A HR Director reflects - why Employee Experience is the new frontier for customer-centric companies

Having worked as a HR Director at Cemantica for the past 18 months, I’ve been immersed in a company that lives and breathes Customer Experience (CX). Cemantica has built its reputation on helping companies transform how they serve their customers, and stepping into that culture made one thing very clear to me:

You can’t deliver great customer experiences without focusing on the people who deliver them, your employees.

This isn’t a new idea, but over the past year, it became much more tangible for me. As I spent more time understanding the CX tools we use with our clients, I decided to apply these tools internally as well.

Bringing journey mapping inside: from clients to colleagues

One of the most eye-opening things I’ve done this year is use one of our core CX tools, journey mapping, to take a closer look at our employee lifecycle.

As an SME with a remote, distributed workforce, we don’t have the luxury of hallway chats, informal moments of connection or face to face meetings. That makes it even more important to be intentional about designing the employee journey.

I started by defining six key phases: attraction, recruitment, onboarding, development, engagement & retention, and offboarding. Each phase was broken down into sub-stages, detailing what actually happens from the employee’s perspective. I then identified all the key touchpoints, the moments and mechanisms through which employees interact with the company at each stage and began gathering data.

And it didn’t stop there. I also interviewed and sat with people across the company, listening to the employee voice: new joiners, long-timers, even former employees and asked what was working, what wasn’t, and where they felt friction or support. It was incredible to see, with the help of these Employee Experience surveys, the journey map come to life through real stories, feedback and emotion.

A closer look at onboarding

Onboarding was one of the focus areas as it’s setting the tone for everything that follows, and it can make or break someone’s experience before they’ve even fully settled in.

Research backs this up:

• According to Glassdoor, organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%
• A Gallup study found that only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job onboarding—leaving significant room for improvement
• And in our own experience as a remote-first team, this phase is one of the only structured windows we have to create meaningful connection, build confidence, and reduce early drop-off

That’s why I wanted to dive deeper and asked:

• What are people actually experiencing in their first days and weeks?
• Where do they feel excited or confused?
• What’s helping them integrate and what’s getting in the way?

Here are a few standout insights:

• Small moments matter: A personal welcome message or an informal coffee check-in had more impact than any polished presentation
• Feedback and communication are essential: Beyond the formal onboarding process, it’s critical to create regular moments for two-way feedback Encouraging open conversations early on helps surface challenges, build trust and make new employees feel heard. It also reinforces a culture of continuous improvement right from the start
• Clarity beats perfection: Employees care more about knowing what to expect than whether the process is flawless

This wasn’t a huge project. It didn’t require big budgets, just time, curiosity and a genuine desire to listen. And it reminded me that Employee Experience (EX) doesn’t need to be big to be meaningful. It just needs to be intentional.

Personas: Turning stories into strategy

Another first this year was creating employee personas, a CX technique that helped us take a more tailored approach to communication, development and recognition.

By speaking with employees across roles, seniority levels and cultural backgrounds, I was able to identify key differences in motivations, expectations and needs. These personas helped us challenge assumptions and better align initiatives with the people they’re meant to serve.

Three ways CX has changed how I lead in HR

Working in a CX-first company has reshaped how I approach HR. Here are three lessons I carry with me:

1. Experience is designed, not assumed.
   Whether it's a customer or an employee, what stays with people is how something felt. Mapping the Employee Experience forces you to be deliberate: Are we designing this moment with intention or just letting it happen?
    
2. Feedback is a flow, not a form.
   Surveys are useful, but they’re not enough. Ongoing check-ins, informal conversations, or even a quick Teams message asking, “How’s it going?” can surface just as much insight and sometimes more.
    
3. Culture is lived, not written.
   Culture isn’t defined in the handbook, it’s built in the micro-moments. It’s how we show up for each other, how we communicate and how we respond when things go wrong.
    

The EX challenges I’m thinking about now

Employee expectations have shifted and they’re not going back. In my role, I see several recurring themes that keep coming up:

• Clarity: People want to know how their work fits into the bigger picture and what their direct impact is
• Flexibility: Remote and hybrid work have reset expectations, people want trust and autonomy
• Growth: Development is no longer a “perk”, it’s essential
• Connection: Especially in distributed teams, people want authentic interactions, not just meetings
• Agility: Especially in Tech, SaaS and Start-up environments, things move fast. Our employee journey maps need to reflect that, they should be living documents that evolve as the business and our people do

One challenge I’m especially focused on is how to integrate ongoing feedback into the map itself. It’s one thing to document the journey once, but it’s another to keep it accurate as experiences shift. I’m asking myself:

• Where can we insert light-touch feedback loops at key moments?
• How can we use what we hear—formally and informally—to refine the map over time?
• And how can the map serve not just as a diagnostic tool, but a continuous listening framework?

The goal is to ensure our journey map doesn’t sit in a folder, but grows with us, shaped by the real voices and needs of the people behind it.

The importance of Employee Experience as a mindset not a side project

For me, EX isn’t a separate HR initiative anymore, it’s an attitude I bring to everything I do.
It means asking:

• How does this feel?
• Does it make sense?
• Are we supporting the people who make everything else possible?
• Is this something our people need or want?

We’re developing our EX journey at Cemantica, the shift is happening. We're applying our own CX thinking internally, to listen more carefully and to design with intention, not just for customers, but for our team too.

I’m still learning, still experimenting and still asking questions. But I’m convinced of one thing: the companies that will thrive tomorrow are the ones designing for their people today.

Let’s shape the future of work by creating the moments that matter most.

Read more about how the Cemantica Journey Management platform supports better Employee Experience and contact my colleagues if you would like to see a demo.