Employee experience (EX) has become a central focus in today’s fluid business world, not just as a concept, but as a continuous, evolving commitment to the people who bring businesses to life. But as organisations strive to embed EX into their core strategies, one key question keeps surfacing — where does employee experience sit? Who actually owns it?
The simple answer? It depends.
The reality? Everywhere, and nowhere exclusively. Many business leaders agree that HR (or people teams) are the natural home for employee experience. HR brings the frameworks, policies, tools, and structure — owning the strategy and often coordinating the action.
HR can’t carry the load alone
In many organisations, HR chairs cross-functional groups — like the aptly named ‘culture carriers’ — that bring together key influencers to shape and drive employee experience forward.
But HR alone can’t carry the weight. As one leader that I have recently spoken to put it, “HR can own the survey and write the policies, but employee experience is inseparable from culture, and no one function can own that.”
Senior executives, operational leads, marketing and communications, finance, and even corporate social responsibility (CSR) functions all play vital roles. One business leader that I know well, with responsibility for over 2,500 staff described how their team includes a colleague experience manager and an engagement manager, with strong dotted-line collaboration into HR and communications. This structure allows them to align with the business’s strategic goals while retaining the agility to drive their own initiatives.
Employee experience as a mindset
This approach reflects a growing recognition that EX is not just a program or department — it’s a mindset. It’s embedded in leadership behaviour, communication style, recognition culture, learning opportunities, and how work-life balance is supported.
Here are five pillars that have the greatest impact on how employees feel at work: leadership and communication, recognition and rewards, personal and professional growth, the work environment, and flexibility.
Culture drives employee experience
Many business leaders agree on a crucial aspect: culture drives employee experience. Culture is not top-down — it’s lived across an entire organisation. It’s co-created.
Some organisations are adopting democratic approaches to completing tasks. For instance, there are ‘activity committees’ selected annually. The tone of communication is set by the executive leadership team, but it is enabled and enacted by everyone.
This reflects a shift from command-and-control leadership of the past towards a shared ownership model. The idea isn’t to centralise power, but to empower everybody.
What’s clear is that for employee experience to be optimised it cannot be a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ project. It’s an ongoing business investment, in time and otherwise. Successful EX is built on continuous listening, feedback, action, and refinement.
Roles like champions, culture carriers, and colleague EX managers help operationalise this ongoing journey, but ultimately, it’s the collective accountability from leaders, teams, and individuals that sustains it.
Another approach is to incorporate EX within the CX function.
HR and people functions already have huge workloads with the whole changing landscape around homeworking, operating model transformation, and continuous restructuring.
Is taking ownership of employee experience too much to ask? Customer experience functions certainly already have relevant tools and processes to be able to measure, manage and influence EX. In theory at least, customer experience has the skills to influence organisational-wide transformation, at all levels.
Essentially, success is shaped by identifying the answers to three critical questions: What are we trying to achieve with an employee experience strategy? Who or what is going to deliver it? And, what governance and structures ensure it stays alive and accountable?
Employee experience does need a ‘home’ and ownership and accountability, but more importantly, it needs a network and commitment. HR may be best placed to hold the employee experience strategy, but to be effective its deployment needs to live across the organisation.
There’s no one-size-fits-all model, and the best performing organisations don’t just define where employee experience sits. They co-own it, together.
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