Employee engagement 101: Rethinking EX in the age of declining trust

When it comes to EX, Annette Franz, CCXP, says there is growing evidence that employee engagement and trust have stagnated – in some cases even declined. 

Many CX practitioners have seen this with their own eyes, but remain powerless to change the fortunes of their teams and organizations. After all, when a problem this significant is witnessed in almost every market globally, it’s difficult to know where or how to start tackling it. 

In her new book Employee Understanding: A Three-Pillar Framework for Designing a Great Experience and Driving Business Success, Franz presents a three-pillar framework to help brands reorganize their operations and make the shift from a profit-first culture to an experience-first culture that will drive CX – and profit – accordingly. 

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CX Network: Your new book Employee Understanding: A Three-Pillar Framework for Designing a Great Experience and Driving Business Success, acknowledges that retaining and engaging employees remains a top challenge for CEOs. How would you assess the current state of the employee experience (EX)? 

Annette Franz: The employee experience is in flux, not universally bad but far from where it needs to be. A lot of companies say they prioritize employees, but the reality often doesn’t match the rhetoric.  

Employee engagement and trust have stagnated or declined. Gallup’s 2025 global data shows that only about one in five employees are truly engaged at work, roughly the same as a decade ago. 

That says it all. Nothing changes if nothing changes.

CX Network: Without giving too much away, what are the three pillars that can drive a great experience and secure business success?

Annette Franz: The three pillars are:

Culture: Build an environment where employees feel heard, valued, supported, and empowered. A strong and healthy culture is the precursor for a great employee experience. 

Insight: Use modern listening tools (go beyond surveys!) and data-driven strategies to not only understand employee needs but also to act on them.

Empathy: See the world through your employees’ eyes and go deeper to grasp their day-to-day realities, aspirations, and pain points. This is a powerful leadership tool to ensure employees have a great experience.

CX Network: As the saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast. How can an organization make the switch from a profit-first culture to an experience-first culture? 

Annette Franz: This is a great question. And it doesn’t have a short answer. It really starts at the top, with leadership rewiring how everyone in the organization thinks, acts, decides, and measures success.

You’ve got to start by redefining what drives performance. Instead of chasing quarterly numbers, leaders must anchor decisions in values, people, and value creation – all while understanding and communicating that sustainable profit is the outcome, not the goal. 

That means measuring success through customer and employee experiences, not just financial KPIs, and holding leaders accountable for behaviors that build trust, empathy, and consistency across every touchpoint. 

When experience becomes the lens for strategy, process, and leadership, profit follows naturally – and dare I say, more sustainably.

CX Network: What are some of the key things all organizations can do to deliver a better experience for the employees?  

Annette Franz: For starters, they need to understand what employee experience means. It’s not perks, it’s not engagement. It’s the sum of all the interactions that the employee has during the life of the employment relationship. It includes any way the employee “touches” or interacts with the company and vice versa in the course of doing her job.

It also includes the actions and capabilities that enable her to do her job. And, importantly, it includes her feelings, emotions, and perceptions of those interactions and capabilities.

Employee engagement, on the other hand, is an outcome of a great employee experience, and has input and implications for both the employee and the employer.

Next, as I mentioned, culture is the precursor for the employee experience, so brands must make sure that the culture is strong and healthy.

And then, no surprise, but the same work we do the design and deliver a great customer experience is also done to design and deliver a great employee experience. That includes the work of understanding employees and then act on what is learned. 

Specifically…

• Listen: Create listening posts to gather employee feedback and marry that feedback with the breadcrumbs of data that employees leave behind as they interact and transact with various departments across the organization.
• Characterize: Conduct interviews and surveys and marry that with existing employee data to create detailed employee personas and internal customer personas that outline their needs, pain points, and problems to solve.
• Empathize: Map the employee journey to identify key touchpoints and moments of truth and create service blueprints that outline the people, tools, systems, and processes that support and facilitate the employee and customer journey. These blueprints will help to surface issues and breakdowns that create friction for employees in their jobs.

The paperback edition of Employee Understanding: A Three-Pillar Framework for Designing a Great Experience and Driving Business Success is available now, with a Kindle edition coming soon. You can find out more and buy your copy via this link.