Editorial
Research Report
The ROI of Employee Experience
We've turned work into a series of transactions.
Every meeting has a stated purpose and a hard stop. Every conversation should yield an action item. Every interaction is an opportunity to capture data, measure engagement or move someone through a funnel.
We've become so obsessed with optimizing each moment that we've forgotten what those moments were supposed to be for.
The promise of workplace technology has always been efficiency: do more with less, automate the mundane, streamline the friction. And now, with AI speeding into every corner of work, we hear the same refrain: these tools will "free people up for higher-value work."
But here's what rarely gets said aloud: higher-value work often looks like thinking. Like having unhurried conversations. Like staring out the window while an idea takes shape. Like the kind of unstructured connection that builds trust and sparks insight — none of which fits neatly into a productivity metric.
We say we want to free people for deeper work, but we haven't actually made space for depth. We've just made space for more transactions.
The Transactional Mindset
Watch how we talk about work now. Colleagues become "stakeholders." Conversations become "touchpoints." Relationships become "networks to leverage." Even our language has been taken over by the logic of exchange.
This isn't accidental. When every platform we use is designed to capture, measure and optimize, we start to see the world through that lens. The calendar app that schedules our days in fifteen-minute increments. The project management tool that turns collaboration into a sequence of assigned tasks. The communication platforms that timestamp every exchange and calculate our response rates. The analytics dashboards that reduce customer relationships to lifetime value calculations.
We've built an infrastructure that treats human interaction as inventory to be managed.
The result is a kind of relational poverty in the midst of apparent connection. We're more networked than ever and somehow lonelier at work. We have more data about our colleagues and customers than any generation before us, and yet we understand them less. We've optimized for efficiency and lost something we don't have a metric for: serendipity.
What Gets Lost
Ask anyone where their best ideas come from, and they'll rarely point to a scheduled brainstorming session. They'll tell you about a conversation that wandered somewhere unexpected. A chance encounter in a corridor. An offhand comment that lodged in their memory and resurfaced months later in a completely different context.
This is the white space — the unscheduled, unmeasured territory where serendipity lives. And we're systematically eliminating it.
In our pursuit of productivity, we've optimized away the conditions that allow creativity, innovation and genuine human connection to flourish. Every minute accounted for. Every interaction purposeful. Every relationship evaluated against what it might deliver.
But you can't build a relationship in a transaction. You build it in the space between transactions — in the follow-up that wasn't required, in remembering what matters to someone, in showing up consistently rather than strategically.
Reclaiming the Unmeasurable
If AI really is going to take over our transactional work, we have a choice to make. We can fill the liberated time with more transactions — more meetings, more messages, more emails. Or we can reclaim that time for what humans actually do best: think, connect and create in ways that can't be reduced to an algorithm.
This requires a fundamental shift in how we value work. It means protecting time for unstructured thinking and resisting the urge to fill every gap with another task. It means measuring what matters — even when that means accepting that some things can't be measured at all. It means treating "I spent an hour having coffee with a colleague" as the essential infrastructure of trust and collaboration.
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Technology should serve relationships, not replace them. Efficiency should create space for what matters, not consume every moment in pursuit of marginal gains.
The magic has always lived in the white space. Perhaps it's time we stopped trying to fill every inch of it with something we can count.
Editor's Note: What does it take to preserve serendipity in the workplace?
- When Conversation Died: The Rise of Automation Over Connection — We've replaced conversations with summaries, polls and AI agents, and called it productivity. What did we lose in the process?
- How Do We Balance Focus and Connection in the Digital Workplace? — We need to design our digital workplaces with these dual imperatives in mind.
- 5 Steps to a Deep-Work Friendly Organization — Deep work has value in today’s cutthroat attention economy.
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