We’ve never had so much information about how people experience work.
Employee surveys, pulse checks, listening platforms, people analytics and increasingly sophisticated AI tools give organisations access to insights that would have been difficult to imagine a decade ago. We can track trends, compare benchmarks, identify patterns and explore differences between employee groups.
In many ways, this is good news. Understanding how people experience work matters, and better evidence should help organisations make better decisions.
But there’s a question worth asking. Has our ability to improve employee experience kept pace with our ability to measure it?
Because while the tools have become more sophisticated, many of the challenges facing employees remain remarkably familiar.
When understanding becomes the activity
There’s something reassuring about measurement. It gives us something tangible to work with. We can demonstrate progress, identify priorities and show stakeholders that we’re taking employee engagement seriously.
And in organisations where people teams are under pressure to demonstrate their value, having credible evidence is particularly important.
But somewhere along the way, it’s possible for the process of understanding employee experience to become an activity in its own right.
We design a survey, collect responses, analyse the findings, present the results and develop action plans. Then, before long, it’s time to measure again.
None of these activities is inherently problematic. In fact, they’re often essential. The difficulty comes when the time and energy invested in understanding the experience outweighs the effort and attention given to changing it.
It’s easy to confuse activity with progress, particularly when the activity produces something visible. A dashboard, report or action plan feels like an achievement. Improving the everyday experience of work is often slower, less straightforward and much harder to demonstrate.
Have we made things more complicated than they need to be?
Employee experience is complex. People have different needs, expectations and circumstances. Organisations operate within different contexts, and what works well in one environment might be entirely inappropriate in another.
So we’re certainly not arguing for simplistic solutions.
But there is a difference between recognising complexity and creating unnecessary complication.
Consider some of the things that consistently influence how people experience work. Having clarity about what’s expected. Being treated fairly. Feeling trusted. Having opportunities to develop. Being able to do meaningful work without constantly battling inefficient processes or competing priorities.
These aren’t particularly new ideas. And while they may be relatively easy to describe, they’re often much harder to deliver.
Improving them might require changes to how work is organised, how decisions are made, what managers are expected to do, or how different teams collaborate. These are organisational challenges, not simply employee engagement activities.
Which perhaps helps explain why we sometimes gravitate towards another programme, framework or measurement tool. They’re often easier to introduce than changing the underlying conditions that shape people’s experiences.
Why improving employee experience starts after the insight
Imagine an organisation discovers that employees are frustrated by a lack of autonomy. The finding is clear. The data is credible. Perhaps external benchmarking even shows that the organisation performs particularly poorly in this area.
But what happens next?
An obvious response might be to provide managers with training about empowerment, or launch an initiative encouraging people to take greater ownership.
Yet what if the real issue is that decisions have to pass through multiple approval processes? Or that managers are held accountable for outcomes but given very little freedom to make decisions themselves?
In that situation, encouraging people to behave differently won’t necessarily change their experience. The organisation needs to examine the systems, structures and expectations creating the problem.
This is where human-centred design becomes particularly valuable. Rather than moving directly from a finding to a solution, we spend time understanding what’s happening, why it’s happening and what might genuinely make a difference.
It also means involving employees in exploring and testing potential improvements, rather than simply asking them to describe what’s wrong.
The aim isn’t to produce a more elaborate action plan. It’s to make better-informed changes to the experience itself.
From more insight to better decisions
Of course, none of this means we should stop measuring employee experience. Quite the opposite.
Good evidence helps us challenge assumptions, understand different perspectives and identify where our attention might be most valuable. Without it, we risk relying on anecdote, instinct or whichever issue happens to be attracting the most attention. But perhaps we need to rethink what success looks like.
Instead of asking whether we’ve improved our engagement score, we might ask what we’ve learned about people’s experiences, what we’ve changed as a result and whether those changes are making work better. And rather than judging the sophistication of our approach by how much data we can collect, perhaps we should judge it by the quality of the decisions that data helps us make.
This also changes how we might approach external research and benchmarking. The real value isn’t necessarily in knowing whether we’re performing better or worse than other organisations. It’s in using the wider evidence to challenge our thinking, ask better questions and make more informed decisions about where to focus our efforts.
That’s the thinking behind our 2026 Benchmarking Employee Experience and Engagement Report. It’s an opportunity to look beyond the headline figures, reflect on what the evidence tells us and consider what it might mean for our own organisations.
And it’s the conversation we’ll be continuing in our upcoming webinar, Beyond the score: What the latest EX & EE evidence really tells us. We’ll explore how to make sense of the findings, what we can and can’t learn from benchmarks, and how to turn that understanding into meaningful improvements. Sign up here to secure your place.
Because ultimately, the point isn’t to become better at describing work. It’s to make work better.
