Recruitment, onboarding new employees, supporting their career development and improving working conditions: these are the day-to-day operational challenges that HR teams manage. Behind these practical demands lies a broader issue, that of the employee experience. Just as the customer experience structures the relationship between a company and its buyers, the employee experience structures the relationship between an organisation and its teams. This analogy invites HR functions to adopt the posture of an "internal service provider", attentive to the needs of each employee at every stage of their journey. And the effects on collective performance are very real.
The Employee Experience: A Lever with Three Dimensions
For Employees: Well-being at the Heart of Engagement
The employee experience covers an employee's entire journey within a company: from recruitment through to onboarding, from skills development to the day-to-day quality of their working conditions, as well as the recognition of their investment and adaptation to new ways of working. When it is well managed and consistent, its effects are measurable. 96% of employees state that the degree of alignment between their own values and the company's culture is a key factor in their job satisfaction (source: Points de contact).
This data reveals something fundamental: the employee experience is not a peripheral comfort issue. It is a driver of engagement, and engagement translates directly into retention. An engaged employee has an 87% probability of staying with their company, a figure that represents a considerable challenge of continuity and stability for organisations that struggle to retain their talent.
For Employers and Clients: A Coherence That Creates Value
The employee experience generates shared benefits for three parties: employees, employers and clients.
For employers, a well-structured employee experience makes it possible to attract the best profiles, reduce staff turnover, strengthen the engagement of existing teams and retain talent, particularly through dedicated talent management tools.
For clients, the effect is more indirect but just as tangible: they perceive the coherence between a company's internal organisation and the quality of the product or service it offers them. An engaged team delivers higher-quality work. Employee satisfaction influences client satisfaction, and this dynamic strengthens over time.
Swile: A Unicorn Built on Employee Engagement
From Lunchr to Unicorn: A Well-Timed Market Entry
Founded in 2016 by Loïc Soubeyrand under the name Lunchr, Swile is a French company specialising in meal vouchers and employee benefits. In less than four years, it joined the highly exclusive club of French unicorns, companies valued at over one billion dollars, by raising $200 million.
Its trajectory illustrates the strategic role of the employee experience in driving company growth. By leveraging an excellent time-to-market and placing employee engagement at the very top of its priorities, Swile set itself apart in a highly competitive market. The company holds 13% market share, equivalent to 15,000 client companies and €850 million in ticket volume issued per year, a position built in part thanks to the coherence between its internal experience and the quality of its service offering.
The Employee Experience as a Strategic Differentiator
What Swile's journey illustrates clearly is that the employee experience is not a comfort-driven investment. It is a foundational competitive advantage. By pioneering employee engagement and offering a seamless experience for both its own teams and its clients, Swile built lasting differentiation in its market.
The underlying logic is straightforward: a company that treats its employees with the same care it extends to its clients creates a coherence that is perceptible externally. This is precisely the analogy that HR Tech start-ups have seized upon to develop tools equal to the challenge.
HR Tech: Driving the Transformation of the Employee Experience
Tools That Simplify and Personalise the HR Journey
HR Tech start-ups have identified a genuine need within many organisations: to better structure, improve the reliability of, and personalise the employee experience at every stage of the journey. By offering innovative solutions, they help HR teams refocus on human support, saving them time on administrative tasks and monitoring processes.
This shift reflects a workplace reality: the employee experience and well-being at work have become productivity factors in their own right. Organisations that genuinely integrate them into their HR strategy turn them into a lever for collective performance. Those that neglect them face growing challenges in terms of attractiveness, retention and team engagement.
Klara, in Service of the Employee Experience
It is within this context that Klara operates. Designed to simplify and structure talent management processes, the tool gives HR teams a clear and centralised view of available skills, possible career paths and each employee's development needs.
By saving time on processes, Klara frees up space for what matters most: the human relationship, personalised support, and recognition of teams. The tool does not replace the HR approach; it strengthens it and makes it more legible for everyone. In a context where employees expect an experience that matches their expectations, the ability to combine process efficiency with quality of support makes all the difference for organisations seeking to retain their talent over the long term.
