A perspective from Rareș Miron, subject matter expert for Workplace Experience & Facilities platform development and former Director of Real Estate & Facilities (EMEA) - someone who's managed workplace and experience strategy from inside large, complex organisations.

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For years, organisations have been working to improve employee experience with all kinds of strategies: chasing engagement scores, launching culture campaigns, or adding perks, events and themed days. And when none of it delivered any meaningful results in the long run, we told ourselves the problem was generational, motivational or cultural.

But is it really the case?  

I believe that the answer is far simpler and far more revealing.

We kept adding layers of “feel‑good” initiatives on top of systems, processes and environments that were fundamentally misaligned with how people actually work. We tried to influence sentiment rather than improve capability. We tried to boost morale instead of removing friction. We tried to make people happier rather than make their work easier.

And when you look at it through that lens, the failure is inevitable. Employee experience is not about how people feel. It's about whether the system sets them up for success. For many organisations, especially large, matrixed ones, that system is full of friction.  

Global employee engagement fell to just 20% in 2025, its lowest point since 2020 and Gallup now estimates that costs the world economy $10 trillion in lost productivity a year, roughly 9% of global GDP. That is not a motivation problem. That is a systems problem, playing out at a global scale.

I've spent years managing workplace and experience strategy across complex, multinational environments. Looking back, I can see the same pattern repeating itself: trying to fix emotional outcomes without addressing operational causes. We were focused on optimising for sentiment when we should have been engineering for clarity, coherence and flow.

We weren't failing because people were very demanding. We were failing because our systems were too narrowly designed.

The gap between promise and reality

Every organisation has an employer value proposition, which is the story we tell candidates about what it is like to work here. But the real test is the lived experience.

And that's where things often break.

People join expecting autonomy, clarity and support. Instead, they encounter:

• Processes that contradict each other
• Policies that were never designed with real people in mind
• Workflows that slow them down instead of enabling them
• Environments that create friction instead of flow

When the system makes it hard to succeed, no amount of engagement activity can compensate.  

You can't free-lunch your way out of a broken workflow.  

Looking at recent research from McKinsey, employees who report a positive experience have 16x the engagement level of those with a negative one, and are 8x more likely to want to stay. Experience is not a nice-to-have sitting alongside retention and performance. It is what drives retention and performance!

The shift that changes everything

What's changed in recent years, and what I wish I had earlier in my career, is the ability to finally see the system. Not through annual surveys. Not through sentiment dashboards. Not through anecdotal feedback. But through real-time signals that reveal where the experience is breaking down.

Signals that show:

• Where processes are slowing people down
• Where policies are creating unintended barriers
• Where environments are failing to support the work
• Where teams are struggling long before it becomes visible in engagement data

Once you can see these patterns, the conversation shifts from "How do people feel?" to "What's preventing people from succeeding?" And that's where real transformation begins.

The Aha! moment that reframed the problem

One organisation I worked with showed symptoms that looked cultural: fluctuating engagement, humming frustration and a general sense that things were not in the right place.

But as I spent more time inside the system, the real story started to reveal itself. A single workflow was creating delays across multiple teams. A building issue had gone unresolved because the escalation path was unclear. A process apparently designed for efficiency was quietly eroding everyone’s trust. None of this showed up in engagement surveys, but it was present in the people’s day‑to‑day experience. The turning point came when the feel‑good initiatives failed to make any difference. That’s what pushed us to look deeper. And once we did, the picture changed quickly: the root cause was operational, not emotional.

None of this required a new engagement strategy. It required visibility and the willingness to redesign the system.

Having both, the improvements were immediate and meaningful. Not because people suddenly became happier, but because they were finally able to succeed.  

A McKinsey-documented case showed a company streamlined its cross-functional workflows and increased speed to market by more than 1.5x, with employee engagement rising 25% as a byproduct, not the goal!  

Surprising? Not really, when friction is identified and removed from the system.

The future of employee experience is operational, not window dressing.

The organisations that will win the next decade aren't the ones with the best perks or the most polished culture decks. They're the ones that treat employee experience as an operating system: something designed, measured, and continuously improved.

They're the ones that:

• Build processes around real human needs
• Design policies with inclusivity at the core
• Remove friction instead of masking it
• Use data to diagnose, not to defend
• Understand that success is the foundation of satisfaction

The evidence is already there: companies in the top quartile on employee experience indicators are 4.2x more likely to outperform their peers on profitability, innovation and retention.

Because when people can do their best work, everything else follows: engagement, performance, retention, trust.

Happiness becomes the side effect, not the strategy.

A question for every leader

If you could see, in real time and in clear detail, where your workplace is failing your people, what would you redesign first?

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