Feature
If you've been following employee experience trends, you've probably seen the headlines and thought, "Wait, what’s happening?"
Multiple studies show that organizations are still pouring money into EX programs. Wellness platforms, engagement surveys, total rewards upgrades and listening tools top the list of investments, according to these studies.
So on paper, companies care about employee experience more than ever. Even more so than the boom days of sub-4% unemployment, where talent competitiveness was truly over the top.
But then you look at what's actually happening inside those same organizations and the floor drops out. Engagement is cratering, collaboration has collapsed and employees wouldn't recommend their workplace to a friend.
While leadership teams are nodding along when HR presents the latest EX initiative, the trust in that leadership is tanking. Something is incredibly wrong. It’s just not about money this time.
Fund the Program, Starve the Conditions
The data makes the contradiction impossible to ignore. Mercer's 2025 survey of nearly 1,500 HR leaders shows that 78% of companies report EX budgets held steady or grew, with health and well-being topping the priority list.
At the same time, global employee engagement just hit a decade low at 21%, costing the global economy $438 billion in lost productivity, according to Gallup's latest survey. Between Q3 2022 and Q2 2025, Gartner tracked what its analysts call a "culture recession," where the share of employees who'd recommend their organization as a great place to work fell from 35% to 26.5%, collaboration dropped to 12% and perceptions of innovation and agility collapsed.
The budgets prove companies care about employee experience. So why the disconnect?
Organizations are funding EX programs while gutting the foundational conditions those programs need to succeed.
You can't roll out a wellness platform and cut manager training in the same quarter, then wonder why adoption stalls. You can't launch an engagement survey while signaling through layoffs and efficiency mandates that cost-cutting matters more than people, then act surprised when employees check out.
Only 43% of HR leaders are satisfied with the impact of their EX initiatives and only 40% believe their programs meet ROI expectations, according to Mercer.
You can’t optimize your way out of a trust problem. Employees can see through thin corporate promises and performative programs — especially when they're carrying the load of three people.
The AI Efficiency Trap and Why EX Should Still Matter
AI use in many companies is accelerating the contradiction between what they say they value and what they actually prioritize.
Gartner found that 65% of employees are excited to use AI at work, yet 37% don't because their coworkers don't. They also found that nearly half want formal training, while more than a fifth receive minimal support.
When you deploy AI tools without training, without involving people, and without clarity on how AI will augment rather than replace work, you torch the goodwill you'll need for the next initiative. That trust is critical for AI adoption, too. George Penn, a managing vice president for Gartner’s HR practice, wrote that employees who trust leaders are 43% more engaged, and trust increases 6.5-fold when leaders demonstrate genuine concern.
This pattern isn't new or directly attributable to AI alone, though. Management cycles often oscillate between efficiency-focused models and human-centered corrections. For example, Frederick Taylor's efficiency-driven time studies gave way to Elton Mayo's human relations movement. The pendulum swings as power shifts or old realizations become new once again.
And yet, with Gallup estimating that a fully engaged global workforce could add $9.6 trillion in productivity, equal to 9% of global GDP, it's worth asking: What could be better for efficiency and results than ensuring that your employees consistently have a great experience while at work?
What Separates High-ROI EX Organizations
The economic case for investing in people has always been sitting in plain sight. But if you're funding employee experience and not seeing returns, there are a few things that successful organizations do that others don’t.
- High-ROI organizations transfer EX ownership out of HR and into the business. They give P&L owners accountability for engagement scores the same way they own revenue. They stop waiting for corporate to synthesize employee feedback six months after the fact and empower teams to diagnose and fix their own problems in real-time.
- They treat EX data like revenue data. They forecast attrition, spot early warning signs, and connect engagement to business outcomes before the quarterly review, not during the post-mortem. Put your EX scorecard next to your NPS dashboard and review both in the same meeting with the same urgency.
- They invest in people who know how to design employee experience, not just administer surveys. They train managers to act on feedback instead of assuming leadership osmosis will handle it. These execution choices separate companies that see 3x to 4x returns from those throwing money at programs that don't move the needle.
The basics work. The question is whether your organization will actually do them.
Stop Funding Programs While Destroying Your Foundation
You can't buy employee experience. You build it through a hundred small decisions about who gets trained, who gets heard and whether efficiency or humanity wins when they conflict.
Right now, most organizations are doing themselves a massive disservice. They're spending money on EX programs while gutting manager training, rushing AI deployments without employee input, and centralizing decision-making so tightly that local teams can't act on what they learn.
The budgets say one thing, but the execution says another. Employees see the gap and respond as one might expect.
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The pendulum will swing back when leaders stop trying to optimize their way out of a trust problem and start treating culture as the load-bearing structure it actually is.
The choice is sitting in front of you. The data shows what works. The question is whether your organization cares enough to act on it, or whether you'd rather keep funding engagement theater.
Editor's Note: Read more about aligning employee investments with results below:
- The Failure of the Employee Engagement Industrial Complex, Part 1 — Despite billions spent on tools, perks and programs, global employee engagement has barely improved in 15 years. This is an opportunity for leaders.
- The Silent Exit of Employee Experience: A Call to Action for CIOs — An open letter to CIOs on the role they play in protecting EX as a strategic priority — and why it matters for the long-term of their own functions.
- The New Playbook of Employee Experience — Organizations that treat engagement as an outcome of good design, not a program to fix, will build meaningful employee connections.
