Karishma Patel Buford is the Chief People Officer at OppFi, a financial technology company recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in Chicagoland. Before OppFi, she led talent management at Groupon across 15 countries and earlier ran diversity and inclusion at the same company. Her career also includes head of talent management at BAE Systems and senior consulting roles in leadership development. Her training is unusual for an HR executive: a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology and a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Health System.
This Reimagining Company Culture conversation focused on what actually constitutes a great employee experience versus what the marketing version of EX has become. Karishma made the case that EX is mostly a series of small operational moments executed well, not a single program or a brand campaign. Her framework is practical and measurable.
The synthesis below pairs her view with research and field practice from People teams shipping the work today.
Why Most Employee Experience Programs Underperform
Most EX programs are built around an annual engagement survey, a few wellness perks, and a recognition platform. The result is fragmented experience: a polished onboarding followed by inconsistent management, generic learning, and recognition that feels like checkbox theater. Employees notice the disconnect immediately.
only 20 percent of employees worldwide were engaged in 2025 according to recent global data, costing the world economy roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity. The gap between EX investment and EX outcome is mostly an integration problem, not a budget problem. Programs that operate in isolation cannot produce the cumulative experience that actually retains employees.
The fix is to design EX as a single coherent journey across hiring, onboarding, manager interactions, growth, and exit, with each touchpoint reinforcing the same set of cultural commitments.
What the Real Ingredients Are
What is the most important ingredient in employee experience?
The manager. Most EX outcomes track tightly to the quality of the daily manager-employee relationship. Investment in manager development consistently outperforms investment in any other EX program. Pair that with employee engagement frameworks that hold managers accountable, and the team gets compounding returns.
How does onboarding shape long-term experience?
The first 90 days set the trajectory for the rest of the tenure. Onboarding programs that connect new hires to mission, manager, and meaningful work outperform onboarding that focuses on systems and policies. The companies that invest here see higher first-year retention and faster time to productivity.
What Actually Works in EX Strategy
Build EX around employee journey moments
Map the full employee lifecycle, identify the moments that matter most (first day, first feedback, first promotion, first time the company gets it wrong), and design those moments deliberately. The moments outside this list usually take care of themselves; the moments inside it determine whether someone stays or leaves.
Tie employer brand to actual experience
Employer branding only stays credible when it matches the daily reality. Marketing what the company is not produces a one-time hire and a fast departure. Marketing what the company actually delivers attracts people who fit and stay longer.
Use surveys to instrument EX, not perform it
Employee surveys are most useful as continuous instrumentation rather than annual events. Pulse cadence, by-team segmentation, and visible follow-through turn surveys from a compliance ritual into an actual EX tool.
Where Employee Relations Fits in Employee Experience
EX strategies that ignore ER are missing one of the strongest signals available. The way a company handles employee complaints, investigations, and conflict resolution is a daily test of whether the stated EX commitment is real. Companies running modern employee engagement programs treat ER infrastructure as part of EX, not separate from it.
How ER infrastructure changes EX outcomes
Trustworthy intake, clear case routing, predictable communication, and visible resolution all change how employees experience the workplace. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS data continues to show that voluntary quits remain a meaningful share of separations, and a chunk of those quits trace back to a single mishandled ER moment that signaled the company did not actually care.
Frequently Asked Questions About Employee Experience
What is employee experience?
Employee experience is the cumulative effect of every interaction an employee has with the company across their lifecycle, from candidate experience through alumni status. It includes manager interactions, tools, physical or digital work environment, learning opportunities, and how the company handles hard moments.
How is EX different from engagement?
Engagement is a snapshot of how employees feel and how connected they are to the work. Experience is the underlying reality that produces (or fails to produce) engagement. Strong experience generally produces strong engagement; the reverse is not always true.
How do you measure employee experience?
Pulse sentiment, lifecycle survey scores, regrettable attrition by tenure stage, internal mobility, and qualitative feedback from interviews. Each metric reveals a different part of the picture; together they give a defensible view of whether EX is actually improving.
What role does retention play in EX?
Retention is the most reliable lagging indicator of EX. Retention strategy connected to EX produces durable improvements; retention work disconnected from EX usually produces short-term tactics that wear off.
How do small companies build great EX?
Small companies build EX through proximity and consistency. The founder, the first manager, and the first few rituals set the tone. The discipline is to write down what is currently working before growth scrambles the implicit practices that made the early experience strong.
How do EX programs survive cost pressure?
EX investment often gets cut first when revenue pressure rises, which is exactly when it produces the highest payoff. The companies that protect EX during downturns retain top performers and capture market share when conditions improve. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS data shows that voluntary quits remain a meaningful share of separations even when overall turnover slows, which means EX still matters during cost discipline.
How does internal mobility connect to EX?
Internal mobility is one of the highest-signal EX investments. Employees who can grow inside the company stay longer, develop deeper expertise, and reduce hiring spend. The companies that build strong internal mobility programs see measurable retention gains within the first 12 months of consistent execution.
Another underrated EX practice is what happens at exit. Most companies treat exit interviews as a checkbox; the strongest treat them as a final research opportunity. Patterns across exits, by team and by tenure stage, reveal where the lifecycle is breaking down. The teams that read exit signal carefully often catch upstream problems six to nine months before they show up in attrition data.
The recognition layer also matters more than most leaders give it credit for. Generic recognition programs rarely move the needle; specific, tied-to-values recognition does. Companies that train managers in the specific format of effective recognition (name the behavior, name the value, name the impact) build a quiet engine that reinforces the cultural commitments without requiring centralized programs to do the work.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Karishma’s framing is operational: EX is the cumulative result of a series of moments executed well, not a single program. The teams that ship this well treat the manager relationship as the primary lever, instrument the lifecycle continuously, and connect ER signal to EX strategy.
For People teams trying to build the same posture, the discipline is to map the lifecycle, identify the highest-impact moments, and design each one with the same care a product team would put into a customer journey. The compounding effect is what produces the retention gains executives expect from EX investment but rarely see when programs operate in isolation.
See how AllVoices helps People teams turn workplace signals into action.
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