Organizations that are sensitive to and invest in the “experience” of their workers are already experiencing these results, as both external research¹ and our own research findings confirm. A positive experience boosts employee affiliation, engagement, and loyalty to the organization, resulting in positive impact on productivity and innovation.² Initiatives designed by “guessing” what the workforce will respond to will not generate positive outcomes—they have to be informed and supported by the rigor of human capital analytics and continual feedback loops.

This report’s findings are based on interviews and two surveys of members of The Conference Board. The first survey was conducted in February 2020 just before COVID-19 took hold across the US (“prepandemic”); the second was conducted in October 2020 (“midpandemic”) and focused on how the pandemic was changing the way organizations think about workplace experience. The four research questions addressed include:

• How have the events of 2020 changed how organizations think about the workforce?
• How can we better understand the workforce experience through the use of analytics?
• How can we better understand the relationship between the workforce experience and human capital (HC) programs supporting the end-to-end employment life cycle?
• How can we better understand the relationship between HC programs and enterprise-level performance?

This report views workforce experience through the lens of human capital analytics (HCA). HCA captures data through both qualitative and quantitative analyses, and data obtained about the employment journey can be correlated to other measures of the HC function and enterprise-level performance to provide insights about employee and program efficiency. For the purposes of this report, The Conference Board has expanded its definition of employee experience to include all workers (e.g., full- and part-time employees, gig workers, contractors) and defines workforce experience as follows:

Workforce experience: How a worker thinks and feels during the entire organizational journey, from beginning as a prospect to becoming a candidate to being hired; through onboarding, internal movement, or promotion; and then finally, at retirement or exit, including all interactions along the way.³

• Organizations that regularly use HCA in their decision-making outperform those that do not. Organizations that report using HCA in their processes have an approximately 270 percent higher level of return on every $1 invested in HC compared to organizations not using HCA—an average HCROI of $19.75 compared to HCROI $7.25, shown by an analysis of public domain data of companies that participated in our surveys. Organizations with a committed HCA function are also seeing profit margins approximately 14 percent higher than organizations not using HCA. These results show a strong relationship between investment in people and worker productivity (a driver of profitability) and the resulting business performance. An organization’s pathway to profitability is to continue to efficiently invest in people and people programs and, in its HCA function, to generate insights that will improve enterprise performance.
• COVID-19, as well as resulting economic trends and demographic shifts, has changed the workforce experience, and HC leaders should be intentional about shaping this new experience during and especially beyond the pandemic. Leaders should focus on reducing workplace impediments for workers and evaluating “experience” from the worker’s point of view to address employee engagement, job satisfaction, productivity, longevity, and loyalty. They should reframe the definitions of “employee” and “workforce” to include nontraditional workers such as managed services, third-party sources, former employees, and even digital labor, all of which will be a critical part of “labor” going forward. Organizations should treat their workers as internal customers, using human-centered design thinking principles to examine the workforce experience end to end, from the point where individuals discover the employment brand, through their relationship with the organization, and even after their departure.
• Supported by analytics, HC professionals need to move from a process-oriented to a journey view of the workforce experience. Survey results show organizations are focusing their transformational initiatives primarily on the “new hire” part of the worker journey, with less attention given to what happens after the initial stages of the experience journey, a trend that is likely to lead to retention and turnover challenges in the future. The next horizon for HC is to transition from a myopic, siloed, process-focused perspective to that of the worker journey, where all experiences along the way receive equal attention to ensure people stay productive, engaged, and skilled. This shift in focus will also enhance the employment brand, current workforce experience, HC program effectiveness, and enterprise performance.
• Workplace transformation requires cross-functional collaboration, with HC as orchestrator and key coordinator. Per our respondents, the importance of this cross-functional collaboration continues to grow: 58 percent indicated it was a critical focus in our prepandemic survey, rising to 70 percent midpandemic. To improve the workforce experience, three mindset shifts are required: 1) Look at the employment journey from the worker perspective (rather than from the organizational, process, or technology perspective); 2) Involve the workforce in identifying and prioritizing opportunities for ergonomic/space improvement, rather than leaving all choices about technology and office space to technologists or the space planning function; and 3) Create a cross-functional collaboration informed by HCA that brings together internal functions that support the worker, such as space planning, IT/infrastructure, and security. Using analytics, HC can evaluate how effective the interdependency of functions and activities is for improving business outcomes.
• While workforce experience measurements exist, they are not yet tied to “what matters.” Our research shows that workforce experience is coming into focus, especially as organizations adapt to a new work reality. From the measurement perspective, the primary focus is still on employee sentiment and HC program effectiveness. To help HC better prioritize programs to support bottom-line impact, align HC investments to simultaneously generate meaningful financial and workforce experience impact. Organizations should use HCA to enhance impact and accelerate value by tying the experience measurements to business outcomes.
• Transparency and social activism are intensifying worker-centric priorities, leading to greater internal scrutiny of workforce policies and programs. Organizations recognize that growing transparency (thanks to employees publicly sharing information about their work environment), social activism, the investor community requiring more HC disclosures, and the focus on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) with associated reporting disclosures are all leading to a need for greater accountability, resulting in changes to organizational practices.⁴ Notably, social activism was a “medium” or “high” priority for 49 percent of respondents in the prepandemic survey, catapulting to 74 percent in the midpandemic survey; their workforce-related priorities shifted from “medium to low“ to “high.” We also observed a trend toward greater accountability for HC practices. Many organizations dramatically shifted their focus from “considering” changes to workforce policies (38 percent prepandemic to 16 percent midpandemic) to actively “changing” workforce policies (27 percent prepandemic to 64 percent midpandemic). Policy changes were focused on transparency, disclosure requirements, social activism, and stakeholder capitalism. These changes possibly reflect the pressure generated by the social justice movement experienced over the summer. Organizations should review their current policies and programs to understand if they are supporting more transparent and accountable corporate goals.
• Human-centered design thinking should be part of HC. In the past, HC program effectiveness was evaluated from the organization’s perspective—prioritizing program optimization and efficiencies. We have already seen business models shift in focus from manufacturing primacy to customer primacy; that is, from efficient manufacturing to the consumer as a driver of value creation, with business processes aligning to achieve a specific consumer objective. We believe we are now at an inflection point where workers’ experience or the “employee journey” will drive enterprise-level impact. Employees will now have a more profound impact on value creation for organizations. Leaders should shift their thinking from focusing on programs and policies to focusing on the overall workforce experience, using human-centered design thinking principles to change approach and using HCA to quantify enterprise-level impact.

[1] Kristine Dery and Ina Sebastian, “Building Business Value with Employee Experience,” MIT Center for Information Systems Research, June 15, 2017.

[2] Robin Erickson, Laura Sabattini, Amy Ye, and Amanda Popiela, DNA of Engagement: How Organizations Can Align Engagement and Inclusion to Enhance Employee Experience, The Conference Board, June 2020.

[3] Adapted from Erickson et al., How Organizations Can Align Engagement and Inclusion.

[4] Amanda Popiela, Robin Erickson, and Rebecca L. Ray, Even Higher Expectations in a Post-2020 World: How Organizations Engage with Social Change, The Conference Board, December 2020.