June 12, 2026
Your Employee Experience Roundup: The AI Efficiency Pushback, Forrester’s Sobering EX Data, and 61% Cover Their Backs At Work
This week in employee experience, the rush to make short-term AI efficiency gains saw pushback at the Festival of Work 2026, where speakers urged organisations to adopt a more people-centric approach to AI.
Meanwhile, fresh Forrester data shed light on how employee experience is dragging down total experience, and Investors in People has found that employees are taking steps to cover their backs in organisations which leaders perceive to be highly trusted.
Here is what you need to know from this week’s employee experience roundup.
Festival of Work 2026: The Efficiency Obsession With AI Is Backfiring
The Festival of Work 2026 took place on 10–11 June, and brought a notable pushback against chasing AI for efficiency gains. Across numerous sessions, speakers made the case for people-centric, work-first approaches to AI over the short-term, trust-eroding efficiency route. The message was consistent: a slower, more strategic approach will outlast the race to cut costs.
Other takeaways from the event:
- AI has made work faster, but not more coordinated.
- The choice between engagement and performance is a false one.
- Good design starts with the work, not the org chart.
Read CXM’s full Festival of Work 2026 takeaways.
Forrester Grades Employee Experience for the First Time – and the Early Data Is Sobering
For the first time, a global Employee Experience Index (EX Index) has been added to Forrester’s Total Experience Score, sitting alongside the established Customer Experience Index (CX Index) and Brand Experience Index (BX Index).
The early EX data is troubling for most organisations. In the US, only 25% of brands with EX data showed a positive EX impact on their total experience, while 37% showed a negative one.
In short, organisations’ approaches to employee experience are currently dragging more brands down than lifting them up.
Read CXM’s analysis of Forrester’s updated Total Experience Score.
UK Permanent Hiring Falls at the Fastest Rate in 10 Months
UK permanent hiring fell at its fastest rate in 10 months in May, according to the latest Report on Jobs from KPMG and the REC. Placements have now fallen for the 44th consecutive month, the longest period of contraction since the survey began in 1997.
REC Chief Executive Neil Carberry summed up the mood: “The clearest story in the economy right now is momentum being held up by uncertainty.” He pointed to higher costs, the Gulf crisis, and what he called “new employment red tape” as reasons businesses are “tapping the brakes on permanent hiring”.
Read CXM’s analysis of the falling rate of UK permanent hiring.
Leaders Think They’re Trusted; Employees Are Covering Their Backs
New research from Investors in People finds that 61% of employees regularly ‘cover themselves’ by keeping emails or screenshots, while leaders significantly overestimate how much their people trust them. The data suggests organisations may be measuring belief in trust rather than the behaviours that demonstrate it.
Workforce Planning Remains Stubbornly Short-Term
Workforce planning is still dominated by short-term headcount decisions, with only 11% of organisations taking a long-term view. The finding comes from McKinsey’s HR Monitor 2026 global survey, published this week. Most companies risk underestimating the scale of the transformation ahead unless they shift towards building strategic capability, McKinsey cautions.
15Five’s Work Signals
Performance-management platform 15Five has launched three AI features aimed at turning everyday work signals into continuous performance management.
Work Context pulls activity from tools teams already use, such as Slack, Teams, Asana, and Jira, into a single view of performance without extra reporting. AI Assisted Reviews drafts around 80% of a first review while leaving managers in editorial control. And Focus Briefs give managers a weekly read on team priorities ahead of one-to-ones.
Chief Executive Dr Jeff Smith framed it as weaving “the signals of how work actually gets done” into an ongoing feedback loop. It is a clear example of the week’s wider theme: using AI to deepen the manager-employee relationship rather than simply strip out admin.
Bersin’s HR 2030 Blueprint
The Josh Bersin Company has launched ‘HR 2030: The Journey to Agentic HR’, a four-year blueprint for rebuilding HR around AI agents. It envisions a leaner, flatter function, with headcount potentially down 30–50% and the share of strategic work rising from around 30% to as much as 75%, as ‘superagents’ coordinate specialist agents across talent, rewards, and employee experience.
Bersin argues that faster hiring, reskilling, and redeployment are 10 to 100 times more valuable than using AI simply to cut headcount, and he warns leaders against unplanned ‘agent sprawl’. Like much of this week’s news, it frames AI as a reason to redesign how the function works, not just a way to do the same job with fewer people.
Get in touch
That’s it for this week’s employee experience news. I’ll be back next Friday, and if you have EX stories to share, connect with me on LinkedIn or drop me a line at [email protected]
Becky Norman is the Employee Experience Editor for CXM. With 14 years in digital publishing, she champions the organisations and practitioners creating exceptional experiences for their people — and driving measurable impact on customer success as a result. Prior to this role, Becky spent eight years as editor of B2B publications HRZone and TrainingZone, covering the most pressing issues facing HR, people, and learning leaders. In 2020, she co-created Culture Pioneers – a global campaign recognising the organisations shaping workplace culture to drive both business performance and employee experience.
