Employee Experience

UKEXA 2026 Live Poll: 119 EX Leaders Share Biggest Blockers to Employee Experience

At the UK Employee Experience Awards (UKEXA) 2026 ceremony on 9 July, attendees took part in a live poll exploring where employee experience stands today. The session drew 119 poll participants and generated 397 responses across three questions. The results...

Microsoft’s Xbox AI Restructuring Meets Its First Union Pushback  

Microsoft’s Xbox division is heading into a public standoff with its own workforce. On 15 July, members of Bethesda Game Studios’ union will march at four studio locations under the banner ‘Save Our Devs’, protesting the latest wave of job...

Your Employee Experience News Roundup: Job Hugging, Revolut’s Graduate Office Mandate and Microsoft Layoffs

In this week’s employee experience news roundup, retention looks healthy on paper, but look closer and the story gets messier. Gartner’s “job hugging” data suggests people are staying out of fear rather than commitment — many are turning down new...

The UK Employee Experience Awards 2026 Winners Revealed 

On 9 July, finalists gathered at Park Plaza Riverbank, London, for the UK Employee Experience Awards (UKEXA) 2026, the first time in over six years that the finals have taken place live and in person.  Nineteen organisations made the 2026 shortlist, presenting a...

Voice Deepfakes Have Broken the Contact Centre’s Oldest Trust Test: Here’s How You Can Safeguard Against Them

For as long as contact centres have existed, agents have made one sure bet. Namely, that a voice is a fingerprint. Sound right, and you are who you say you are. According to the people who build and test today’s...

Human and AI Workforce Management: Why Managing Hybrid Human and AI Teams Changes Everything

Like it or not, AI colleagues have officially become a real part of the workforce. We’re not just using AI tools any more; we’re delegating the same tasks to AI assistants that human beings have been tackling for years. Gartner thinks...

Revolut Scraps Remote-First Graduate Policy. Seven Experts Disagree on Whether That’s Good for Them

Revolut’s graduate return-to-office policy marks a clear reversal. From next year, graduate hires will need to be in the office at least three days a week, the company has confirmed, scrapping the ‘remote-first’ approach it once used to attract them. Graduates...

Job Hugging: Why Low Turnover May Be Hiding a Disengagement Problem  

Job hugging is leaving employees present but disengaged, and organisations that read this as healthy retention risk missing the cost to performance, culture and the customer experience. People are increasingly clinging to their jobs out of fear rather than choice in...

Copilot Now Has to Earn Its Keep, Microsoft Tells Staff, as Fresh Round of Layoffs Expected

Microsoft has told the 11,000 people working on Copilot that the product needs to “earn the right to exist.” The line comes from an internal memo written by Jacob Andreou, the Executive Vice President who took charge of Copilot in...

Employee Experience News: Cisco’s AI Layoffs, the Workday Discrimination Ruling, and Superdry’s Governance Failure

This week in employee experience news, accountability caught up with automation. A court refused to let an AI vendor hide behind ‘we just built the tool’, Cisco paired a personalised AI rollout with job cuts in the same window, and...

Five Governance Gaps the Superdry Case Exposes in Toxic Retail Leadership

The latest retail scandal is more than another cautionary tale. It exposes how organisational systems fail to hold power to account when the person wielding it sits at the very top. In May 2026, Superdry co-founder James Holder was convicted of raping...

Is Your CRM About to Replace Your WEM Platform? What CX Leaders Need to Know

For years, workforce engagement management occupied its own corner of the CX stack. It was technically adjacent to the contact centre or CRM platform, but deliberately separate. Vendors like Verint, Calabrio, and NICE built substantial businesses on that separation. They...