Reshaping Employee Experience and Organizational Culture: Lessons From the Tumultuous Events of 2020 and 2021

Through interviews with seven thriving organizations that reported gains in both productivity and employee engagement/work-life balance as well as analysis of new survey data, this study explores how organizations can respond to the tumultuous events of 2020-21 and recreate work in ways that maintain productivity while enhancing their employees’ experience and contributing to a healthy organizational culture.

Executive Summary

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, virtually every employee in America has experienced dramatic change in their work life at the same time that they have been confronted with economic uncertainty and isolation from family and friends. Millions became unemployed. Many in essential roles risked their health on a daily basis to serve the public. Many professional and office employees suddenly began performing their jobs remotely, and many are likely to continue to do so postpandemic. Meanwhile, several incidents since the start of the pandemic have caused a heightened awareness of racial injustice and renewed employer commitment to addressing it.

In addition to redefining where many employees conduct their work, the pandemic and related crises of 2020 and early 2021 are reshaping the employee experience itself. The Conference Board conducted its second Workplace Reimagined survey in September 2020 and found that while 60 percent of respondents reported a perceived increase in productivity since the start of the pandemic, many said that multiple aspects of the employee experience were eroding. Employee burnout, the number of employees with mental health problems, and time spent in meetings had increased, while work-life balance, engagement and morale, and the number of employees reporting high levels of personal well-being had decreased.

These results suggest that for many organizations, the perceived productivity gains were being achieved at the expense of the employee experience.

However, a number of the September 2020 survey respondents reported an increase in productivity and in many of the aspects of a positive employee experience, which is closely intertwined with organizational culture. Our research has revealed that the crises of 2020 and 2021 have accelerated the pace of organizational culture change. While culture transformation initiatives typically take two to three years to take effect, almost half of organizations surveyed in April 2021 reported that their culture had changed in just one year since the outbreak of the pandemic.

This report examines how the tumultuous events of 2020 and the first half of 2021 have reshaped both the employee experience and organizational culture and what lessons can be applied for organizations to be able to thrive in the future. To do so, we combine the qualitative findings from seven interviews with companies originally surveyed in September 2020 that reported high productivity and high employee experience along with April 2021 quantitative data from the third Workplace Reimagined survey.

How The Conference Board defines employee experience and organizational culture

Employee Experience (EX): How an employee 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.

Organizational Culture: The organization’s shared mission and set of accepted organizational values, behaviors, and practices (in other words, what we do and why we do it).

Insights for What’s Ahead

The thriving organizations that reported both productivity gains and enhanced employee experience during the crises of 2020 each demonstrated several of the following six attributes that can serve as lessons for those organizations rethinking their talent strategy post-COVID-19:

1. Trust and Offer Flexibility. Rather than heightening surveillance, thriving organizations trusted employees to make good decisions about where, when, and how they performed their work. They offered flexibility, grounded in trust, which fostered productivity at the same time that it enhanced the employee experience.
2. Communicate Frequently and Transparently. Thriving organizations communicated frequently and transparently through virtual town halls and other forums. Senior leaders went beyond the script by authentically sharing their own challenges, inviting employees to ask questions, and allowing themselves to be seen on camera as real people—rather than solely as polished executives.
3. Make Genuine Caring a Priority. Thriving organizations augmented their well-being programs in response to increased stress and anxiety. They asked employees what they needed and fulfilled those needs—from more flexible hours to noise- cancelling headsets. Leaders spoke openly about caring for employees, and several companies incorporated caring into their mottos, such as “care and compete” and “grace and space.”
4. Commit to Inclusion. Thriving organizations amplified their focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, recognizing the diverse needs and experiences among their employees and consciously working to develop both equitable and inclusive solutions.
5. Amplify Mission and Purpose. Thriving organizations recognized the power of a common purpose as a unifying force for remote and geographically dispersed employees.
6. See Opportunity in Crisis and Be Agile. Several thriving companies that had initiated organizational transformations prior to 2020 used the crises of 2020 and early 2021 as an opportunity to accelerate their transformation, rather than allowing the crises to impede it. They rose to the challenge with agility and decisiveness.