Employee experience and the cost of ignoring your best people

Let's talk about your EX — Employee Experience.

It encompasses everything a person lives, feels, and perceives from the moment they join an organization until they leave: the culture, the leadership, the tools, the processes, the recognition, the communication, and the colleagues.

In some places it's treated as a priority. In others it's an afterthought. But what's absolutely clear is that in any organization, someone who's been there for a while knows perfectly well who produces results and who only produces noise.

You don't need a performance report or an evaluation. You can see it in who shows up when there's a hard problem, a compromised situation. Who delivers without anyone having to chase them. Who adds to the team and helps everyone improve.

The noise makers

Generally, the person who produces value and generates results is ignored by whoever only produces noise, because they see their position threatened — worried that others might compare and notice they're not contributing.

Curiously, one way these noise-makers protect themselves is by creating processes and bureaucracy that slow everyone down equally, making it harder to distinguish who actually delivers.

The exhaustion of the doers

The real exhaustion doesn't come from the workload. It comes from proposing improvements that never get implemented.

From flagging problems that get ignored until they explode — and then suddenly everything is urgent.

From having conversations that lead nowhere with people who ask a lot and listen very little.

That exhaustion doesn't appear overnight. It accumulates slowly, meeting after meeting, broken promise after broken promise, feedback thrown into the void, watching their proposals get ignored while being asked to solve problems generated by others' incompetence.

And not in their own way, but in the way of whoever manages them. The way that they've already seen fail before and will fail again, but that nobody questions because questioning makes uncomfortable whoever doesn't want to be questioned.

Nothing irritates high performers more than: "solve this problem that was created by not listening to you, and solve it my way — the way that never works."

When they stop trying

There comes a point when the people who add value stop proposing, stop identifying improvement opportunities, and stop investing energy in a system that doesn't give it back.

That's the most expensive moment for any organization — and it's almost always invisible until it's too late.