What Is the Employee Experience and Why Does It Matter?

A company stands or falls with the quality of its employees. The best product in the world won't save you if you don't have the people to back it up. That's why it makes sense to create an environment that employees love working in. This is called employee experience management (EXM).

EXM focuses on improving employee satisfaction and setting internal teams up for success. It's a process that we're very aware of at X-Team and one that we're constantly trying to refine. According to Jacob Morgan's The Employee Experience Advantage, the employee experience consists of three elements:

1. Company Culture
2. Technology Environment
3. Workplace Environment

Company Culture

Fundamentally, a healthy company culture is one that's built on trust, respect, creativity, and collaboration. These values show themselves in the everyday decisions a company makes.

For example, despite being a fully remote company, X-Team doesn't monitor any of its employees. If we would, it would indicate that we neither trust nor respect our X-Teamers. But we do, which is why there's no time-tracking software on any X-Teamer device.

Another example is the Keep Moving Forward mindset that every X-Teamer embraces, centered around the idea that we're always looking to drive our projects and goals forward. An X-Teamer doesn't wait for someone else's reply before they continue working; they see what else they can do to keep moving forward.

X-Teamers live in all corners of the world and come from all walks of life, but it's these shared values that unite us and inspire us to strive for higher heights every day. While we're always working to improve our company culture, we like to believe it's what makes X-Teamers proud to work for us.

Technology Environment

X-Team wouldn't have been possible if it hadn't been for technology. We've been a remote company since the mid-2000s, when remote had no meaning other than the device you used to switch channels on your TV. But to us, even back then, it was a way to connect with other people around the world and do something meaningful together.

How you use technology is crucially important in EXM. This was most blatantly obvious during the pandemic, when almost all companies needed to go remote and promptly tried to recreate the office online. Endless meetings without agendas and no flexibility in working hours meant that many workers burned out, mistakenly believing remote work wasn't for them.

The problem wasn't remote work. The problem was how companies used technology to implement remote work. At X-Team, we have a low-meeting, high-documentation policy, as well as relatively flexible working hours and asynchronous communication. Without these key elements, which heavily rely on technology, our employee experience wouldn't be where it is right now.

Workplace Environment

Workplace environment doesn't just mean how you've physically organized your office (which wouldn't make sense in a remote company anyway). It also encompasses the processes you use to streamline work, as well as the activities you organize to engage and inspire your employees.

If you've been following X-Team for a while, you know that we put a huge amount of effort into this. We wouldn't dare to brag, but our events are unlike any you will have seen at other companies. From our legendary X-Mas events to our X-Outposts to our annual $2,500 Unleash+ budget, we go out of our way to create a workplace environment that stands out from any other company.  

There are many moving pieces to make this all work, and it's taken us over a decade and a half of experimentation to get here, but it's how we take the employee experience to the next level.

If you like what you hear, and if you're a Senior Developer who's looking for a new opportunity, we welcome you to apply. Have a look at our job board to see what roles we currently have open.