Beyond Assumptions: How Leaders Shape Employee Experience

Leaders everywhere are talking about Employee Experience, and for good reason.

EX is perhaps the single most important thing an employer can do to improve engagement, productivity, and retention. 

But how many leaders actually understand EX? 

There are many different ways to define EX, but I’ve always been confident in saying that it refers to the sum total of all of the touchpoints and interactions an employee has with people, systems, processes, technologies, and the physical or virtual work environment. 

EX can manifest in every single contact between employees and their organizations: the working environment, recruitment and onboarding process, career development, performance reviews, and the critically important relationships with leaders and colleagues. 

In other words, there’s a lot of stuff in the EX bucket, and anecdotally, I can attest to the fact that many leaders are struggling to define an effective EX for their organizations. And when they can’t come up with a functional definition, you can bet the EX is suffering. 

Why is EX elusive for some leaders?  

EX is quite nuanced, and like many other aspects of talent management, some leaders do not have the patience to dig deep into the constituent elements. Often, these leaders believe they have bigger and more pressing priorities and push EX to the backburner. 

There are also generational issues at work. Huge tracts of the business world are managed by leaders who remain skeptical about modern theories of effective leadership. This skepticism means that some leaders do not acknowledge, or may underestimate, their role in delivering EX. 

It could be that many of these leaders wrongly assume their organizations have mastered EX and are reluctant – as leaders often are – to admit that they are actually doing a bad job. 

Whatever the motivating factors, what we have here is a significant gap between how employees and leaders are experiencing work. 

There's a disconnect between leaders and the front lines. 

This phenomenon is, in many ways, nothing new. Leaders routinely think their organizations do a better job in overall talent management than the people who work for those organizations. 

For example, during the pandemic, surveys revealed that executives thought they were performing really well given the circumstances; employees, on the other hand, were largely dissatisfied. 

The same thing happened during the Great Resignation, where research showed leaders consistently underestimated the growing desire of their employees to quit to find better jobs. Another recent and related survey found that 86%of executives thought trust was high among their employees; only 67%of employees who were polled said they trusted their leaders. 

Even when they identify the problem, leaders often apply the wrong solution. 

If you’ve ever been in a boardroom to review the results of a recent engagement survey, you know the focus is almost always on what organizations can do to “fix” employees. Rarely, it seems, do leaders take a step back and contemplate whether they are eroding EX. 

This failure to assess their own culpability is, again, a key cause of the gap between EX perception and reality. 

In a study of what it calls the “Manager Blind Spot,” Gallup found leaders regularly overestimate the amount of recognition and feedback they provide to their teams. Meaningful recognition and feedback are core precepts of effective EX, and failure to provide both can seriously undermine engagement.  

“Nearly 60% of managers feel they are doing a good job recognizing their team’s hard work and contributions,” Gallup reported in May 2024, “but only about a third of individual contributors (35%) share the same sentiment. Recognition isn’t happening as often as managers think, or it’s not being delivered in a memorable way for employees.” 

Better leaders are the key to better EX.

It’s pretty clear the path to better EX runs through your leadership culture. Although EX incorporates many different constituent elements – the onboarding process, opportunities for career development, peer relationships – it is not an overstatement to identify the constant contact and interaction between leaders and employees as the single most important determining factor in an effective EX. 

How should you address leadership opportunities that might be undermining EX? There are a number of strategies you can apply in the short term. Many of these will involve an organization-wide acknowledgement of the importance of EX, a commitment to addressing all of its various aspects, and support for leaders to deliver effectively. 

However, even before embarking on that kind of EX journey, the single most important thing organizations can do is stop over-estimating what they are providing now, and accept that leaders need to up their EX game.  

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Onboard with Trust: Employee Experience During the First 90 Days

Post-Layoff Success: Employee Experience for the Long Haul