The Value of Employee Experience
Thinking through how we invest in talent programs
Not too long ago, my team (which just happens to include an industry executive with a hell of a lot of talent management experience) was having a discussion about Army HR programs, and I got asked a simple but provocative question:
If you had $100 to spend, how would you divide it between talent acquisition, retention, and employee experience?
That’s an easy one for me. $10 toward acquisition and retention, $10 toward programs that help Soldiers and veterans tell their stories, and $80 toward Soldier experience.
Most organizations—and the Army is no exception—pour tons of money into talent acquisition, but the thing I’ve seen is that if you get the experience right, from value-driven impactful work to workplace tools and training to quality of life to leadership to career growth and recognition, then the rest takes care of itself.
And one of the reasons that we’ve had the issues in talent acquisition and retention has little to do with the money we’ve invested in those programs, but the fact that they’re currently out of alignment with our employee experience. My hypothesis is that if we can invest in the improvement of employee experience—in our case, Soldier experience—retention and talent acquisition will become far less of an issue.
How does that work?
Let’s decode it. 🚀
Rebalancing the Spend Toward Experience
The default focus for most organizations on this question is to pour money into talent acquisition. They chase new talent, pump up recruiting campaigns, or offer signing-bonuses. Some of them, realizing that they have attrition issues later, pivot to retention programs that throw out pay bumps, retention incentives, or gimmicky perks. But there is a problem with increasing the spend on these programs.
They’re treating the symptoms, not the problem.
Why does your organization have attrition problems or problems attracting talent in the first place? My bet is that it’s not due to your bonuses or the amount of money you spend on marketing and job boards.
Experience is the root cause and needs to be addressed.
I watched this happen from multiple angles when I was standing up the innovation team at U.S. Army Recruiting Command in 2023/2024 to address our recruiting shortfalls. The Army invested like crazy in marketing and advertising, on lead generation, and on recruiter training and incentives. And you have to pay attention to these—without the front end of the cycle, you don’t have an intake for talent.
But what I also saw were problems permeating the force. Quality of life issues, like bad nutrition and barracks mold. Soldiers feeling like they’d been lied to by advertising and their recruiter when their experience looked nothing like the commercials or promises. Veterans who were less and less willing to talk about their experiences, and who were less and less likely to recommend the Army as a career.
What keeps Soldiers in uniform—or pushes them out—isn’t the billboard they saw on the way in. It’s the experience once they get here.
And I’m not talking about perks and benefits or giving them additional time off. People don’t join the Army because they want something easy, they join the Army because there’s something about being a Soldier that draws them in. And we have to deliver that.
Do they feel developed and impactful?
Do they have leaders who invest in them?
Do they see meaning in their work and a future for themselves?
Or do they see bureaucracy, broken processes, and indifference?
We join the Army for a lot of different reasons. College money, adventure, even a catchy ad campaign. But we stay—or leave—because of experience. And the same is true for industry.
Why Experience Dominates
Let me break down why I think the lion’s share of your $100 should go to experience.
1. Experience drives retention and higher performance.
We’ve all heard the expression that people don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses or company culture. And depending on where you are in the organization, your boss sets that company culture. In the Army, the organizational culture is the responsibility of the commander, so bad boss pretty much equals bad culture.
Gallup research shows that 70% of the variance in employee engagement is tied to the manager for this reason. Great managers create the right environment for employee engagement and employee experience, and in those organizations with positive engagement and experience, they achieve 23% higher profit. With positive experience, there’s less employee absenteeism, higher retention, fewer safety incidents, fewer defects or errors…you get the picture.
2. Experience fuels talent acquisition.
The best recruiting tool isn’t a glossy campaign, especially in the digital age. It’s your employees themselves. When people love where they work and they’re doing awesome things, they tell their friends. And these days, one of your employees just might have 2M+ followers on one of their platforms.
In the Army, our best recruiters are a combination of veterans in the community who tell their own stories and encourage people they know and who know them to seek a career in the military, and Soldiers out on social media telling their own stories. That’s why I’ve invested time and innovation dollars in programs that help these populations better tell their stories.
Real experiences and authentic stories resonate with peers—and with the digital generation, which is well geared to seek authenticity online.
3. Experience multiplies performance.
Even if you keep people, disengaged employees give you “quit and stay” behavior. We had terms for this well before “quiet quitting” became a thing. In the Army, we said people were on the ROAD—retired on active duty. Hell, in high school, we said people had “senioritis” their last year. Whatever you call it, you might find yourself in a situation where your retention numbers might look good because people are physically present, but they’re mentally checked out.
Employee experience doesn’t just keep people in the building—it keeps them contributing at their best. As I mentioned before, it increases retention, reduces absenteeism, and generally increases individual productivity. Satisfied employees are more efficient and innovative.
Notice I say “satisfied” and not “happy.” The focus isn’t on just giving people nice things, but in meeting their expectations.
Actually, that’s a good jump-off point. Let’s talk about what employee experience really is.
Decoding Employee Experience
It’s not ping-pong tables or pizzas on Friday or fancy coffees. Although frankly, I am still highly motivated by an amazing maple latte I grabbed from the coffee vendors at Google’s offices. But when we talk about investing in employee experience, we mean core structural investments that shape how people live and work in your organization every day.
Clear purpose and alignment: People need to know how their work connects to the mission.
Growth and development: Skills training, mentoring, opportunities to stretch.
Voice and agency: Systems that let people influence decisions and improve processes.
Supportive leadership: Leaders trained not just to manage, but to develop.
Human-centered systems: Benefits, policies, and tools designed around people, not bureaucracy.
These aren’t “extras.” They are the backbone of how people experience work, and the better that experience ranks against expectations, the more success you will have at retaining your workforce. And the better your people message that experience, the more success you will have at attracting new members to the workforce.
THIS is where I would spend all my money.
But let’s talk about that other important portion, how they tell their story.
The Storytelling Dividend
If I had $100, why would I carve out 10% of that specifically for programs that help Soldiers and veterans tell their stories?
Because stories do two powerful things:
Externally: They humanize the organization. When Soldiers share their authentic journeys, they inspire others to see themselves in uniform. The same is true in business—employees’ voices are far more trusted than corporate messaging.
Internally: They strengthen identity and pride. When people learn to tell their own stories, they often reconnect with meaning in their work. That meaning is retention fuel.
A good story told by a peer beats a multimillion-dollar ad campaign. Every time. We have data to prove it. I’m excited to highlight the publications we’ve shared it with.
What About the Last $10?
We still need talent acquisition and retention, and while I’m not in favor of putting tons of money toward it, we still need to invest. That spare change I’ve set aside for it might actually go to fund:
Smart data systems to target recruiting more precisely.
Exit surveys and stay interviews to understand retention trends.
Analytics that connect workforce trends to mission outcomes.
But if you’re constantly pouring the majority of your dollars into filling a leaky bucket, you’re solving the wrong problem.
The $100 Test
Here’s a practical way to use this thought experiment in your own context. Ask yourself (or your bosses or talent professionals):
If I had $100 to spend on talent tomorrow, how would I divide it?
What does my current budget actually reflect? (Most will find it’s closer to $60–70 on acquisition, $20 on retention, $10 on experience.)
What would shift if I flipped that ratio?
And most importantly:
What’s one concrete investment I can make in employee experience that would change the game for my people?
The AI Layer
There’s one more reason experience should dominate your investment: AI.
As more routine tasks get automated, the differentiator won’t be who can crunch numbers fastest. It’ll be whose people feel supported, creative, and empowered enough to use technology as a multiplier.
If your workforce feels replaceable, they’ll act replaceable. If they feel valued, they’ll use every new tool to make themselves—and your organization—better.
Employee experience is the foundation for that shift.
So…let’s recap.
If I had $100, I’d put $80 on employee experience.
Not because talent acquisition and retention don’t matter, far from that. But because they’re downstream symptoms of the real problem.
Get the experience right, and people will want to join. They’ll want to stay. They’ll want to perform.
And I’d invest in storytelling, because authentic voices scale further than marketing dollars ever will.
At the end of the day, the question isn’t how much you spend on talent. It’s where you spend it. And the leaders who invest in experience are the ones building organizations people don’t just work for—they belong to.
Unrelated to the post content, we just redid our brand design. Let us know what you think of it!
