Six examples of great employee experience

Every one of us needs some inspiration sometimes, so in this article, we listed six examples of great employee experience from a variety of companies with proven results, from which you can draw inspiration!

This article is part of our guide to creating a great employee experience.

1. Airbnb

Currently ranking 6^th on the Employee Experience Index, Airbnb has been spearheading the shift to employee experience focus for a number of years. They initiated their shift already back in 2013 when Mark Levy joined the company, with the idea of creating an Employee Experience group, as they had already for Customer Experience.

Airbnb constructed their whole business model around the idea of feeling at home anywhere, and this extends into its workforce as well, as they function as a community. Each member of staff is considered as both a customer and a host, leading into the same quality service offered to its employees as it does for its clients. Together these actions led to them topping the Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work list in 2016.

2. Adobe

Adobe sees that the employee experience is a marriage of art and science, science being the data gathered and art being the content provided for emotional triggers. At Adobe, people have always been the core asset, rooting from the idea of their founders thinking that their best assets go home for the night. Their main internal driver for employee experience is their own cloud-based intranet, which keeps the workforce connected. This way of thinking, combined with their internal drivers, and other factors such as focusing on workplace experiences via creating connections at the offices, has helped Adobe rise to the top ranks in employee experience. 

3. Accenture

Accenture understands the value of employee experience and has seen that the employee experience is the new battleground for competitive advantage. They have determined three main steps to great employee experiences: 

• identifying pockets of value, finding the focus point between the wanted business outcomes and the first priority workforce driving more value to the business from employee experience (EX) actions.  
• defining moments that matter, understanding your employees in order to design hyper-personalized experiences at the workplace
• co-creation and designing the experience, applying customer-centricity thinking and techniques in creating the workplace

These three steps have helped them to remain competitive with a highly productive workforce, ranking seventh in the Employee Experience Index currently. 

4. Cisco

Like all of the companies in this list, Cisco thinks their best asset is their people. At the end of 2019, they created a whole new team to overlook the big picture related to employee experience, working to discover opportunities to improve their internal employee experience by bringing teams together.

Cisco understands that this is a continuous journey, and will evolve as people, workplaces and technology evolves, and this is what makes Cisco one of the examples of great employee experience. This has been shown by the many awards they’ve won in the field of employee experience, such as being No. 1 Great Place to Work in various countries.

5. Mozilla

Creating and handling company culture is not easy, especially not in the time of a crisis. Mozilla put their focus on the employee experience during the current pandemic, to ensure the adaption to this new and changing environment. What Mozilla did was transforming their internal events online and finding new ways of keeping employees engaged even in remote-working mode. For example, adopting virtual onboarding enabled Mozilla to re-think the needs of physical spaces. This resulted in cost savings as their needs for physical spaces reduced during this time. 

6. Microsoft

Microsoft has used their efforts to explore how to stay competitive with the likes of Google and Apple, wanting to understand their employees’ behaviors, pain points, and motivations, ultimately driving an organizational shift towards purpose, learning and development. They identified the 5 Ps of employee fulfillment, shown in the image above, which is seen as a critical element to the company’s employee experience strategy. Their commitment to the employee experience is shown in their newest piece of software, called Viva, which is an employee experience platform (EXP) aimed to be the first EXP for the digital era.

Closing thoughts

These are just some examples that you can look more into. What you can also check is the Employee Experience Index, which is a way of ranking and showing examples of great employee experience companies. 

What can you learn from all this? All of these companies have put investments in their workforce, and they are finding benefits in the likes of increased employee engagement, better employee performance, and decreased costs.

Are you wondering how to start investing in your workforce?

Read how Subsea 7 uses our Empathic Building digital twin at their campus to help them manage hybrid working and improve their employee experience:

Our best assets go home for the night

Eric Kline, Director of Global Workplace Experience, Adobe