Designing a Better Employee Experience

Gallup's 2024 State of the Global Workplace report found that only 23% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. The other 77% are either not engaged, going through the motions, or actively disengaged, meaning they are not just unhappy but are, in Gallup's language, "working against their employer's interests." The estimated cost of low engagement to the global economy sits at $8.9 trillion annually.

These are staggering numbers. They also tend to produce a particular kind of organizational response: more surveys, more perks, more all-hands meetings, and more sincerely worded communications from leadership about how much the team is valued. And engagement scores continue to plateau.

The problem is not that organizations don't care about their employees. Most do. The problem is that they are diagnosing a structural condition with relational remedies, and structure does not yield to sentiment.

The Experience Is the System

Here is a reframe that changes what organizations pay attention to: the employee experience is not primarily composed of how people feel about their work. It is primarily composed of what their work actually requires them to do, moment to moment, throughout the day.

The experience of being an employee at your organization is the experience of moving through your systems. The onboarding portal that never quite loads. The approval process that requires three separate sign-offs for a fifty-dollar purchase. The customer inquiry that can't be resolved in one interaction because the relevant information lives in a system the front-line employee doesn't have access to. The end-of-month reporting that requires manually reconciling data from four different platforms.

These are not inconveniences. They are the texture of daily work. And that texture, accumulated over weeks and years, is what employees are responding to when they tell a survey they are not engaged.

Jacob Morgan, who has studied employee experience at hundreds of organizations, identifies three environments that shape the experience: the physical environment, the cultural environment, and the technological environment. His research, published in The Employee Experience Advantage, found that companies investing thoughtfully in all three outperformed the S&P 500 by more than four times and generated 28% higher profit margins than their peers.

The technological environment—meaning the systems, tools, and processes people work within every day—is the one that most organizations invest in last and understand least.

Gidens Observation: In our workflow assessments, the single most common source of employee frustration is not pay, not management, and not culture. It's preventable friction in daily processes. Tasks that require more steps than they should. Information that should be available automatically but has to be hunted. Handoffs that get dropped because no system owns the transition. These are fixable problems.

The Onboarding Signal

If you want to understand the quality of your employee experience, start with onboarding. Not the orientation content, not the welcome lunch, but the actual operational experience of a new team member in their first thirty days.

What systems do they need access to? How long does it take to get that access? Is there a documented path through the processes they're responsible for, or are they dependent on informal instruction from whoever has time to help? When they encounter a situation they haven't seen before, is there a clear path to resolution, or do they have to figure out who to ask?

Onboarding is a microcosm of the employee experience because new employees have not yet adapted to the friction. They experience it clearly, before the workarounds become second nature and the inefficiencies become invisible. What frustrates a new employee in week two is very often what's subtly draining a veteran employee in year four, who has simply stopped noticing.

Friction as a Design Problem

The language of design is useful here because it centers the right question. Designers do not ask why users are failing. They ask why the design is producing failure. The system is the variable, not the person.

Applied to employee experience, this means asking: where in our operational environment are we creating friction that our employees have to absorb? Where are we asking people to compensate with extra effort for systems that are poorly integrated, poorly documented, or poorly suited to the actual work?

Friction shows up in measurable ways. Task completion times longer than they should be. Error rates elevated by manual data entry. Employee time spent on coordination and status-checking rather than value-producing work. Customer satisfaction scores that correlate, reliably, with the operational smoothness of the internal teams serving those customers.

Friction is also invisible in ways that don't show up in dashboards. The decision not to flag a problem because the process for flagging it is too cumbersome. The workaround that becomes standard practice because nobody has the bandwidth to fix the root cause. The talent that leaves not because they were unhappy with the mission but because they were tired of fighting the systems.

"Every minute an employee spends navigating a broken process is a minute they are not spending on the work they were actually hired to do. Multiply that by your headcount and your working days per year. That number is your friction cost."

What Better Looks Like

Designing a better employee experience is not about building a perfect system. It is about building a system that is honest about its imperfections and continuously improving them.

It means process clarity: every employee should be able to find, understand, and execute the processes relevant to their role without depending on informal knowledge networks. Documentation should be accurate, accessible, and written for the person doing the work, not for the person who designed it.

It means tool coherence: the systems employees use daily should talk to each other. Information entered in one place should not need to be re-entered somewhere else. Decisions made in one system should propagate appropriately to the systems that depend on them.

It means intelligent support: when an employee encounters a situation outside their normal parameters, they should have access to context and guidance that helps them resolve it rather than just escalate it. The system should make people smarter, not just faster.

And it means feedback that closes: when employees identify a problem in the operational environment, there should be a mechanism to act on that information. Organizations that collect employee feedback without acting on it do not just fail to improve. They actively signal that the feedback was never really wanted.

The Business Case

The employee experience is not a soft investment. The organizations that have redesigned their operational environments with employee experience as an explicit criterion consistently see the returns in the metrics that matter to the business.

Lower turnover. Shorter onboarding timelines. Fewer errors in customer-facing processes. Higher first-contact resolution rates. Faster response to market changes because the operational machinery can actually move when asked.

The employee experience is the operational architecture of your organization. Design it accordingly.