Employee Experience

M&S CEO Says Leaders Shouldn’t Switch Off Completely — But Intentional Disengagement Is What Drives Performance

In a recent speech at the Business Leader Summit in London, M&S CEO Stuart Machin suggested that leaders shouldn’t fully switch off during holidays. These remarks have, unsurprisingly, reopened an important debate about work-life balance. Such thinking usually stems from a...

Your Employee Experience Roundup: Perception Gaps, Disengaged Managers and the Agentic AI Future

Every fortnight, I’ll be rounding up the latest employee experience news, research and insights, and pulling out the threads that connect them. So if you’re too busy to track every report drop, every new trend, or indeed every time a...

What Meta’s AI Avatar Tells us About the Future of Workplace Trust

Meta is building a photorealistic, AI-powered version of Mark Zuckerberg. Trained on his mannerisms, tone, publicly available statements and his own thinking on company strategy. The goal is apparently that employees “might feel more connected to the founder through interactions...

The Pay Transparency Disconnect: Why Employees and HR See Pay So Differently

Most HR professionals believe pay at their organisation is fair, yet barely half think their employees agree. Published yesterday, Salary.com’s 2026 State of Pay and Compensation Practices Report finds a 31-point confidence gap between what HR believes about pay fairness and what...

Sales Performance Rises 22% When Managers Build Trust Skills

Managers with the ability to build trust across their teams significantly increase the chance of hitting sales targets, new data suggests. Research by MindTools Kineo, launched in 2023 and continuing today, highlights how managers’ non-technical, human skills contribute to business outcomes...

 The Perception Gap: Why Leaders Are Getting the Frontline Experience Wrong

Corporate leaders across retail, hospitality and food service sectors are designing strategies with significant blindspots in their frontline operations. Axonify’s 2026 Frontline Operations Report, published earlier this month, reveals a significant disconnect between what leaders believe is happening on the floor...

Josh Bersin’s Agentic HR 2030 Vision: What does it Mean for Employee Experience?

As more organisations deploy AI agents across their operations, the question of how this technology will reshape HR is gaining traction. Are we heading towards a world in which people issues are mostly handled by AI bots, not humans? Last...

Leaders Are Engaged, Angry and Lonely — and Organisations Need to Pay Attention

Leaders are your organisation’s most engaged people, and most satisfied in their personal lives. Yet they are also most likely to feel angry, stressed, and lonely day to day. Revealing this paradox is Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report....

BCG Predicts Most Jobs Will Be Reshaped, Not Replaced, by AI

One of the most persistent fears surrounding artificial intelligence is that it will hollow out the workforce. New research from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) offers hope to an alternate narrative, concluding that the more immediate reality for most workers is...

AI Workforce Planning: How to Predict Workforce Demand Without Burning Out the Team

The workplace has never been less predictable. Most companies are in an odd state of limbo, reluctant to hire more staff or make any solid progression plans because they’re still waiting to see what kind of impact AI is going...

Meet your new EX editor

You cannot deliver a great customer experience if you fail to get your employee experience right. The connection between the two is clear, and yet siloes remain in both organisations and across media coverage. As the new Employee Experience Editor...

Employee Engagement is Sliding and Productivity is Paying the Price

When the job market is strong, disengaged employees leave. When it tightens, they stay and show up checked out, delivering less. That double bind is the central warning in Gallup’s newly published analysis of its State of the Global Workplace...