"We need more employee engagement!" "No, we need a better employee experience!" Do those statements sound familiar? Is your organization focused on improving only one of those areas? If so, that is mistake number 1. The second mistake is viewing employee experience (EX) and engagement as isolated components independent of one another. It's time for those to be mistakes of the past.

With increasing focus on employee engagement, it is easy for companies to let EX fall by the wayside. The focus on engagement is understandable, however, considering Gallup research indicating that employee engagement in the US is at 33 percent, and only 50 percent of employees would recommend their workplace to others. In addition, these factors direct many organizations' attention to employee engagement: scarcity of top talent, critical skills shortage, and the lowest unemployment in years (prior to the COVID-19 pandemic).

Even the organizations that place a significant focus on EX may overlook or even sacrifice the opportunity to improve engagement in the process. The truth is that engagement cannot start until after the experience begins. Instead of a competition or trade-off, the two should be an alliance that works to achieve what is in employees' and the organization's best interest.

Individual identities

One problem traces back to a lack of clarity on what experience and engagement are in relation to employees. EX can have many disguises, but engagement must not be one of them. Experience and engagement are two distinct players that carry heavy weight individually.

EX is the journey an employee takes with an organization, spanning the time before being hired to the interactions following the individual's exit from the company. EX encompasses all that employees may learn, do, see, and feel throughout the five phases of the employee life cycle: recruitment, onboarding, development, retention, and offboarding.

In comparison, in a July blog post, Josh Bersin, an independent analyst and founder of Bersin by Deloitte, defines employee engagement as "the measure of an employee's satisfaction with their employer and their job." EX influences employee engagement rates, but engagement rates do not completely reflect EX. Companies can view employee engagement as a reflection of certain organizational touchpoints throughout the employee life cycle.

Employers can have the best of both worlds by working to improve EX and engagement. Organizational leaders sometimes view engagement as nothing more than a program for which talent development professionals must meet program objectives within a budget and obtain employee survey responses to a temporary initiative. However, EX is a broad topic warranting greater organizational support and attention.

EX encompasses an employee's interactions with the company in onboarding, accessing benefits, training, promotion process, tuition reimbursement requests, medical leave requests, the exit interview, and numerous other touchpoints. As for engagement, it includes the employee feedback the organization requests. Employers must recognize both EX and engagement as priorities.

Make the case

The organizational benefits of EX include brand promotion, better retention, lower turnover, and better customer experience. Engagement benefits are high productivity and performance, customer referrals, profitability, and employee satisfaction.

There are other reasons organizations should take EX and engagement seriously as competitive differentiators. The way the world works has changed, as well as the type of experience employees seek in new opportunities as a result of COVID-19. That has caused factors beyond the paycheck to capture employees' attention, such as meaningful work, a positive work environment, flexibility, growth and development opportunities, and trust in leadership. Those details define the why when talent development professionals present the case for EX and engagement initiatives.

Consider what it takes for your organization to be successful in both areas without shortchanging either. Avoid the practices that have caused failure for many companies in the past. Poor practices in EX include disregarding or minimizing the employee's first impression (hiring stage), overlooking the importance of offboarding feedback, and failing to use feedback from exiting employees to refine the organizational culture.

For engagement, practices that have contributed to failure include neglecting to include the employee in engagement, viewing engagement as solely HR's responsibility, and not acting on received feedback. Leveraging technology tools and social media is a must for the innovative approaches that will drive results. There are no significant generational differences for EX, but that may not be the case for employee engagement. However, that may change as baby boomers retire and Gen Zers enter the workplace.

Make the connection

Training can make the difference in an organization's approach to EX and engagement. It can be valuable to your workforce in three ways.

First, a training goal should be to ensure that participants understand the similarities and differences between EX and engagement. Also, training is beneficial for talent development professionals looking for best practices on how to develop and implement the organization's EX and engagement strategies and methods. Further, training can help participants understand what tools, apps, and technology are available to help bolster and support EX as well as engagement. Offering such training is a means of adding to the development opportunities that enhances EX. For example, if 70 percent of employee engagement is due to the manager, develop managerial training to help boost engagement.

Conversations, feedback, and recognition are topics to include in the training program. Consider providing managers with an engagement toolkit that addresses those topics. With training, employees and management will learn what is needed to ensure EX and engagement efforts are effective, and they'll see the value of those efforts.

Analytics is another potential training topic in relation to EX and engagement. You cannot improve what you don't measure. Organizations need to get to the analytics or big data that give insights to drive EX and engagement decisions that affect retention, bottom-line results, and key business areas.

In many instances, access to engagement data is restricted to those who need to know, but the managers who really need the data often don't know because they do not receive the information or the access. Not only does training promote the information exchange and sharing but also the application of the data and analytics.

Make the call

To move forward and develop strategies to improve in the areas of engagement and EX, leadership must answer several questions. A critical starting point is to ask how the organization defines EX and engagement. With that established, determine the desired outcome for implementing initiatives designed to bolster EX and engagement among employees. Leadership also may want to have input on who should be involved in moving such initiatives forward.

After settling on how leadership views engagement and EX, as well as the desired outcomes of strengthening those areas and determining the key players, you can then begin to identify the gaps by comparing what the organization is doing with what is needed. As with any strategy, leadership can weigh in on what metrics are important and how the results will be measured.

Also, think ahead to what actions the company will take on the results and decide who will be responsible for carrying out those actions. Finally, identify the training and resources needed to implement any EX and engagement strategies.

With more research, the talent development function will see greater quantifiable benefits that organizations can experience. It will certainly be evident in companies' analyses of the pandemic's impact with an increasingly remote workforce and redefining today's workplace. Now more than ever, EX counts for more than what talent development professionals have imagined in the past, and engagement is one of the vehicles that can help take it to new heights for your organization.