Who really owns the employee experience?

Employee experience has become one of the urgent retention challenges facing organisations. Yet many businesses still treat it primarily as a technology issue rather than a people strategy. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report suggests the current answer isn’t working. Just 10% of UK employees feel engaged at work, below the global average of 20% and among the lowest in Europe. That number has barely shifted in years, despite sustained investment in platforms, programmes and workplace initiatives, suggesting many organisations are still failing to address the underlying drivers of engagement.

Part of the problem lies in how organisations assign responsibility in the first place. According to the Future of Work Index, nearly a third of senior leaders believe IT holds primary ownership. A further 23% point to HR, and 16% to individual managers.

Employee experience is the sum of every interaction a person has with their organisation, from first job application to final day. It is shaped by technology, culture, management quality, and whether people can see how their work connects to something larger. No single function can carry that weight alone, and when one is expected to, the cracks show quickly with inconsistent experiences and duplicated effort.

While technology plays an important role, employee experience is ultimately about people, culture and communication. That makes HR uniquely positioned to lead the strategy, even if delivery requires collaboration across multiple functions.

The hidden cost of divided responsibility

The cost of siloed thinking is measurable. The index also revealed that more than a quarter of senior leaders describe collaboration between HR, Internal Communications and IT as highly siloed or in active conflict. The downstream effects are predictable: inconsistent experiences, duplicated effort, employees’ unsure which tool to use or who to ask for help.

Digital friction accumulates quietly until it becomes an engagement problem. And engagement problems become retention problems before anyone has properly diagnosed the cause. By the time the issue surfaces in exit interview data, the conditions that created it have often been in place for years.

What shared ownership actually looks like