What Is Remote Employee Experience (REX) and Why It Matters for Your Business

These days, many of us are working fully remote jobs or are living the hybrid lifestyle, spending a few days in the office and a few days at home. If you’re like me, you can’t imagine going back to a world where you’re commuting every single day to a full-time office.

Remote work isn’t new to us anymore. But, now that the dust has somewhat settled, employers are rushing to improve their remote employee experience to retain talent and enable productivity at home.

Remote employee experience (REX) is a holistic approach to people operations that values employee well-being, engagement, and personal goals. A positive remote employee experience means that team members feel valued by their organization, which increases productivity and morale.

Remote employee experience makes best-in-class organizations profitable, stable, and great workplaces. With an engaging, team-oriented, and flexibility-focused REX, remote employees can perform productively outside the traditional office from anywhere in the world.

Remote employee experience is a complex mixture of how human psychology, company culture, and industry norms impact employees’ fulfillment and happiness in their work. If your team is fulfilled and happy, you’ll have higher engagement, productivity, and loyalty.

Many organizations claim to put the values and needs of their employees first. Unfortunately, some workers are finding this messaging hollow. Actions speak louder than words, and workers wait for their companies to offer competitive flexibility, benefits, and psychological safety.

Are you aware of the importance of remote employee experience? A troubling Monster survey showed that 96% of employees are on the job hunt.

Managers are not blowing employees away with their remote employee experience efforts. This Monster statistic is concerning, but it isn’t too late to turn your employee experience around for remote teams. 

There’s a lot of information about traditional employee experience but a shortage of data about hybrid, flex, or fully-remote employee experience. We’ll teach you how to create a remote team experience that helps you attract and manage the best talent in your industry. First, let’s delve into why REX matters.

It’s no secret that turnover is expensive, so intelligent leaders always focus on retaining talent. One of the best ways to do this is by improving your employee experience.

It isn’t just the cost of hiring that impacts a business's bottom line. Research shows us that happy employees make your business more money. How do you make your employees happy? By improving their employee experience. 

But don’t just take it from us. Let’s look at some compelling research from MIT. 

• Companies with a positive employee experience score are more innovative and profitable and report higher customer satisfaction.

• Companies reporting a positive employee experience have 16 times the engagement level of employees with a negative employee experience score.

Remote work wasn’t a fad: In 2020, quarantined employees were forced to learn work-from-home best practices. Initially, it was strange and unfamiliar, but we all became accustomed to increased flexibility, non-existent commutes, and more time spent with loved ones.

Adjusting to “the new normal”: The recent corporate focus on employee experience is primarily due to increased studies and research which show that companies with satisfied employees report higher productivity and profits.

The answer is simple: happy employees who feel engaged are more likely to be innovative and harder working. Employee happiness translates directly to satisfied customers and increased profits.

It’s not rocket science; it’s just the unmistakable positive impact of investing in your employees.

In the past few decades, the world of work has gradually transformed from a "service economy" to an "experience economy," resulting in an increased emphasis on customer and employee experience. 

Now, things are shifting again to focus on the remote employee experience. Employee experience is a term many were familiar with before the remote work shift, so it’s no surprise that with a massive change in how we work, the way we experience work changes. 

Let’s examine how employee experience and remote employee experience compare.

Employee experience

Employee experience (EX) management has been quickly accepted into mainstream corporate culture. Mark Levy of Airbnb was the first head of employee experience at a major U.S. company, but many organizations have followed suit in recent years. 

MIT performed a global study of senior executives that determined two main factors that affect the overall employee experience: work complexity and behavioral norms. 

Remote employee experience

Remote employee experience is a term that grew from the concept of EX and was popularized by the rise of remote work. Now that we know remote work isn’t going anywhere, managers are scrambling to create remote work environments that result in a positive employee experience.

And it turns out remote work is only increasing. Despite fewer remote job openings, the number of Americans working remotely is on the rise once again.

With so many people working in a remote or hybrid arrangement, the employee experience conversation has shifted to focus on remote employee experience and how leaders can measure it.

To measure remote employee experience, we’ll use The Future Forum’s best practices. This consortium focuses on creating a new understanding of digital work.

In 2020, The Future Forum released its new Remote Employee Experience Index. This index uses data from 4,700 remote workers in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Japan, and Australia. 

In their remote employee experience research, The Future Forum identified five key factors that determine the remote employee experience.

What key elements make up remote employee experience? 

1. Productivity

2. Work-life balance

3. Ability to manage work-related stress and anxiety

4. Feeling a sense of belonging

5. Satisfaction with working arrangement

To create a positive experience for remote employees, you can focus on the five key factors that impact remote employee experience: 

Set reasonable productivity standards

Reasonable productivity standards ensure team members complete tasks on time, with the right level of quality, and at the right speed.  

The crucial elements of productivity standards are 1) deadline flexibility and 2) reasonable due dates for projects. Be sure you’re working within your team’s schedules, PTO, parental leave, or religious observance. If you’re calculating productivity and leaving out flexibility for vacation or sick time, you’ll stress your team out.

Create a sustainable work-life balance for remote workers

Remote work inherently creates an environment where employees can seamlessly manage their work and personal life.

Starting a load of laundry while you wait for a document to upload or having the ability to drop your kids off at school instead of spending time commuting are priceless benefits of remote work. 

One danger of hybrid or remote work is the need for proper boundaries between work hours and personal time. Use clear PTO expectations, communication policies, and OOO notifications to ensure employees are keeping their work and home lives separate in healthy ways. 

Help your team manage work-related stress and anxiety

Work-related stress doesn’t disappear with remote work (though it is greatly alleviated). As a manager, you must ensure fair and flexible deadlines and expectations to reduce unnecessary anxiety for your team.

Creating a sense of psychological safety can help your team feel comfortable in sharing their feedback, concerns, or suggestions. 

Instill a sense of belonging among employees

The sense of belonging is one area where remote work can falter. To counteract this, use team-building activities and employee retreats to help your team interact outside the work context.

At Hubstaff, we’ve created an internal Slack channel called “Hubstars,” where employees can publicly highlight their co-workers who are exceeding expectations.

Ensure your team is happy with their remote working arrangement

While you aren’t in direct control of your employee’s remote work environment, you can help them create a comfortable and productive setting. 

With the money you save on providing a physical workspace, create a bonus system that improves employees’ home office space. Some companies offer in-home cleaning services or discounts on home internet as perks. Others provide subscription gift boxes or coworking space memberships. 

At Hubstaff, we offer professionally-taught classes about ergonomic work conditions. We also offer bonuses to help our professionals buy chairs, desks, and other home office equipment.

All this talk of remote employee experience got us thinking: what do remote employees say that they want? We sought out surveys and created an online poll to find out. 

With an impressive margin, the number one thing that our LinkedIn followers look for in remote work is flexible deadlines and schedules. For managers, this is a home run. It’s free, and it’s proven to improve productivity and profits. 

The ability to give feedback to managers, a solid tech stack, and socializing with co-workers each claimed roughly 10% of the overall vote. But the thing employees say they value the most is just the flexibility to do their work while maintaining a work-life balance.

Key benefits employees gain from working remotely 

According to a study done by Slack, over 72% of knowledge workers indicate a preference for remote or hybrid work. The survey also showed that the key reported benefits are:

• Less time spent commuting 

• Money saved on food, attire, gas, and other office-related costs

• Work-life balance improvement 

• Overall less stress 

• Increased quality time with loved ones 

Don’t just take it from us. Send a survey to your staff and ask what you can do to improve your remote team experience. Anonymous polls give an authentic perspective into how your team functions remotely. 

Practical ways you can address your remote employee experience 

Top-performing companies prioritize two areas of the employee experience: supplying employees with the right digital tools and implementing evidence-based leadership strategies.

Use the right technology

The right tech stack can transform your remote employee experience. Companies in the top quartile of employee experience respond with a difference of 66% more digital capacity for work than their competitors in the bottom quartile.

Here are a few essential tools that optimize our remote employee experience:

• OfficeVibe: We use OfficeVibe surveys to anonymously and automatically poll our employees to ensure everyone is happy and engaged. These anonymous surveys allow team members to provide critical feedback to managers. 

• Slack: This might be obvious, but Slack is vital to our remote team. With custom time zones and away settings, our international crew thrives on the async chat system.

• Google Meet: Google Meet is our preferred video conferencing platform. It’s easy to use and connects to Google Calendar for simple meeting invites and coordination. Check out the Meet and Slack integration for additional functionality. 

• Hubstaff: We use our software to optimize time tracking, payroll, task management, time off requests, and activity tracking. Let’s talk more about how that works for our remote team later.

Provide opportunities for feedback

Humble leadership can make all the difference in a remote work environment.

Without the natural dialogue of an office, it is essential to provide the opportunity for employees to give feedback. Companies in the top quartile of employee experience are 90% more likely to seek employee feedback.

Employee development is also crucial for remote teams. Mentorships and continuing education may look different in an in-office environment than in remote work, so leaders must prioritize them in remote work.

Here are some clear signs of a negative remote employee experience:

• Lack of trust 

• Employee turnover

• Disengaged teams

• Micromanagement 

Slack conducted a study highlighting employees' top challenges while working from home. Here is what they found: 

• Unstable Wi-Fi or internet access

• Maintaining and building working relationships with colleagues

• Staying focused and avoiding distractions

• Feelings of loneliness or isolation

• Keeping up with what others are working on

Leaders can mitigate many of these issues with a strong employee experience strategy. 

How return-to-work policies hurt employee experience scores 

Some employees are urging their employees back into the office. How does this impact employee experience scores? Spoiler alert — it’s not good. 

Because they were interested in the effects on the employee experience of the increasing return-to-work orders, The Future Forum ran a study to see how returning to physical offices impacts employee experience scores. 

Unsurprisingly, employee experience scores have dropped to near-record lows across all eight employee experience measures that they survey. 

Image Source: The Future Forum

According to The Future Forum, full-time office employees report the most abrupt declines compared to their remote or hybrid peers. Here are some of the changes:

• 2x reduction in work-life balance

• 1.6x decline in satisfaction with their work environment

• 1.5x increase in work-related stress and anxiety

Image Source: The Future Forum

The language — often prompted by C-level executives — about the return-to-office movement doesn’t match current workforce data. On the other hand, Hubstaff remains, as we always have, a 100% remote workforce. Let’s talk about how we enable our remote team to thrive.

We’re proud of our employee experience here at Hubstaff and believe our software plays a key role. We’ve been focusing on remote employee experience long before it was fashionable. 

Hubstaff provides a complete system of tools designed around remote team experience (RTE). Here are some critical ways that Hubstaff improves the remote employee experience. It helps you:

• Maintain peace of mind that your team is working productively 

• Build a company culture that attracts the best talent

• Ensure your team is content and motivated to do their best work

• Make the best resource management decisions possible

With online timesheets, reporting, automated payroll, invoicing, and scheduling, Hubstaff enables our remote team to thrive while working internationally and in countless different time zones.

Companies that don’t respond quickly to this new way of working and need for remote team experience will struggle with internal stress, a lack of productivity, and high talent turnover.

On the other hand, companies that eagerly embrace the need to support a solid remote employee experience will have happier employees motivated to do their best work.

The way to save money and make money is to invest in your team. It’s about reducing turnover and ensuring they love their work. You’ll see this investment returned through an improved remote employee experience, and you’ll be delighted by significantly increased productivity and profits.