Why (digital) employee experience matters: 28 statistics

Your employees are the greatest and most important resource you'll ever have. They are the key to your organisation's success. So it simply makes sense to take care of them best as you can. How you can do this? Creating a great (digital) employee experience can get you a long way. And we've gathered 28 digital employee experience statistics to convince you of this fact.

These will be sure to make you want to get started with optimising your (digital) employee experience! And you won't be the only one, because 92% of HR leaders have set the employee experience as top priority in 2021 (yes, we're getting right into it!).

Want to discover more about the (digital) employee experience in general? Read more in this article!

Why would you focus on the employee experience?

Because you care about your employees of course. But also because there are some very concrete benefits attached to a good employee experience.

First of all, a good experience increases employee engagement.

• Companies with high employee engagement are 21% more profitable
• Organisations with engaged employees experience 41% less absenteeism and a 17% increase in productivity
• 69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were being recognized

And your customers clearly benefit from this too. Since:

• Organisations with excellent customer experiences have employees that are 1.5 times more engaged
• 79% of companies with engaged employees provide 'significantly better customer service' than those who don't

What customers (and you) don't benefit from however, is employee turnover.

• Delays to customer projects and/or services is the #1 impact of employee turnover

This is a big problem. It's hard enough to retain talent as it is, especially if you consider that:

• 8 in 10 employees would seek a new job after just one bad day
• And 51% of employees are actively looking for a new job at any given time
• 81% of businesses agree employee turnover is a costly problem
• 3% of business owners agree retaining employees is harder than hiring them

It's no wonder that 77% of companies focus on employee experience to increase retention, since

• 60% of employees said well-being enhances employee retention
• Employees who are engaged at work are 87% less likely to leave their current employer

Why does the digital employee experience matter?

In the digital age, technology has a huge impact on the way people execute and experience work. Just consider the facts that

• 78% of workers now use 6-10 digital tools on average just to communicate
• The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28% of the workweek managing email
• Companies can raise the productivity of knowledge workers by 20 to 25% by using social technologies

Since in many jobs technology is used to some extent, it's a vital part of the employee experience.

Not having the right technology in place cannot only impact people's work:

• 54% of U.S. office professionals report wasting time searching for files in cluttered online systems
• The average interaction worker spends nearly 20% looking for internal information or tracking down a colleague who can help

But also how they feel about their work, their experience.

• 40% of employees have experienced mental exhaustion from video calls while working remotely
• 61% of employers in a supervisory role say they spend more time getting technology to work than they'd like
• 80% of Americans experience some type of frustration with technology every day

And there are big differences in these experiences too.

• 35% of leaders and managers were reported to have a good or very good Digital Employee Experience
• 42% of office workers report a good Digital Employee Experience, and of knowledge workers 44%
• Only 17% of frontline workers report a good or very good Digital Employee Experience
• 51% of frontline workers even rate their DEX as 'poor' or 'very poor'

Clearly, not that many people are that happy with their Digital Employee Experience. It's therefore remarkable that in contrast to the general Employee Experience, DEX isn't getting that much (needed) attention. Only 27% indicate they have a DEX strategy in place or in progress.

There are several things you can do to improve your Digital Employee Experience (we have a great article on it if you want to check it out), but it's more than just throwing more technology at the problem. In fact, that could even make the problem bigger.

• 80 to 93% of employees don't think that increased technology has improved business performance.