Employee experience is moving from an HR metric to a business imperative as organisations confront tighter labour markets, rising attrition costs and increasing pressure for innovation. Rajiv Naithani, Chief People Officer at Persistent, said companies that still view experience as a peripheral HR function risk structural challenges that directly affect growth.
He drew a sharp distinction between engagement and experience, noting that engagement measures sentiment at a point in time, while experience encompasses every interaction between an employee and the organisation — from first contact to exit. “It is not a pulse score; it is the lived reality of culture,” he said, arguing that experience is shaped by managers and leaders as much as HR systems.
Naithani said treating employee experience as an HR agenda alone exposes organisations to disengagement, attrition and cultural erosion. “Growth without a focus on employee experience is inherently fragile,” he said. He added that resilience during disruption depends on consistent, high-quality interactions across the employee lifecycle, which cannot be delivered by HR in isolation.
Linking experience to financial outcomes remains a point of debate in many companies, but Naithani said the connection is visible in practice. He described how a sense of belonging within teams translates into stronger retention, improved delivery and better customer trust. “When engagement scores rise, customer NPS follows,” he said. Empowered employees, he added, significantly accelerate innovation, generating more patents, solutions and growth opportunities.
Leadership accountability, he argued, must evolve in line with these outcomes. Employees “experience their manager, not the organisation”, making frontline leadership pivotal to retention and performance. Naithani said leadership scorecards should track indicators such as top-talent retention, team mobility, engagement health and well-being. “Leaders are not just responsible for numbers; they are responsible for the experiences that create those numbers,” he said.
He said employee experience is emerging as a competitive advantage in today’s talent economics. Internally, it shows up in lower attrition and stronger trust in the organisation. Externally, it translates into talent advocacy, referrals and positive employer reputation — outcomes that influence hiring velocity and workforce sustainability. “Employees who feel valued become magnets of talent,” he said.
Boards and CEOs, Naithani argued, should pay closer attention to lead indicators rather than lagging ones such as overall attrition. He highlighted four signals that reveal whether experience is strengthening business performance: retention of top talent, robustness of leadership pipelines, alignment between innovation hotspots and positive experience scores, and whether engaged teams consistently deliver superior client outcomes. These indicators, he said, link experience directly to revenue, renewals and customer loyalty.
Designing consistent global experience in multinational organisations requires balancing shared values with local nuance. “Culture is like music,” he said. “Values remain consistent, but their expression varies.” He added that AI is enabling companies to bridge geographical differences through self-service tools and personalised career development pathways, helping employees shape their own professional journeys.
Looking ahead, Naithani said organisations will be increasingly divided between those that treat employee experience as a cost centre and those that see it as a growth engine. The former will remain reactive, focused on surveys and attrition. The latter will adopt a people-centred and AI-powered approach, enabling scale, consistency and personalised journeys. “The future will belong to companies that measure not only attrition but also belonging,” he said.