Employee Experience is a business imperative, not an HR project.
For too long, employee experience (EX) has been treated as a peripheral concern: an HR project, a culture initiative, or a morale booster.
That mindset is not only outdated – it’s expensive.
In today’s highly competitive, talent-constrained, and AI-disrupted world, EX is a strategic lever that touches everything, including productivity, customer experience, innovation, retention, and brand reputation.
It’s time to stop talking about EX as if it’s an initiative and start treating it like what it truly is: a leadership priority that demands a permanent seat at the executive table.
Here’s how to make that shift – from non-existent or scattered ownership to strategic influence.
1. Connect EX to Strategic Business Outcomes
If EX is framed as a “people program/initiative,” it’ll never make it past the HR agenda. To earn executive-level attention, you must tie it directly to measurable outcomes that the business already values:
- Financial Impact: Quantify the cost of turnover, slow onboarding, or disengaged employees. Show how improving EX drives efficiency and profitability.
- Customer Outcomes: Draw the direct connection between employee experience and customer experience – especially in customer-facing or customer-enabling roles.
- Operational Efficiency: Demonstrate how better internal experiences reduce friction, eliminate rework, and accelerate time-to-productivity.
- Risk Reduction: Reposition EX as a mitigator of brand, compliance, and legal risk – burnout, toxic cultures, equity issues, and leadership churn all carry massive risk exposure.
Speak in numbers and outcomes. Don’t sell EX as a feel-good initiative. Sell it as performance infrastructure. Executives fund what impacts performance, mitigates risk, or drives growth and other desired outcomes. Frame EX accordingly.
2. Speak the Language of the C-Suite
Employee sentiment scores won’t get you executive commitment. Business impact will.
Stop saying things like: “We need to improve employee engagement.”
Start saying: “Our onboarding experience is adding 60 days to productivity and costing $4M annually in lost capacity.”
Stop saying: “We need to fix our culture.”
Start saying: “Manager behaviors are driving 40% of attrition and dropping our customer satisfaction scores by 12 points.”
Make action statements that are linked to outcomes. Replace HR jargon with business language. EX is a lever for profitability, productivity, brand value, and market differentiation. EX is your performance infrastructure. Sell it as such.
3. Make EX Strategic and Systemic
If EX lives in a survey tool, a one-off initiative, or a culture committee, then it’s already lost. If it remains fragmented, i.e., owned by HR, touched by IT, ignored by Ops, then it will never scale. You need an enterprise-wide EX strategy, not a collection of programs.
You need a true EX strategy that is:
- Aligned with your corporate strategy
- Focused on high-impact moments and journeys (e.g., onboarding, internal mobility, manager effectiveness)
- Co-owned across functions (HR, IT, Ops, CX, Finance, etc.)
- Designed with employee input, i.e., not for them, but with them
- Tied to metrics that capture both employee sentiment and operational performance
This isn’t about perks or pulse surveys. It’s about intentional design of how people experience work every day, across the entire employee lifecycle.
Strategic EX is cross-functional, measurable, and embedded – not episodic or siloed.
4. Shift HR’s Role from Owner to Orchestrator
HR cannot – and should not (and probably does not) – own every element of the employee experience. Most moments that define the employee experience don’t happen in HR. They happen in:
- Meetings with managers
- Clunky systems and broken workflows
- Policy bottlenecks
- Decision-making processes that exclude or exhaust people
Instead of “owning” EX, HR should orchestrate it by:
- Connecting silos across departments
- Designing and governing the EX strategy (see governance structure details below)
- Embedding employee insights into decision-making
- Enabling leaders and managers with tools, data, and guidance to design and deliver better experiences
- Championing systems thinking and journey mapping
Think of HR as the COO of the Employee Experience – not the custodian of it.
5. Build an EX Governance Structure
To scale EX beyond intention and to make it operationally real, you need structure, accountability, and cross-functional alignment.
Here’s what a governance model can look like:
- An Executive EX Council with cross-functional leaders from HR, IT, Ops, Legal, Finance, and CX
- An Executive Sponsor that champions EX across the organization and works hand in hand with the CX Executive Sponsor to ensure everyone understands the connection between EX and CX – and acts accordingly
- A core EX team that mirrors the work of – and links to – the core CX team
- A clear charter linking EX priorities to business strategy
- Defined roles and responsibilities for design, delivery, and accountability
- Shared KPIs across functions, not just HR
- Regular reporting to the executive team on experience risks and wins
Governance brings structure, consistency, clarity, and commitment. Without it, EX will get buried.
6. Elevate the Role – and the Reporting Line
If EX is as important as you say it is, the org chart should reflect that. It needs representation at the highest levels.
- Appoint a Chief Employee Experience Officer or Chief People & Culture Officer, with executive-level reporting
- Ensure they have a seat at the leadership table, not buried three levels below it
- Tie executive bonuses or performance reviews to EX success
- Embed EX into every transformation, acquisition, and strategy conversation, including M&A, restructuring, and customer innovation
This one should probably be #1 in this post, but these are all important aspects to getting EX a seat at the table. After all, no seat = no power. When EX is part of the executive team, it becomes a lens through which all decisions are evaluated. So, position EX where decisions are made – not after they’re made.
7. Get the CEO on Record
Nothing elevates EX like CEO-level visibility and advocacy. If the CEO isn’t committed to EX, it won’t get funded, prioritized, or protected. Here’s how to engage him/her:
- Present EX as a business-critical capability, as a risk or growth driver – not an HR ask
- Show industry benchmarks from competitors and market leaders; what are those considered best-in-class doing?
- Tie EX to CEO-level priorities: culture transformation, retention, innovation, digital transformation, talent risk, and investor conversations
- Get public CEO commitment: in town halls, board meetings, annual reports, strategic narratives
- Do the same things we do to get commitment for customer experience
EX that isn’t modeled from the top isn’t sustainable. Culture and experience are reflections of leadership.
In Closing
Make EX unignorable.
If you want employee experience to have a seat at the table, stop treating it like a side project or waiting for an invitation. Treat it like it belongs there, like the business-critical function that it is. Bring the data. Bring the impact (EX drives performance, retention, innovation, growth). Bring the urgency.
Then deliver on the promise.
Fix the ownership.
Don’t bury or silo EX in HR.
Fix the experience.
Don’t pitch it as a project or label it as a program.
And absolutely don’t undersell its power – while culture erodes and talent walks out the door.
Culture is the foundation. EX is the driver. And together they shape every outcome your business cares about, i.e., customer loyalty, operational excellence, and sustained competitive advantage.
Employee experience doesn’t deserve a seat at the table as a courtesy. It demands one as a business necessity. It should be helping lead the entire conversation.
On what high-performing companies should be striving to create: A great place for great people to do great work. ~ Marilyn Carlson, former CEO of Carlson Companies
ABOUT ANNETTE
Annette Franz is an internationally recognized employee and customer experience thought leader, coach, speaker, and author. In 2019, she published her first book, Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business); it’s available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats. In 2022, she published her second book, Built to Win: Designing a Customer-Centric Culture That Drives Value for Your Business [Advantage|ForbesBooks], which is available to purchase on Amazon, Books A Million!, Target, Barnes & Noble, and thousands of other outlets around the world! And, finally, Annette’s third book, Employee Understanding: A Three-Pillar Framework for Designing a Great Experience and Driving Business Success, is now available on Amazon! Sign up for our newsletter for updates, insights, and other great content that you can use to up your EX and CX game.
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