🤔 Your Engagement Scores Are Going Up—But What Are They Actually Telling You?

Why It Matters

If validated, passive benchmarking of employee experience can reveal hidden competitive advantages in talent and translate into material shareholder value—suggesting executives and investors should treat EX as a strategic KPI.

Summary

Speakers argue that traditional engagement scores and vendor benchmarks are limited because they are anonymized and measured in isolation, making it hard for executives to know whether a score change is meaningful across locations, roles or versus specific competitors. They propose using public and passive data sources to benchmark employee and candidate experience against named rivals, identify friction points in hiring, and generate actionable recommendations. To test the link to performance, they ranked S&P 500 firms by public EX signals and found the top 20% delivered about 5% higher total shareholder return over five years. The approach reframes engagement from a standalone HR metric into a measurable factor tied to recruiting effectiveness and company valuation.

Original Description

David Green, Katarina Coppé and Jake Mealy discuss why engagement benchmarks only tell part of the story. The real opportunity lies in understanding how employee experience compares to competitors, where friction exists, and which interventions actually drive business outcomes.

🌟 One of the most compelling findings? Companies with the strongest employee experience in the S&P 500 outperformed the market by 5% over five years.

Employee experience isn't just an HR measure—it's a business performance indicator.

🎧 Listen to the full episode:https://www.myhrfuture.com/digital-hr-leaders-podcast/the-hidden-economic-value-of-employee-experience