“Our people are our greatest asset” is a tired cliché, but the idea is a good one. On some level, most leaders probably believe the sentiment, but leaders also tend to view HR and employee communications as cost centers rather than areas for strategic investment.
Maybe what’s missing is a business case for employee experience.
What if you could prove quantitatively that positive employee experiences drive positive employee behaviors for your organization? And what if you could identify the specific aspects of employee experience that lead to the greatest boost in employee behaviors? These are the questions explored in the 2025 Integral Index – Integral’s annual survey of 2,000 US employees, conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll.¹
To measure positive behavior, we created a metric made up of four factors: Would you/your colleagues:
By averaging responses to these four questions together, we can create a score for positive behavior. These can also be measured within an organization in the same way that we measured them for employees in general. And – critically – these measurable dimensions of experience lead directly to the kind of business goals that HR and employee comms teams tend to be measured on: employee retention and the employer brand, engagement, and employee advocacy.
So far, so good – but what are the levers an organization can pull in order to drive improvement in these areas? To answer that, we looked at how different aspects of employee experience drive the behaviors people say that they or their colleagues would engage in. Here are some of the major drivers we found with a high degree of statistical significance:
These are enormous differences, representing enormous opportunity. Now compare the questions we asked to the questions often asked of HR and employee communications teams – questions like “How good is our compensation model”? or “Do employees engage with messages from corporate comms?” These are important questions, but the drivers our research identified go much deeper. They’re less process-oriented and more human: Does the organization communicate changes clearly? Does your manager support you? Is the organization fair in the way it treats employees?
Ultimately, these are questions about culture, behavioral norms and ways of working – far more profound topics for HR and employee comms teams to address.
And we can go further: Once we understand the drivers of positive behavior, we can get at root causes by measuring the drivers themselves. For example, we saw above that when organizational changes are clearly explained, employees are much more likely to engage in positive behaviors. So: Are organizational changes clearly explained? Very often, the answer is no.
Barely half of the employees in our study (54%) said that “major organizational changes such as reorganizations, leadership changes or layoffs are communicated clearly with the reasons explained” – a remarkably low number. But when we keep digging, we can understand why: Managers, and even senior leaders, are often not equipped to communicate well:
Here, then, is the business case for investing in employee experience: You can quantify the areas where your employee experience needs the most focus; the specific improvements in employee behavior you can achieve; and the business outcomes you can expect as a result. It’s all measurable; the key is to invest in measuring it so you can learn and iterate. This approach will enable HR and employee comms teams to drive profound improvements not only in their organization’s culture, but in its bottom line.
This post originally appeared on the Institute for Public Relations blog.
