Employee experience and internal communication are now inseparable. How you communicate—what you share, how often, and through which channels—shapes every moment of the employee journey. And when communication breaks down, so does the overall employee experience.
A strong EX doesn’t just boost engagement and retention; it improves customer experience (CX), brand loyalty, and business performance. Organizations today need communication tools that support clarity, connection, and consistency. That’s where platforms like Poppulo help unify messages and create meaningful employee experiences at scale.
Key Takeaways:
- Employee experience (EX) shapes engagement, productivity, and your overall brand.
- Internal communication is one of the biggest drivers of EX and improving employee engagement.
- Companies struggle with burnout, hybrid work, and inconsistent communication.
- Better communication—clear, transparent, personalized—directly improves EX.
- Poppulo helps organizations strengthen employee experience through intelligent, unified internal communication tools.
More than ever before, organizations today are focusing on Employee Experience—not only to hold on to their best people and attract new talent—but because of its proven impact on the Customer Experience.
Employers increasingly realize the impact of employee experience on the company’s overall success.
While WTW’s 2025 Global Trends data shows that improving the employee experience is the number one strategic priority for organizations worldwide, a massive delivery gap remains. Only 27% of companies are aligning their workplace experience with employee needs, leaving most employees to navigate chaotic systems and departmental friction that stifle performance.
Understanding Employee Experience
A positive employee experience is the quality of every interaction an employee has with your organization—and it directly influences performance, engagement, and retention.
What is Employee Experience and why does it matter so much?
(Note, we explored this in a very popular webinar with Victoria Dew, CEO of Dewpoint Communications, which you can watch here)
Gallup defines employee experience as an employee’s journey with the company they work for. It encompasses every interaction throughout the employment cycle, as well as experiences related to the employee’s well-being, role, leaders, and workspace. It begins the minute the employee reads your job posting and continues until they depart from your company.
According to a survey from the Josh Bersin Company, several positive outcomes can be realized by paying attention to EX and implementing the proper strategies. These include:
- Increased productivity and satisfaction levels among employees
- A higher likelihood for companies to hit their financial targets
- Increased motivation and engagement
- Improved customer experience
- Increased employee retention
- Higher chance of innovating efficiently
Key Benefits of a Positive Employee Experience
When you elevate employee experience, the results show up everywhere in your organization.
- Higher engagement and motivation
- Increased productivity
- Improved employee well-being
- Lower turnover and onboarding costs
- Stronger company culture
- Better collaboration and innovation
The Link Between Employee and Customer Experience
Your employees shape your brand reputation and customer loyalty—making EX and CX inseparable.
The reality is that employees determine the success or failure of your company. Not only do they represent your overall brand image, but they also help determine your brand’s reputation. And there is no longer any doubt that the employee experience directly shapes the customer experience, for better or for worse.
The Multi-Million Dollar Impact of Communication on Employee & Customer Experience
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Therefore, organizations must consistently encourage a positive employee experience to enhance the overall customer experience. If you lose them, you’re losing a good investment.
Gone are those days of command-control employee experience, where employees did what the employer required because they received a monthly salary. Today, employers who do not consistently provide a positive EX usually have high turnover rates.
How Employee Experience Impacts Brand Perception and Customer Loyalty
Your employees are your brand. They’re the ones interacting with customers every day, shaping how people see your company. When employees feel disconnected or out of the loop, it shows—and customer experience takes the hit.
Research is clear: strong employee experience leads to stronger customer experience. Engaged employees give more. Disengaged employees do only what they must.
People want clear communication, meaningful work, and real support. Companies that don’t provide this face rising turnover—losing talent, knowledge, and money.
Bottom line: when you lose your employees’ trust, you risk losing your customers too.
Why Do Companies Find It Challenging to Deliver a Positive Employee Experience?
Despite good intentions, many organizations fail at EX due to burnout, disconnection, and poor communication.
Common Challenges Impacting EX
Although many companies are interested in delivering a positive EX, most find it challenging to deliver. Some of the reasons behind this include the following:
- Burnout
- Context switching
- Disengaged employees
- Hybrid work
Fortunately, all these challenges can be effectively overcome with the help of a consistent and compelling employee experience strategy, as Victoria Dew outlined in our webinar.
Overcoming Barriers with a Strong Communication Strategy
Employee communication plays a critical role in delivering positive EX. Good employee comms help make EX tangible in employees' minds and hearts. It breathes life into the employee experience.
The Role of Internal Communication in Shaping Employee Experience
Transparent, consistent communication builds trust, engagement, and a sense of purpose among employees.
Making EX Tangible Through Communication
Since the pandemic, many organizations have included several measures to achieve work-life balance among employees. They have also included more strategies to become more compassionate to employee needs and protect employees' well-being and health.
Importance of Communicating Policies and Well-being Initiatives
But what if these policies are not communicated effectively to the employees? The result: a negative employee experience.
This is because the policy fails to create change in the workplace, and employees remain feeling unseen and unheard. However, if the policies are effectively communicated and employees comprehend the policy’s effects, it will likely help employees feel more fulfilled at work.
Building Connection, Belonging, and Inclusion Through Communication
Many organizations fail to prioritize employee communications, despite increasing policies that encourage a positive EX. By effectively implementing good employee communication strategies, internal communications teams can assist organizations in various ways.
These include providing meaning and context for changes, pushing behavior changes and attitudes at the workplace, fostering belonging and inclusion, and winning employees' hearts and minds.
Leveraging Internal Communication Tools to Improve EX
Corporations continuously search for new methods to recruit top personnel, promote growth, and differentiate themselves from the competition. One of the easiest ways to attain these results is to use existing resources and tactics they are acquainted with to concentrate on employee experience.
Below are three essential ways you can improve employee experience with tools already in your company’s toolbox.
1. Minimize Friction
By minimizing friction in communication with workers, your team will likely be more aligned, engaged, and productive—regardless of where or how they work. Employees who are satisfied with their jobs are more likely to share their expertise with their co-workers. Rather than seeing other co-workers as competitors, they are more willing to collaborate.
2. Enhance Personalization
In the corporate world, the one-size-fits-all strategy has never worked. Given the diversified workspace in many organizations in this modern day and age, different employees have different needs and wants, and they may be more responsive to one form of communication over the other.
Therefore, companies need to find varied communication channels to communicate effectively with each employee.
3. Implementing a Storytelling Communication Strategy
People love listening to stories, and your employees are no exception. Companies can embrace the power of storytelling to increase engagement and boost communication levels.
Strategic storytelling requires creating captivating storylines and leveraging them to catch employee interest and develop empathy while connecting and engaging your workforce. It may make a message more memorable, magnify it, and even appeal to the emotions of your employees.
It’s clear that putting the focus on EX can help any company improve its bottom line. It boosts staff productivity, employee engagement, and the experience of customers. Improving your employee comms can help create the experience that employees today expect, but it requires the right communications tools. Luckily, we have those tools.
FWI | Poppulo can assist your company in enhancing organizational and operational communications by cutting through communication noise and the common overload of information to create the consumer-grade working experience that your employees need and demand.
Measurable Impact of Internal Communication on Employee Experience
Track engagement, retention, and productivity improvements to prove the ROI of better internal communication.
The beauty of focusing on internal communication and employee experience? You can measure it.
Employee Engagement and Retention Metrics
Strong employee experience strategy shows up in hard numbers:
- Engagement survey scores: Track overall satisfaction, connection to company mission, and willingness to recommend your organization
- Pulse survey trends: Monitor real-time feedback on morale, workload, and workplace sentiment to catch issues early
- Turnover and retention rates: Measure voluntary departures, especially among high performers and critical roles
- Manager–employee communication quality: Assess the strength of relationships, clarity of expectations, and feedback frequency between teams and leaders
- Time-to-productivity: Measure how quickly new hires become effective contributors
When internal communication improves, these metrics move in the right direction. Employees stay longer, contribute more, and refer talented friends.
Communication Effectiveness KPIs
To understand whether your internal communications are actually working, track indicators like:
- Open and read rates: Are employees engaging with your messages?
- Response rates: Are they taking action when needed?
- Channel performance: Which channels deliver the highest engagement?
- Content engagement: What topics or formats get the most attention?
- Employee sentiment: How do people feel about the frequency and quality of communication?
These KPIs help you continuously refine your approach and invest in the communication strategies that truly elevate the employee experience.
Poppulo’s Role in Enhancing Employee Experience
Poppulo helps organizations create meaningful, measurable employee communication experiences that drive real business results.
You know employees experience internal communication matters. But how do you actually make it happen at scale?
That's where Poppulo comes in.
Centralized Employee Communication Platform
Poppulo brings all your internal communication into one powerful platform, eliminating the chaos of scattered tools and missed messages.
With Poppulo, you can:
- Reach employees across email, mobile, intranet, and digital signage
- Ensure critical messages actually reach the right people
- Create a single source of truth for company information
- Reduce communication friction that frustrates employees
When employees know exactly where to find information, engagement naturally improves.
Data-Driven Insights and Engagement Analytics
Poppulo doesn't just send messages—it shows you what's working.
The platform provides:
- Real-time analytics on message performance
- Engagement metrics that reveal what resonates with employees
- Audience insights to refine your targeting and personalization
- Actionable data to continuously improve your communication strategy
You'll finally have proof of ROI when investing in improving employee engagement through better communication.
Seamless Multichannel Delivery
Your employees aren't all sitting at desks checking email. They're in warehouses, retail stores, hospitals, remote home offices, and on the move.
Poppulo ensures your messages reach everyone through:
- Mobile-first delivery for deskless workers
- Personalized content based on role, location, and preferences
- Multi-format support including video, images, and interactive content
- Automated workflows that ensure consistency without manual effort
The result? A consumer-grade communication experience that employees actually want to engage with.
Conclusion & Next Steps
Improving internal communication doesn’t just boost employee experience—it elevates customer experience and overall business performance. Today, strong EX communication is a true competitive advantage. The companies that excel prioritize clear, consistent messaging, use their tools with intention, measure what matters, and make employees feel genuinely valued and connected. You don’t need to overhaul everything—you just need a platform that brings communication together, delivers real insights, and makes the whole process simpler.
Ready to transform your employee experience? See how Poppulo empowers organizations to elevate their employee experience through effective internal communication.
FAQ
How does internal communication impact employee experience?
Clear communication reduces uncertainty, builds trust, and helps employees understand their role and purpose—directly improving EX.
What are the top challenges in improving EX?
Burnout, unclear communication, inconsistent messaging, and hybrid work complexities are the biggest obstacles.
How can internal communication tools like Poppulo help?
They consolidate channels, personalize communication, provide analytics, and ensure every employee receives timely, relevant information.
Why is employee experience important for business success?
Better EX leads to higher engagement, stronger productivity, lower turnover, and improved customer experience.
How can organizations measure improvements in EX?
By tracking engagement scores, retention rates, sentiment analytics, and communication effectiveness metrics.