Employee Experience That Pays Back – A Case Study Playbook

This practical case study shows how a large enterprise moved beyond annual engagement to a science-based, always-on view of employee experience. You will see how EX drivers such as workload, support, trust and role clarity were measured and modelled against outcomes including attrition, absence, safety and service quality. We cover the data pipeline, validation methods, and governance choices that satisfied Legal, Works Councils and Security. We then follow the adoption story – manager playbooks, behaviour nudges and feedback loops – and the ROI framing that secured funding to scale. Expect a candid account of what accelerated value and what slowed it down.

• Business problem and aims: link EX drivers (workload, support, trust, clarity) to attrition, absence, safety and customer outcomes, with CFO-ready targets.
• Measurement model: validated multi-factor EX construct and item bank; cadence, sampling and segmentation choices; reducing bias and survey fatigue.
• Data and modelling: integrate EX signals with HRIS, absence, safety and customer data; feature engineering; predictive models; calibration and drift monitoring.
• Governance and compliance: privacy-by-design, consent, role-based access; alignment to ISO 45003 and CSRD-ready workforce reporting; Works Council engagement.
• Manager enablement: insight-to-action playbooks, nudges, SLAs and escalation paths; measuring behaviour change and adoption.
• Impact story: what moved, how quickly and why; converting “hours saved” into capacity, cost or risk impact that Finance accepts.
• Scale and sustainability: service model, operating rhythms, and a simple evaluation scorecard for new EX use cases.

• Replicate a KPI tree that connects specific EX drivers to attrition, absence, safety and customer metrics in your context.
• Design a lean EX data pipeline and modelling approach with validation, fairness checks and drift monitoring.
• Map EX practices to ISO 45003 guidance and prepare CSRD ESRS S1-aligned workforce disclosures.
• Adopt a governance pattern: consent, access controls, anonymisation thresholds and Works Council engagement that withstands scrutiny.
• Equip managers with actionable playbooks and telemetry to track behaviour change and close the loop.
• Build an ROI narrative that translates EX shifts into capacity, cost reduction, risk avoidance or revenue uplift that Finance will back.

Kevin Rutherford

VP, Professional Services - North America · Welliba

Leaders face rising scrutiny to evidence workforce wellbeing and its impact on performance. EU CSRD ESRS S1 requires structured workforce disclosures; ISO 45003 guides managing psychosocial risks; WHO promotes organisational and manager interventions; and Gallup estimates low engagement costs roughly 9% of global GDP. These pressures make robust EX measurement and governance commercially critical.