When we sat down with Heidi Newiger, Senior Manager of Employee Experience and Engagement at Harness, for this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, the title of the episode said it all. Remember the human. Heidi runs both employee experience and the diversity and inclusion functions at Harness, which gave her a useful vantage point on what actually moves engagement at a fast-growing global tech company. Her argument was that companies obsess over the program design and forget the part that always wins. The daily experience of being a person at work.
That framing showed up in every part of the conversation. Heidi described designing rituals that scaled across time zones without losing intimacy. She talked about treating values as a daily practice rather than a poster. She emphasized that inclusion and engagement are the same conversation viewed from two angles. Her playbook is a useful corrective for People teams whose dashboards have grown faster than their connection to the experience the dashboards are measuring.
Why Employee Experience Is the Through-Line of Modern People Strategy
Engagement, inclusion, retention, and well-being all converge on the daily experience of the employee. Gallup found that global engagement fell to 21% in its most recent reporting, with manager engagement falling even faster. Employee experience is the lever that pulls every one of those numbers because it is the operating layer where strategy meets the actual workday.
The companies winning this layer treat experience design the way product teams treat product design. They map the journey, identify the moments that matter, and invest in the rituals that compound. That investment pays back in retention numbers and in the quality of the work product.
What Designing for the Human Looks Like in Practice
What is employee experience?
Employee experience is the sum of every interaction a person has with the company across their full lifecycle. It includes the first interview, the first day, the first manager, the first feedback conversation, the first promotion, and the eventual exit. The discipline is to design those moments deliberately rather than letting them happen by default.
How do values move from poster to practice?
Values become real when they are tied to specific behaviors, specific decisions, and specific recognition. Heidi described embedding values into how managers give feedback, how teams celebrate wins, and how the company makes hard calls about resourcing and trade-offs. When the same values show up in those decisions repeatedly, employees stop having to ask what the company stands for. They have lived it.
What Actually Works When You Design for Engagement and Inclusion Together
Principle 1: Build engagement and inclusion into the same operating model
Engagement and inclusion are not parallel functions. They are the same function viewed from two angles. People who feel included tend to be engaged. People who feel engaged tend to feel included. Strong programs build the listening, manager training, and ritual design that serve both outcomes at once rather than running separate workstreams that compete for attention.
Principle 2: Invest in the moments that compound
Some moments matter more than others. The first 90 days. The first feedback conversation. The first signal from leadership during a hard quarter. The companies with the strongest experience invest in those moments specifically. They build great onboarding, manager training on feedback, and clear communication during change because they know those moments produce returns long after the moment passes.
Principle 3: Use feedback systems that respect the human
Engagement surveys are useful when they are designed to produce change rather than to produce reports. The strongest programs run regular pulse surveys, share the results back with employees, name what will change as a result, and follow up. When that loop closes, employees keep filling out the surveys. When it does not, they stop, and the data quality decays.
Where Employee Relations Fits Into Employee Experience
Experience design does not work if the company cannot hear the moments where it breaks. That is the job of employee relations. Strong ER captures the friction that pulse surveys miss, the patterns that managers cannot see from inside their team, and the specific issues that need a confidential channel to surface. With ER wired into experience design, leaders can intervene before frustration becomes attrition.
How ER strengthens engagement and inclusion outcomes
The right ER function gives the experience team three things. Pattern data that shows where the experience is breaking by team, by demographic group, or by tenure. A consistent investigation process so when a problem surfaces it gets resolved. A confidential anonymous reporting channel for the issues employees will not raise in a 1:1. With those three layers, experience design stops being a guess and becomes a discipline.
How Global Teams Build Connection Without Losing Intimacy
Designing rituals that work across time zones
Heidi noted that scaling employee experience across geographies means the rituals have to survive being asynchronous. Recognition needs to happen in writing, not just in town halls. Onboarding cannot rely on a hallway tour. Feedback has to be deliberate because it cannot be incidental. The companies that nail this design start by listing the moments that matter and then redesigning each one for a distributed reality.
Letting managers customize without diluting consistency
Global experience design is a balance between the operating standards every employee should expect and the local flexibility teams need. The strongest programs publish the standards and then equip managers with templates, training, and a community of practice so they can adapt without breaking the experience. Without that scaffolding, the experience drifts and inconsistency erodes trust.
Frequently Asked Questions About Employee Experience
What is the difference between employee experience and employee engagement?
Employee experience is the full set of interactions a person has with the company. Employee engagement is one outcome of that experience, specifically how connected and committed the person feels. Strong experience drives strong engagement.
How do you measure employee experience?
Useful measures combine engagement and pulse survey data, exit and stay interview themes, manager feedback frequency, internal mobility rates, and qualitative listening from focus groups or open-ended survey questions. Triangulating those signals gives a fuller picture than any single metric.
How do remote and hybrid models affect experience?
Distributed work means more moments are mediated by tools and rituals rather than physical presence. The companies with strong distributed experience invest in deliberate manager check-ins, clear documentation, and rituals that work in writing and across time zones. The ones that wing it lose connection quickly.
What is a values-driven culture?
A values-driven culture is one where stated values show up consistently in decisions, behaviors, and recognition. The values are visible in the way managers give feedback, the way teams celebrate wins, and the way leaders make trade-offs. Organizational culture built this way is more durable than culture built on perks.
How do you keep engagement high in fast-growing companies?
Fast growth strains engagement because rituals break, manager spans expand, and new hires arrive faster than culture can transmit. Strong programs invest in scalable rituals, manager training, and feedback systems that catch issues early rather than at the annual survey.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Heidi Newiger's reminder to remember the human is the kind of advice that gets dismissed as soft and then quietly proves itself in the retention numbers. Engagement and inclusion programs that ignore the daily experience produce dashboards that look good and outcomes that do not move.
HR leaders who want both should invest in three habits. Design the moments that matter rather than letting them happen by default. Pair engagement and inclusion strategy in the same operating model. Build the feedback and employee relations systems that surface friction in time to act on it. That is how People functions stop measuring experience and start moving it.
See how AllVoices supports the listening and ER infrastructure behind a humane employee experience.
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