The Future of Employee Experience: Leveraging Technology To Drive Engagement

BY Mary Jones | January 10, 2025

Organizations that lack a technology strategy risk falling behind in addressing employee engagement—one of the most pressing challenges businesses face today. Research from leading firms like Gartner, Gallup, and Forrester reveals alarming trends: 60% of employees report burnout, 80% experience loneliness, and 70% feel disengaged. These factors contribute to a 50% increase in quiet quitting.

“We need to drive engagement. We need tools that allow us to recognize each other and foster leadership transparency,” said Jaime McMahon, chief digital officer at LineZero. McMahon spoke during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s December virtual conference.

McMahon pointed out four priorities for HR professionals moving into 2025 including:

  1. Transforming HR through technology and strategic integration
  2. Creating a future ready workforce
  3. Fostering a culture of innovation and adaptability
  4. Enhancing employee experience and engagement

HR professionals are prioritizing talent retention, according to a survey by Fuel50. Organizations are increasingly recognizing employees as vital assets to their business rather than replaceable workers. However, the challenge lies in effectively retaining talent. According to Fuel50, only 20% of organizations have systems in place to track employees’ skills and abilities.

Creating the framework for data and AI gives organizations the ability to track the ROI of engagement initiatives, detect trends, and make changes as needed faster. “How do we make sure and get access to this type of information so that we can make our workforce effective? At the end of the day, it begins and ends with the data” said McMahon.

Driving Change With Data and AI

Jaime McMahon the chief digital officer at LineZero led the conversation (company photo)

Taking advantage of new technologies like AI is smart for business. AI is rearranging old operational habits. The capabilities offer ways for a customized employee onboarding experience, as well as automating routine HR duties. It’s not just about AI, though, says McMahon.

Integrating a digital workplace becomes a centerpiece for efficient communication, feedback, and document management.  Employees stay informed on important company business, making them feel included, which in turn creates more engagement. Plus, it enables proactive decisions with real-time analytics.

Organizations should avoid focusing solely on building a digital workplace and instead aim to create a comprehensive digital hub. This hub integrates five key components: communications, which facilitate seamless information sharing; engagement, which fosters connection and collaboration; a digital workplace, which provides the tools and infrastructure employees need to work efficiently; analytics and insights, which drive data-informed decision-making; and AI assistance, which enhances productivity and support through intelligent automation.

“When I think about what’s going to make an impact today, these all make a dramatic impact,” he said. Companies who are not implementing these digital concepts will likely fall behind their competitors. Looking into the new year, companies who seek to stay ahead must invest in digital hubs, embrace AI, and make employee experience the focal point of their business strategy.

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, LineZero, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.

Mary Jones is a freelance writer out of Ohio. Her work is featured in several publications including The Dallas Express, NDash, and The Daily Advocate.


RELATED STORIES

Enhancing Productivity and Creating Relationship Breakthroughs Through Your Total Rewards

It’s no secret that employees are key to an organization’s productivity and profitability. Research shows a clear link between engaged, authentic, healthy employees and positive business results. But what can employers do to enhance the employee experience and become a high-performance organization?Ingrid Woolfolk, employee experience lead with WTW, shared insights and next steps in a thought leadership spotlight session about “Creat[ing] Relationship Breakthroughs Through Your Total Rewards” at From Day One’s Chicago benefits conference.WTW helps clients build resilience, inspire their workforces, and optimize performance with data-driven solutions in people, risk, and capital. With over 50 years of insights across industries, they’ve analyzed how employee experience, rewards programs, and company performance are connected.What Makes a Winning Company?To understand what high-performance organizations are doing differently, WTW analyzed results from 16 million surveys completed between 2002 and 2023, including 6 million individual employees from 600 companies in what they call the “post-disruption era” (2019–2023). They compared the employee experience and tracked 9 separate financial metrics across 30 global high-performing companies and 500 average companies.Ingrid L. Woolfolk, the employee experience leader at WTW, led the session Data showed that total rewards are important to employees, even if they don’t use that language. Because of this, it is crucial for companies to understand what employees need and innovate their offerings to fulfill those needs. The three areas that emerged as most important to employees were recognition, growth, and well-being. These three areas also happen to be existing differentiators for global high-performance (GHP) organizations.“Recognition goes beyond traditional monetary rewards,” said Woolfolk. Leading companies prioritize pay equity, transparency, and customized compensation options. They foster loyalty and internal growth by setting clear goals, offering development opportunities, and providing advancement pathways. Comprehensive well-being programs—addressing physical, emotional, social, and financial needs—demonstrate that employees are valued beyond their productivity while removing barriers to engagement.Five Predictions for 2025Based on this research, and requests from existing clients, WTW predicts that companies will pursue the following five focus areas in 2025 to drive performance and elevate their employees’ total rewards experience.Artificial intelligence: Companies are already showing interest in using AI to improve business outcomes and improve the employee experience through enhanced communication, navigation, analytics, and operational efficiency.Spending money where it counts by analyzing employee wants and needs alongside cost and utilization rates to better understand the overall ROI of specific benefits. Subsequent communication campaigns will ensure clear articulation of the total rewards value.Bolstering employee pocketbooks: Woolfolk and team anticipate that companies will seek to improve the affordability of pay and benefits programs, advance employees’ financial acumen and resilience, and enhance retirement offerings. Elevating transparency beyond compliance: Data shows that DEI programs may evolve into broader, more sustainable human capital strategies that promote equity, inclusivity, and pay transparency. These strategies are expected to exceed current compliance standards through new governance models and stakeholder reporting.Double-down on careers by developing career frameworks that align with business goals and support productivity targets while growing and rewarding critical employee skills.Where Can You Start?Woolfolk suggests collaborating with HR and finance partners to assess your current plans. Including the finance team up front can reduce decision-making delays and improve planning. Ensure you have a solid listening strategy so you can collect, analyze, and act upon employee feedback. “Make sure you don’t ask questions that you’re not willing to address,” she said, “because nothing hurts employee morale worse than asking questions and they never hear anything back.”Work with vendors to optimize the design of benefit plans, she says. Take the lead of high-performance organizations by being sensitive to the diverse, evolving needs of your employee populations, including more people in the planning as your organization’s story emerges, and being transparent about what’s next.“Taking action now is really important.” Woolfolk said. Identifying your strengths, weaknesses, and goals is crucial to engaging with the correct partners and building out the rest of your total rewards plan. Any listening strategy or employee survey is not a single event that leads you to high performance. It is a multi-faceted, ongoing exercise, and needs to be blended with a great communication strategy and change management principles.“Combining that change management with that communication strategy is paramount. In order to create the relationship breakthrough, you need that dialogue. You need listening,” said Woolfolk. You need communication that ultimately creates that high-performing employee experience that we all want, to help drive productivity.”Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, WTW, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Jessica Swenson is a freelance writer based in the Midwest. Learn more about her at jmswensonllc.com.

Jessica Swenson | February 06, 2025

People-First, Performance-Focused: Linking HR Efforts to Bottom-Line Success

Despite HR’s new and powerful place in business, many leaders concerned with the bottom line struggle to understand the return on investment for HR’s activities, and many in HR struggle to communicate their value. But bridging human resources to the business isn’t an impossible task; in fact, it’s getting easier thanks to sophisticated HR tech and new access the department has to business leaders and their goals.Ken Matos, the director of marketing insights, and Keren Kozar, senior people and culture officer at HR tech platform HiBob says that the best way to make the connection is with what they call people-first HR.“People coming into the workforce are expecting a leader who genuinely cares about them and genuinely wants to see them be successful in the workplace,” said Kozar in a From Day One webinar on linking HR strategy to the bottom line. “[People-first HR] means that you’re considering your people. They’re not just a number.”“Every single department wants to contribute to a thriving company,” she said, but that may mean different things to different people. “For some, that 100% means the bottom line. For some people, that’s going to mean having an industry-disrupting product, but at the end of the day, happy, engaged employees who feel like they are contributing to an organization that cares about them are going to be the most successful, and that’s how a company is going to thrive.”The Latest and Greatest Business Expense: Artificial IntelligenceCompanies are cutting big checks for artificial intelligence–powered tools and all their promises, and entire organizations are receiving directives from the top: Start using artificial intelligence. But there’s little direction about how to use it, and the tech is still new to many users. Even without detail, departments will be asked to report how it’s improving their work.Ken Matos, Ph.D., the director of market insights at HiBob spoke during the webinar (company photo)Treat AI like a hypothesis to be tested, said Matos. “The first thing is to understand your theory of change for AI.” Identify the problems you believe an AI tool will solve, and “once you have that, you can move on to measurement.” Measure whether people are using it, then track how they’re using it and what they’re producing. “If you know what that chain is supposed to look like, you can pick key places where there are doubts or possibility for failure and focus on measuring those bits. And if the end result is what you’re looking for, then odds are that the whole thing worked.”Linking HR to the Bottom LineIf you want to get business leaders to listen, find out what motivates them. If they want to increase revenue, then it’s your job to identify how people affect revenue with not just what they do, but how they do it.“You can articulate to a leader that you want to get sales revenue up, and here are a bunch of enablers, or obstacles,” Matos said. “My job is to make sure those enablers are maximized. Here’s how and how these obstacles are removed.” With that, those business leaders will start seeing you as an ally, not an admin.And if you’re going to vouch for the efficacy of HR and its work, then you have to speak the language of the business. Kozar once worked for a company where the leader was “100% a numbers guy” who cared only about the balance sheet. “He used to say, ‘HR, you’re so touchy feely.’ And my response would be, ‘people are a measurable metric. They matter. That is a data point. People’s feelings are actually a data point. You need to consider it, just like you would consider absolutely any other analytic that factors into your business decision.’”This can’t end with employee sentiment surveys, though. “We often talk about how to align with leaders and how to communicate with them, but it’s just as important to make sure that HR leaders are speaking to every level of the business,” she said. “So talk to individual contributors, your entry-level folks. The best feedback that I get is from the individual contributors and entry-level people that I’m just sitting with at lunch. That’s how I’m going to synthesize anecdotal feedback and deliver that back to leaders in a way that they’re not going to get through an engagement survey.”Those who chafe against the notion of people-first HR do so because they “don’t realize how feelings change the effectiveness of their business,” said Matos. Think of it this way: How many times have you avoided emails or a project because there’s a person on your team who slows down the work, or is simply a pain to work with?Matos often speaks to business leaders who wonder why it’s their responsibility to motivate the workforce. Maybe you can’t motivate them, he said, but you can certainly demotivate them. “You can strip away their natural desire to do their job, from micromanaging to disrespect to not being communicative. All of these are things under your control.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, HiBob, for sponsoring this webinar.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. 

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | January 31, 2025

Benefits Recap & Forecast: Navigating Alternative Health Plan Choices in 2025

On a summer day in 2024, Matt Cook, chief commercial officer of Firefly Health, suddenly felt some pain in his stomach. He reached out to his Firefly care team and scheduled a 15 minute appointment with a nurse practitioner who ordered him to get a CT scan. The results showed Cook had appendicitis and the next day he was scheduled for a surgery. All of this happened within 72 hours of care.Firefly Health is a virtual-first healthcare company that offers an alternative health plan that aims to make it easier for people to get the care they need. During a From Day One webinar, journalist Jenny Sucov spoke with Cook and Erik Sossa, independent advisor and consultant to Firefly and former Vice President of Global Benefits and Wellness at PepsiCo about health plan trends and challenges employers face with the changing landscape for benefits.The Shortfalls of Typical Healthcare BenefitsWhile Sossa was working with PepsiCo., he felt that employers were leaving employees to manage their benefits on their own. “They had to deal with changes in annual enrollment, finding an in network provider, prior authorization and an explanation of benefits,” he said.Despite the value of healthcare benefits, corporations are taking away from the positive employee experience while they themselves are struggling with the cost of providing care for their workers. “Employees oftentimes are facing the brunt of some of those tough decisions in the form of maybe a more restricted plan,” said Cook. “Affordability is such an issue for both the employee and employers themselves.”Coming from the corporate side, Sossa acknowledges that companies struggle with cost sharing and sometimes burden employees with having to educate themselves on healthcare plans while they may not have the time to learn the ins and outs of health insurance.“For an employee who doesn’t navigate healthcare for a living, they serve our companies for a living, that’s a tremendous burden on them to try to navigate through this,” said Sossa. “That’s part of the dynamic and one of the things I’m very excited about with companies like Firefly that are trying to really change that paradigm.”Matt Cook, the chief commercial officer of Firefly Health, spoke during the webinar (company photo)Cook said that one group that launched Firefly’s health plan alongside traditional plans told them that Firefly was “the first plan they ever offered where frontline workers and executives alike chose the same plan.” The concept of healthcare affordability is not just with money, but also time. For busy workers, healthcare is only useful when it can be accessible according to the member’s schedule.What is Alternative Healthcare?Alternative health care is an alternative to “historical medical plans that have been delivered in this country across a consolidated set of health plans that are out there today,” said Cook.Firefly is trying to “rethink” the medical plan experience by taking off the burden that has been placed on employees. Sossa views it as the “next evolution” of healthcare. “It’s an alternative to a broken system but hopefully that alternative becomes more and more of the status quo as we rethink the way healthcare needs to be delivered in this country,” Cook said.The new generation of healthcare that Sossa envisions is one that is affordable, accountable, productive and healthy. Firefly is using industry wide data sets on wellness, prescription drugs and labs to understand the gaps that need to be filled in healthcare.Firefly’s model allows patients to quickly schedule a 15 minute visit and continue the engagement in between visits. The company found that there were more longitudinal engagements with its members that were dealing with chronic conditions, some of which they were seeing two dozen to 100 times a year. In a primary care system, they might be visiting their doctor once a year, said Cook.The company offers both virtual and in person care through local partnerships. Firefly uses a care model that ensures members are consistently met with the same team throughout their journey.Pitching New Programs to StakeholdersChanges in new programs, like healthcare, can be exciting but it has to be approved by company stakeholders in order to be implemented. Sossa said when something new is being pitched, you have to have a “clear understanding of your audience and speak their language.”When talking to the CFO, understand the marketing, investments and advertising aspects. When discussing with human resources, touch on the represented population, labor landscape and contracts. Sossa says stakeholders will be more receptive to ideas that are half-baked, ones that require some brainstorming.“Bring them the idea at a 30% mark, where you have the ability to sonar ping with them, get their influence and get their reaction. But if you have a chance to sonar ping your ideas as you go through, that makes them part of developing the solution, and they are much more receptive to that,” Sossa added.He encourages corporate leaders to “resist the gravitational forces of short term thinking” and consider how something that will be sustainable and will solve issues takes time. Sossa advises his clients to think of themselves as moving into the first year of a three year strategy. “Aim a little higher in your steering,” he said.The Future of HealthcareAlternative healthcare is at an inflection point, but it is still a slow progressing industry as they introduce the concept to the corporate world, says Sossa. Cook added that the inflection comes at a time where provider shortages are only getting worse.“Ultimately, the average person is going to be looking for that accessible, high quality care and I think that moment is coming. We need to bring great quality care to our people, not leave it to them to go and figure out where to find it,” said Cook.More competitors are entering the alternative health care industry and the adoption of it is going to increase in 2025, predicts Sossa. Especially with growing frustrations on the traditional healthcare models and lack of progression to meet members’ needs.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Firefly Health, for sponsoring this webinar. Jennifer Yoshikoshi is a local news and education reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Jennifer Yoshikoshi | January 27, 2025