictional profiles similar to the characteristics, behaviors, motivations, etc., of existing employees. Once done, chart out fictional employee journeys of these personas and compare them with the existing data.
2. Cultural alignment
Organizational culture and employee alignment are crucial for long-term collaboration. They connect teammates, drive behavior, set realistic expectations, and increase job satisfaction.
A strong people experience (px) strategy must:
- Clearly define and communicate core organizational values and brand perception
- Ensure that in-house policies reflect these values
- Create opportunities for employees to live and breathe the organization’s cultural principles
- Encourage an inclusive environment that celebrates diversity and promotes belonging
Cultural alignment ensures employees feel connected to something larger than their roles, increasing loyalty and forming emotional attachments. This further contributes to organizational success.
3. Leadership buy-in
Organizations can create a culture where employees feel secure by making leaders active participants and advocates for people’s experiences. Strong leadership buy-in also ensures that these initiatives are not just policies on paper but serious practices incorporated into the organization.
Human resources and business leaders should start with the following:
- Modeling the desired organizational behaviors so if innovation is valued, they should show openness to new ideas and have the willingness to take risks
- Allocating significant resources and budget to people experience programs
- Focusing on empathetic listening beyond traditional communication
- Discussing and prioritizing employee engagement metrics in forums and review meetings
A genuine commitment from the leadership’s end, irrespective of one’s employment status, signals a welcoming and inclusive working culture.
Case study: Microsoft’s transformation under Satya Nadella
Under Satya Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft underwent a significant cultural shift, embracing a “growth mindset.” Nadella modeled desired behaviors by encouraging openness to innovation and taking risks—most notably through the company’s embrace of cloud computing (Azure) and acquisitions like LinkedIn and GitHub.
Nadella’s active participation in fostering innovation and empathy also trickled down to employees. He emphasized psychological safety, where employees felt secure proposing bold ideas without fear of failure. Leaders were expected to mirror this by supporting experimentation, even if some initiatives didn’t immediately succeed.
This buy-in didn’t stop at words—it became part of practice, with leaders regularly engaging in feedback loops, celebrating innovative ideas, and prioritizing employee experiences.
4. Personalized approaches
The era of one-size-fits-all employee experiences is over. Modern strategies emphasize personalization through:
- Flexible work arrangements like compressed work weeks, remote settings, or different hours
🧠 Fun Fact: One of the perks of working at ClickUp includes remote and hybrid work environments. Our team is spread across the globe, from our San Diego HQ in the U.S. to Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, the Philippines, and more.
- Customized learning and development paths like skill gap analysis and targeted training
- Individualized career progression planning like internal mobility programs or cross-functional exposure
- Tailored total rewards and recognition programs like fitness club memberships or individual performance bonus designs
- Technology that supports personalized employee journeys like continuous feedback mechanism, progress tracking, or personalized learning recommendations
Hyper-personalization allows employees to feel comfortable and demonstrates that the organization sees and values them as unique individuals, not just resources.
5. Feedback mechanisms
Continuous, transparent, and actionable feedback is essential for your organization’s success and employee satisfaction.
Do the following:
- Implement regular pulse surveys
- Create multiple channels for collecting employee feedback
- Develop transparent processes for acting on feedback
- Use advanced analytics to understand sentiment and trends
- Close the feedback loop by communicating actions taken
Continued advancement is an attractive reason to contribute to an organization.
6. Learning and development
Investment in employee growth is a critical component of people experience.
This begins with developing comprehensive skill development programs that equip employees with the tools to excel in their roles and adapt to industry changes. Offering mentorship and coaching opportunities adds a personal touch, fostering one-on-one relationships where employees can gain valuable insights and guidance from more experienced colleagues.
Supporting continuous learning through digital platforms—such as e-learning courses, certifications, and virtual workshops—ensures employees have the flexibility to upskill at their own pace. Additionally, creating cross-functional and interdepartmental learning experiences encourages collaboration, broadens perspectives, and helps employees understand how their contributions align with the broader organizational objectives.
💡Pro Tip: Gamify your learning and development programs to make them more engaging and fun. Use quizzes, challenges, and rewards to motivate employees to participate and learn.
7. Well-being initiatives
There is a vast difference between promising work-life balance and delivering it. Most companies do the former and forget about implementing it.
SHRM’s Employee Mental Health Research Series released a report showing that 44% of 1,405 surveyed U.S. employees feel burnt out at work, 45% feel ‘emotionally drained,’ and 51% end their day feeling ‘used up.’
That’s why holistic well-being is becoming a concern in modern workplace strategies.
Follow this approach:
- Create comprehensive mental health support programs
- Support physical wellness initiatives
- Assist in financial wellness resources
- Encourage stress management and resilience training
- Implement supportive policies for family and personal challenges
👉🏼 You can take a leaf out of ClickUp’s book.
We go beyond surface-level initiatives by embedding wellness into our workplace strategies.
For mental health support, ClickUp employees get access to mental health resources such as therapy sessions through our Employee Assistance Program (EAP). We also offer unlimited PTO, empowering employees to take time off as needed for their mental or personal health.
In terms of physical wellness, ClickUp offers benefits such as stipends for home office setups, ensuring employees have comfortable and healthy work environments and provides wellness reimbursements that can be used for fitness memberships or other health-related expenses.
While these seven pillars lay a strong foundation for a positive workplace culture, designing and implementing them can hinder everyday tasks—when done manually!
So why don’t we leverage technology? Organizing and customizing the strategy according to your organization’s people experience needs can amplify its impact. After all, modern workplaces support efficiency, personalization, and data-driven insights—all of which technology enables.
Opting for employee engagement software to smoothen feedback loops and track employee development sounds only fair. Let’s take a look!
ClickUp for improving people experience
Easily our favorite go-to HRM solution, ClickUp, can be your answer to a complex workforce as well.
Beyond being an everything app for work, it functions as a customizable employee engagement software as well.
Here are all the ways in which ClickUp’s HR Management Platform can help you improve people experience:
1. Make employee management easy
ClickUp centralizes all HR tasks—hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, and development—into one platform. By enabling customizable workflows, HR teams can seamlessly track candidates, onboard new hires, and manage employee growth.
Custom Fields in ClickUp can help you track key employee data, such as certifications, training progress, and performance metrics. And ClickUp’s Task Dependencies automatically ensure tasks, like onboarding steps, happen in the right order to avoid delays.
2. Better onboarding process for new hires
ClickUp’s HR Platform makes onboarding fast, effective, and stress-free by providing:
- Checklists: Provide step-by-step guides for new employees to complete tasks like submitting paperwork or setting up accounts
- Docs & wikis: Store all training materials in one place for easy access via ClickUp Docs, with the ability to update it in real time
- Templates: Use ready-made onboarding templates to save time and maintain consistency
3. Keep communication clear and open
ClickUp encourages open dialogue between employees, managers, and leadership through ClickUp Chat.
Here’s how it helps:
- Provides a central location for employees and managers to communicate with each other. This can help improve teamwork and collaboration and keep everyone on the same page
- Allows for real-time feedback, which can be helpful for both employees and managers. Employees can get immediate feedback on their work, and managers can provide feedback in a timely manner
- Can be integrated with ClickUp Tasks, which allows for better task management. Managers can assign tasks and follow up on them through ClickUp Chat, and employees can ask questions and get clarification on tasks in the same platform where work happens
- Helps improve employee morale by providing a more social and collaborative work environment. Employees can chat about their work and personal life events, which can help build relationships and improve team spirit
4. Track performance to help employees grow
ClickUp’s performance tracking tools help managers set goals, monitor progress, and provide timely feedback.
ClickUp Dashboards, for instance, allow you to visualize performance trends and identify areas of improvement by consolidating feedback from surveys, performance reviews, and engagement forms into a single, customizable interface.
5. Use a pre-built template
Beyond these tools, if you wish to use a structured HR process template, the ClickUp People Operations Template is exactly what you need to manage everything.
This template centralizes all HR functions, from recruiting and onboarding to performance reviews and engagement surveys. Thus, it is a perfect fit for improving employee experience and efficiently managing people’s operations.
With this template, you can:
- Schedule check-ins, track discussion points, and log actionable insights, creating a consistent feedback loop using built-in features for organizing and documenting 1:1 meetings
- Address challenges and provide on-the-spot updates with customizable fields and statuses
- Use ClickUp Automations to send reminders for feedback sessions, prompt task reviews, or alert managers when milestones are achieved
Summarize this article for me pleaseMeasuring People Experience
People experience is everything that happens during an employee lifecycle—from the onboarding process to the exit interview. To ensure well-being at all of these stages, organizations must regularly measure and analyze key factors that impact how employees feel and perform at work.
Here’s a list of three methods that you can adopt to promise a smooth employee journey and improve your organizational culture:
1. Types of people who experience surveys
Surveys are a powerful tool to gauge how employees perceive their workplace and identify areas for improvement. Here are some types of people experience surveys:
- Engagement surveys: Assess overall job satisfaction, motivation, and connection to the organization
- Pulse surveys: Short, frequent surveys to gather quick feedback on specific issues like team dynamics or workload
- Onboarding and exit surveys: Measure the quality of onboarding processes and uncover reasons for employee departures
ClickUp Forms help collect employee feedback and measure people’s experience effectively. These forms are easy to use, customizable, and dynamic. Through them, feedback reaches the right teams, with responses converted into trackable tasks, enabling timely resolution for various issues.
2. Analyzing employee performance feedback
Performance feedback is a rich source of information for understanding employee needs and growth opportunities. Here’s how you can do this:
- 360-degree reviews: Collect feedback from peers, managers, and direct reports to get a holistic view of performance and interpersonal dynamics
- Goal achievement data: Monitor progress on individual and team goals to identify patterns in engagement and motivation
- Feedback themes: Look for recurring themes in performance reviews, such as challenges with resources or communication
3. Role of employee retention and turnover metrics
Retention and turnover rates are critical indicators of people experience:
- Retention metrics: High retention often signals a positive environment where employees feel valued and supported. Measure the percentage of employees staying year-over-year and compare it across departments or roles
- Turnover metrics: Analyze exit data to identify trends, such as why employees leave and whether turnover is voluntary or involuntary. High turnover may point to issues like poor management, lack of career growth, or unaddressed workplace concerns
- Cost implications: Use these metrics to calculate the financial impact of turnover, reinforcing the importance of investing in a strong people experience strategy
The process goes like this:
Gather feedback ➡ Analyze the vulnerabilities and strengths ➡ Make changes for increased job satisfaction.
Also Read: Free Feedback Form Templates
Summarize this article for me pleaseAddressing Challenges in People Experience
It is hard to say there are no challenges in people experience management. Here are three of the most pressing ones with ways to tackle them effectively:
1. Tackling a hostile work environment
A toxic workplace can affect employee morale, trust, and communication, negatively impacting people experience. Here’s how you can deal with this:
- Identify issues: Use anonymous employee feedback tools and surveys to uncover problematic behaviors or practices
- Set clear expectations: Establish and communicate a zero-tolerance policy for bullying, discrimination, and harassment
- Foster accountability: Train business leaders to recognize and address hostility and build a culture of respect through workshops and open communication
2. Strategies for engaging undervalued employees
Employees who feel undervalued exhibit lower productivity and higher turnover. To tackle this, you can:
- Recognize contributions: Implement regular recognition programs to celebrate individual and team achievements
- Encourage employee development: Offer mentorship, training programs, and career growth opportunities to promote continuous learning
- Listen actively: Create feedback loops where employees can voice concerns and suggestions, reinforcing their importance and use the suggestions for continuous improvement
3. Managing remote work and flexible policies
The rise of hybrid and remote work presents challenges in maintaining connection and productivity. Here’s what you can do:
- Promote connection: Use virtual team-building activities and regular check-ins to maintain relationships and collaboration
- Ensure clarity: Set clear expectations for performance management and communicate business objectives to clarify their roles
- Support well-being: Provide resources like ergonomic tools, mental health support, and flexible scheduling to help employees maintain work-life balance
Also Read: How to Write a New Hire Onboarding Checklist
Summarize this article for me pleaseCreate Value and Provide Validation with ClickUp
Building a welcoming experience involves creating a positive workspace, smooth communication channels, and growth opportunities. HR professionals and management should stay in touch with their staff on the ground level to recognize issues and find solutions.
This isn’t a one-person or one-department job. The entire organization has to work together to improve the employee experience—however, it can’t be done manually. It is impossible to fix decades of gaps within a few months to improve retention and turnover rates.
You need a user-friendly interface that integrates with your workspace, gets to know your employees, understands your policies, and automates repetitive tasks while leveraging templates and tools to improve people experience (px).
You need ClickUp and its customizable features, such as the comprehensive HR platform and the pre-built templates!
Sign up for ClickUp for free and familiarize yourself with endless possibilities for improving work-life integration for your workforce.
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