EX As Force Multiplier for Business Success
Work culture is essentially a nexus of tribal relationships—between management and employees, the organization and its external partners, employees’ own working groups, and, last but not least, the relationship between employees and customers or clients. At once forcefully upheld as critical to business success and treated oftentimes to the most superficial understanding, the employee/customer relationship is under increasing strain, and in need of a serious reboot.
In the simplest terms, we know satisfied human beings on both sides of the service counter have always made for business success. In B-school terms, this is the “service profit chain,” a framework that establishes a direct connection between profitability and employee satisfaction. An engaged workforce can be a revenue driver, service delivery stabilizer, innovation enabler, talent magnet, brand reputation builder, and organizational resilience aid. Positive employee experience and, by extension, the company culture it shapes and reflects, can unleash all of this dynamism if EX (employee experience) is regarded as at least as important as CX (customer experience)—and if the synergistic relationship of the two is supported.
The numbers speak for themselves. Engaged employees and a strong organizational culture can increase revenue by up to 50%. McKinsey found that companies with the best organizational health produced shareholder return 200% higher than companies with the weakest. On the flip side, Gallup reports that in 2024, global employee engagement fell by two percentage points, costing the world economy US$438 billion in lost productivity.
Why EX Hasn’t Been Treated as Business-Critical
The C-suite certainly read the customer experience memo: an overwhelming majority of companies have made CX their top priority and the principle way they compete. Executives talk about customers 10 times more than they talk about employees in earnings calls and still perceive employees to be risks rather than resources. Why has perception of the essential CX-EX relationship remained so lopsided and short-sighted?
Much of the disconnect has to do with the inability to correlate EX metrics like employee satisfaction scores with business outcomes. For instance, how has a company’s improved retention of seasoned, highly skilled talent impacted sales? Has a manager training program been monitored both for employee well-being and for productivity gains?
HR policies and programs intended to nurture employee well-being are rarely tied systematically to CX outcomes. HR is perceived as a cost center, the latter a revenue engine, so making causal, quantifiable connections between them to prove the business impact of an organization’s employee culture isn’t the least bit straightforward.
A Hinge Moment in the History of Work
Another factor in the slow and low prioritization of EX as business-critical is the sheer rate of change impacting businesses today. According to the Accenture Pulse of Change: 2024 Index, that rate has increased by an incredible 183% over the past four years, and 33% in the past year alone. In 2025, nothing represents greater change in and to the world of work than AI. While management is largely optimistic about AI’s promise of productivity gains, with 78% of businesses using AI for at least one business function in 2024, staff training lags, leaving employees, particularly managers, feeling ill-equipped for its adoption. Beneath the AI skills gap, there is fear—and even resistance—among employees, who view AI as marginalizing human expertise and well-being. A 2023 Pew Research study found that only 13% of Americans believe AI will personally help them. Instead, they fear job loss, increased surveillance, and a lack of control over their own work.
We must recognize this is a hinge moment in the history of work: by the end of 2025, the World Economic Forum projects the loss of 85 million jobs globally due to AI and automation. Goldman Sachs predicts up that to 50% of jobs could be fully automated by 2045, driven by generative AI and robotics.
Cultural Signs of Employee Experience Complexity
There are myriad reasons employee engagement reached an 11-year low in 2024. Cultural signs of employee discontent have been circulating since the global pandemic, and point to a far more complex picture than the AI-and-automation shakeup. Covid brought us The Great Resignation of 2021, a forced reappraisal of work’s role in mental health. Gallup describes our current reality as The Great Detachment of 2025, a widespread feeling among employees of being stuck but uninspired in current jobs due to a slowing labor market, and perceptions of few career and pay advancement opportunities. Another phrase for stuck-but-uninspired is “quiet quitting,” a meme introduced to the world in a 2022 TikTok video that quickly amassed over 900 million views. (The Chinese version of passive rebellion against the work status quo—rising joblessness and a nihilistic view of the government—is called “lying flat.”) Gallup’s research show that quiet quitting, while no longer a viral sensation, nevertheless persists: nearly six in 10 global employees are psychologically disengaged from their organization.
As Employees Shift Their Values, The World of Work Lags
What are some of the deeper dynamics behind these employee disengagement trends? Employees across the globe are putting work/life balance ahead of compensation, according to several studies. Employment agency Randstad’s recent study shows that “57% of workers would not accept a job that would negatively affect their work-life balance, including flexibility like working from home.” Balance is achieved through reasonable, controllable, flexible work, but for many employees, work should also support their larger life goals.
Gen Z is leading a generational shift in employee expectations that a company’s values should align with their own. Company purpose has become an increasingly powerful way to attract, retain, and engage a workforce. A WeSpire study found that Gen Z is the first generation to prioritize purpose over salary. A Millennial Employee Study found that even 64% of Millennials won’t accept a job with a company without a strong CSR (corporate social responsibility) policy.
How are employers responding to these cultural signals? While CEO’s outearn regular employees 285 to 1, and DEI initiatives disappear or discretely operate under other departmental auspices, too few companies have been investing sufficient resources in a holistically positive EX—resulting in what Forrester characterized as the “EX winter” of 2024. As employee engagement and company culture energy decline, companies will not only struggle with talent attraction and retention but their customer experience (CX) will suffer as well.
There are of course exceptional exceptions—companies that have adopted innovative approaches to EX. Salesforce has implemented a "Success from Anywhere" model, allowing employees to choose their work environment. They've also expanded their wellness programs and introduced new tools for virtual collaboration. Patagonia has programs that allow employees to take time off for environmental activism. LinkedIn has introduced "LiftUp!," a program focused on employee well-being that includes "RestUp!" days—extra days off for employees to recharge. Hilton, ranked as a best 100 company consecutively for the past 10 years, has several programs for supporting employees’ families, from Lyra Care for Teens to adoption assistance and new parent support, and a crisis concierge for families mourning the loss of a loved one.
The EX-CX Relationship Needs Its Own TLC
While companies can learn from these and other innovative companies about structuring a satisfying employee experience, just as much care must be devoted to the EX-CX relationship specifically. It too is a living system of behaviors, values, programs and policies, much like the employer/employee relationship is, and if built to respond to vital cultural signals about what constitutes a satisfying employee experience, can supercharge an already engaged and motivated workforce to take great care of the company’s customers.
Ziba has devised—and managed for several companies—the following five steps for researching, measuring, supporting, and enhancing the EX-CX relationship:
Journey Alignment:
- Create parallel employee and customer journey maps
- Identify touchpoints where EX and CX intersect directly
- Design enhancements—technology, training, employee empowerment to provide in-the-moment customer care and demonstrate brand purpose, etc.—that benefit both employees and customers simultaneously
Voice of Employee (VoE) Programs:
- Implement regular employee feedback mechanisms
- Use insights to improve both internal and customer-facing operations
- Correlate VoE data with customer satisfaction metrics
Cross-Functional Teams:
- Form teams that include HR, CX, and operations employees
- Collaborate on initiatives that improve both EX and CX
- Ensure CX strategies consider the impact on employees
- Appoint champions of EX-CX integration who do tours of duty in all the relevant roles
Training and Development:
- Design training programs that focus on both employee growth and customer service skills
- Use real customer feedback in training sessions
- Implement mentorship programs that emphasize EX-CX best practices
Recognition and Rewards:
- Align employee recognition with customer satisfaction metrics
- Celebrate employees who exemplify great customer service
As EX goes, so goes CX, affecting everything from brand reputation to resiliency to revenue. Poor customer experience is symptomatic of company cultural dysfunction on some level. A superb customer experience, or any major CX transformation effort, if it is to be sustained and scaled, should be powered by a dynamic program specifically designed for the vitally synergistic EX/CX relationship.
