Introducing G2's New Employee Experience Category

From navigating a massive tech stack to feeling underappreciated and overworked, such feelings can put everyone at risk for burnout, lower productivity, and turnover.

This is where employee experience software provides assistance.

Amid waves of tech layoffs, burnout is hitting employees hard these days. One study, The State of Burnout in Tech, found that 51% of respondents felt they weren’t achieving enough, and 2 out of 5 who had a high risk of burnout were planning on leaving the company within six months.

From recognizing employee accomplishments, building camaraderie, and tracking essential people analytics, employee experience software is an essential tool for any HR department.

G2 is excited to announce a new Employee Experience Software category to help find buyers the best solutions.

The three pillars of employee experience

Employee experience includes every aspect of a company that affects an employee’s perception of an organization, from tech and equipment to more intangible environmental factors like company culture and management’s effectiveness.

The ultimate goal is all about employees—increasing productivity, reducing burnout, and creating a happier, more streamlined workforce.

Employee experience is so expansive that no solution could encompass it all. That’s why it is broken down into three major pillars: physical, digital, and cultural. Most software only addresses one or two aspects. Below are the respective branches in detail.

Physical

These products address the physical needs of employees and how they operate and interact with their business. All products that would fill this category are firmly outside the HR space. Specifically, these categories are under Collaboration & Productivity, Office, and Team Collaboration.

Digital

This section of employee experience is more grounded in the information technology (IT) domain. They feature a set of technologies that assist in and support the creation, management, and delivery of omnichannel digital experiences.

One example is the Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) category.

Cultural

The final branch is the one the employee experience software category covers. For this specific category, the focus is on the cultural elements of employee experience, with metrics such as productivity, turnover, and retention marking the success or challenges any given platform faces.

An all-encompassing approach to simplifying employees' lives

In this new category, launched in autumn, there are five current requirements:

• People analytics: Users need to capture, record, and analyze people analytics data such as eNPS scores, employee sentiment, pulse surveys, and many others.
• Tracking: This includes analyzing message content, social activity, or pulse surveys to measure the experience of any given employee.
• Trend analytics: Platforms must alert managers of potential challenges when it comes to overall employee feedback or behavior.
• Performance and recognition: The software must improve alignment by facilitating performance management or employee recognition to bridge the gap between leaders and users.
• Hub or central ecosystem: A central dashboard or hub lets users share data across an ecosystem of apps with integrated HR systems.

This shows that this isn’t a mere people analytics or employee engagement solution but an all-encompassing approach to making life simpler for employees.

Piquing interest in employee experience software

As a relatively new category, it’s going to take time to build traffic and interest in employee experience. Despite this, there’s already a notable rise in unique pageviews directly to the category.

As the visualization shows, February 2024 saw a sharp increase in unique pageviews, indicating that interest in employee experience is growing. This interest will likely continue to increase as the category becomes more established.

Review data from the past year reports an average 77% adoption rate, a pretty good score, but also an average of 19 months before users see a return on investment (ROI). For a platform designed around usability, it’ll be interesting to see how these numbers shift as this category matures.

The future of employee experience software

Where will this platform go in the future? Will businesses continue to invest in creating a hub for all employee action?

At the moment, consolidation is a massive trend in tech. Departments are looking for ways to save money and make life easier for employees. Employee experience software definitely fits that trend.

What remains to be seen is whether they have the usability and ease of adoption to make users' lives easier. If they can effectively increase productivity and retention, this could be a solution that takes its place alongside an HRIS in the HR toolkit.

Discover how cutting-edge team building software can enhance your employee experience.

Edited by Jigmee Bhutia