There's a strange contradiction at the heart of today's workplace.
We've never had more technology designed to make work easier. Yet employees are still struggling to find the information they need, understand what their organizations expect of them, and keep pace with change.
For employee experience leaders, this probably sounds familiar.
You're being asked to improve employee engagement while organizations undergo another round of transformation. You need to help employees embrace AI tools when they're not entirely sure what it means for their jobs. Higher ups want you to build a stronger workplace culture across hybrid work patterns and teams that may rarely see one another.
Increasingly, you have to demonstrate that your employee experience strategy is making a measurable difference to retention and business performance.
None of these challenges are entirely new. What's changing is the speed at which they're converging.
The numbers bear this out. Edelman's 2026 Trust at Work report found that three in four employees experienced at least one major workplace transformation in the past year and more than four in ten went through three or more.
At Unily's Unite 26 conference, we heard a remarkably consistent message from leaders across HR, internal communications, and technology: organizations are moving quickly, but bringing people along is proving much harder.
The research tells a similar story.
In a new study of 2,305 U.S. workers, Unily and Gallup found that employees with a good digital workplace experience were 3.1 times as likely to be engaged and 5.5 times as likely to strongly recommend their employer as a place to work compared with those with a poor experience. That's exactly the kind of advocacy you’d want to capture on eNPS. They were also considerably less likely to experience frequent burnout.
Yet only 1 in 5 employees had a good digital workplace experience.
The State of the Digital Workplace Experience
Even with all the new technology designed to make work easier, it’s not tech alone that can create a better experience. The research suggests something more interesting: the strongest outcomes are associated with digital experiences that support employees' relationships with their organization as well as their ability to do their jobs.
It's an important reminder as we look toward 2027.
The future of employee experience won't be decided by how quickly organizations introduce new technology. It will depend on whether people feel brought along on the journey.
That's the common thread running through every 2027 trend. Employee experience is becoming harder to separate from the way organizations operate, and EX leaders will play a growing role in shaping how change happens, not just how it's received.
The next chapter of EX will demand a different approach: experiences that can adapt as quickly as work changes while remaining grounded in what employees actually need.
Here are seven shifts we think EX leaders should be paying attention to.
1. The Employee Experience Will Become Central to the Success of Transformation
The challenge is no longer getting organizations to change. It's helping employees keep up.
The pace of work today has turned change into a constant and change management from a one-off project into a permanent state.
The next transformation often begins before the previous one has settled. For many employees, that's already the reality.
AI is accelerating the pace of change, often without providing much certainty about what work will look like on the other side. Leaders are expected to communicate a vision that may still be evolving. Employees are being asked to learn new ways of working while continuing to deliver against existing expectations.
So, how do you bring employees with you when change is the new normal?
You start by listening to them.
At Unite 26, Nikki Turner-Harding, Country Head for the UK and Ireland at The Adecco Group, described the difficulty of introducing AI into an organization where employees were understandably concerned about what automation might mean for their roles.
Rather than beginning with productivity targets, Adecco changed the conversation. It asked employees which parts of their jobs they found repetitive and which activities they wanted more time to focus on.
The result was a more collaborative approach to redesigning work with employees helping determine where AI could genuinely improve their experience.
Employees don't experience transformation as a roadmap. They experience it through changes to their responsibilities, daily routines, and sense of security, often in the moments that matter most to them: a new manager, a new process, or a role that looks different from one week to the next.
Annual employee engagement surveys can't keep pace with that. Listening needs to become continuous, using pulse surveys, focus groups, and everyday conversations to shape decisions before they're made.
In 2027, we expect EX leaders to play a more influential role in shaping those experiences from the outset, rather than being brought in once decisions have already been made.
2. The Employee Experience Will Move From Personalized to Adaptive
For years, teams have tried to make the digital workplace feel more personal. In 2027, the bigger opportunity will be making it responsive to what people actually need.
An employee's needs change constantly throughout the working day.
One moment they're looking for an answer to a policy question. The next, they're preparing for a difficult conversation or getting to grips with an unfamiliar process.
How they want to take in information changes, too. Someone might want to listen to a podcast on their commute, watch a short video to understand something new, or read an article when they need the detail.
The reality though is most workplace experiences still look the same to everyone, every time they log in.
Personalization has taken us part of the way. Employees can receive news relevant to their role, access tailored resources, and see information designed for their location or department.
Personalization is limited to who someone is whereas adaptivity is built around what they're trying to do, right now. Personalization makes the workplace more relevant. Adaptivity makes it more responsive.
In 2027, an adaptive employee experience will respond to people's context, preferences, and changing needs in the moments that matter, rather than serving everyone the same fixed journey.
That shift will show up in three ways:
1) Employees will choose how they consume information. Organizations will quickly turn trusted content into articles, videos, or podcasts rather than creating each format from scratch.
2) Organizations will respond to major change with a dedicated digital experience built in days rather than months and adapt it as employees' needs evolve.
3) Most significantly, employees will interact with workplace technology through natural conversation. Instead of navigating applications or finding information across different locations , they'll simply ask for what they need and get help taking the next step.
This isn't a distant vision. At Unily, Content Studio, Indi, and Unily Glass are already showing how information, digital environments, and interfaces can flex around employees.
For EX leaders, this changes what experience design means. Instead of building fixed experiences and expecting employees to adapt to them, the opportunity is to build experiences that adapt to employees.
3. Making Work Easier Will Become a Bigger Priority Than Adding More Employee Benefits
Sometimes the most meaningful improvement to employee experience is simply removing something that makes work unnecessarily difficult.
A familiar frustration for EX teams is the gap between what organizations say about employee well-being and what employees experience during an ordinary working day.
An organization might offer generous benefits, an ambitious well-being program, and a mental health app, while employees spend their mornings navigating disconnected systems or chasing approvals.
Those everyday frustrations matter.
Unily and Gallup found that 54% of U.S. employees constantly or often switch between digital tools to complete their main tasks. Among employees whose information is spread across many locations, that figure rises to 78%.
The relationship between the digital workplace and wider employee outcomes is particularly revealing. Frequent burnout was reported by 38% of employees with poor digital workplace experiences, compared with 11% of those with good experiences.
The research doesn't establish that digital friction causes it. It does reinforce the importance of looking beyond individual technology problems to understand the cumulative experience of work.
On Unite 26's Building the Intelligent Workplace panel, Forrester principal analyst Cheryl McKinnon described digital employee experience as "that sum of all of those little things that add up during the course of the workday," from the hardware and software to the quality of information.
The panel agreed that one of the clearest markers of an intelligent workplace is less stress: if organizations eliminate noise, take out complexity, and make answers easier to find, "we can just reduce stress for our employees."
As intelligent and adaptive experiences become more capable, organizations have an opportunity to address these frustrations more directly. But the goal shouldn't be to introduce technology for its own sake. It should be to reduce the unnecessary effort employees expend getting their work done.
That could mean removing redundant approvals, making essential information easier to find, or eliminating repetitive administrative tasks that distract employees from more meaningful work.
While AI can help, many of these problems don't require a technological solution. Sometimes they require organizations to simplify a process, clarify ownership, or reconsider whether an activity needs to happen at all.
In 2027, EX leaders will increasingly be judged by how much unnecessary effort they can help remove from employees' working lives.
4. Trust Will Become One of the Most Important Measures of the Employee Experience
You can give employees access to more information than ever. That doesn't mean they'll believe it.
Trust is often discussed in employee experience as a question of leadership credibility or organizational culture.
Both remain important. But as AI becomes part of everyday work, trust is acquiring a new dimension.
Can employees rely on the information their organization provides? Unily and Gallup found that just 26% of employees who use workplace digital information consider it very accurate.
Among employees who rely on both colleagues and digital resources to do their jobs, 60% trust people most, compared with 29% who trust digital information and resources most.
An employee looking for a policy shouldn't have to wonder whether they've found the latest version. Someone navigating a major organizational change shouldn't receive contradictory answers depending on which channel they use.
If AI is going to become a trusted source of workplace information, the quality of the knowledge behind it matters enormously.
At Unite 26, dentsu shared how it had taken a more disciplined approach to managing organizational content, reducing outdated material and establishing clearer ownership.
The lesson extends beyond AI readiness.
Trust is built through countless small interactions with an organization. Every accurate answer helps. Every confusing or contradictory experience risks undermining it.
In 2027, we expect EX leaders to take a broader view of trust, recognizing that the reliability of everyday workplace experiences is part of the relationship between employees and their employer.
5. Employee Communication Will Shift From Delivering Messages to Creating Understanding
Employees don't necessarily need to hear more from their leaders. They need to understand what they're being told, why it matters, and what it means for them.
Internal communication has never lacked channels.
Employees can receive updates through email, intranets, messaging applications, town halls, and increasingly, AI-powered experiences.
What access to communication doesn't guarantee is clarity.
Unily and Gallup found that 85% of U.S. employees receive at least one digital message from senior leaders during a typical week. Among those receiving messages, 54% say they are only somewhat helpful or not helpful at all in understanding organizational priorities.
That's not a reach problem. It's an alignment problem.
For EX leaders, that raises an uncomfortable question: how much of what organizations communicate actually helps employees make sense of their work?
This becomes particularly important during periods of continuous transformation. Employees need to understand how strategic decisions affect their roles, how their work connects to the bigger picture, and what they should do differently as a result.
Getting it right pays off. PwC's Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025 found that workers who feel strongly aligned with leadership goals are 78% more motivated than those who report the least alignment.
And it's only going to get harder. Human attention is becoming one of the scarcest resources in any organization.
At Unite 26, digital workplace consultant Sharon O'Dea pointed out that the average person now receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages a day, according to Microsoft's Work Trend Index. AI will make it easier than ever to add to that pile. As Sharon put it: "AI has made content cheaper to produce, but it doesn't make anyone's day any longer."
Her math on a single CEO message to 40,000 people, at 90 seconds each, is sobering: "That's a thousand hours of attention in a single send."
As adaptive experiences become more sophisticated, organizations will have new opportunities to make information easier to understand and act on. A single trusted source could support different formats, levels of detail, and experiences depending on what an employee needs.
AI will make this easier to achieve at scale. It also creates a responsibility to avoid overwhelming employees with even more content.
6. The Human Experience of Work Will Become More Valuable as AI Takes on More Tasks
As technology becomes more capable, employees will be asking a deeply human question: where do I fit?
Much of the conversation about AI at work has focused on productivity. How much time can we save? Which tasks can we automate? How much more can employees accomplish?
When technology changes the work people do, it can also change how they think about their contribution and future.
Employees may welcome the opportunity to spend less time on repetitive administration. They may also worry about losing skills, professional identity, or opportunities for development. Ignore that, and job satisfaction and intent to stay will quietly erode, however impressive the productivity gains look.
This is where EX leaders have an important role to play.
The Unily and Gallup research identifies two dimensions of Digital Workplace Experience: Digital Enablement, which concerns access to usable tools and information, and Digital Culture, which concerns how digital experiences support connection and development.
Employees with good Digital Culture but poor Digital Enablement reported substantially stronger engagement than those with good Digital Enablement but poor Digital Culture: 38% versus 17%. Having both was associated with the strongest outcomes overall.
It's a reminder that providing people with effective technology isn't the same as creating an experience in which they feel valued. That's a workplace culture question as much as a technology one.
As AI changes the nature of work, we expect organizations to pay closer attention to whether employees have opportunities to develop and contribute in meaningful ways.
That means making space for employees to shape how AI is introduced, building reskilling into AI rollouts rather than bolting it on afterward, and ensuring that productivity improvements translate into better experiences for people. It also means investing in manager development because manager effectiveness will make or break how difficult conversations about changing roles land. It also means performance reviews that recognize growth and new capabilities, not just output.
At Unite 26, The Adecco Group's approach illustrated the potential of this thinking. Rather than simply asking where AI could replace manual effort, the team explored how it could give recruiters more time for the human parts of their jobs.
That's the kind of conversation EX leaders should be helping organizations have.
7. The Frontline Will Become the Real Test of Inclusive Employee Experience
If your employee experience only works for people sitting at a desk, how inclusive is it really?
Organizations have spent years talking about creating consistent experiences for every employee with the assumption being that people have regular access to a laptop, time to read lengthy communications, and the freedom to step away from their work to complete training.
For frontline employees, those assumptions often don't hold. And these are frequently the people who shape customer experience most directly.
Unily and Gallup found an interesting difference between frontline workers and their desk-based colleagues.
Frontline employees were more likely to report good Digital Enablement, at 58% compared with 44%. But they were less likely to report good Digital Culture, at 30% compared with 36%.
In other words, having access to functional technology doesn't necessarily mean employees feel connected to their organization. It's one of the biggest experience gaps in the modern workforce.
At Unite 26, Alshaya shared how it had rethought learning for its frontline workforce.
Traditional training that required employees to sit at a computer for extended periods didn't reflect the realities of working in retail. Its response was a mobile learning experience designed to fit more naturally into the working day.
Etihad Airways approached a similar challenge through employee communication. Its workforce includes cabin crew, engineers, and office-based employees with very different information needs. Rather than continuing with largely one-size-fits-all communication, Etihad developed a mobile employee experience that brings together relevant updates, workplace services, and opportunities for connection.
The company reported that 99.9% of its approximately 14,000 employees had downloaded the application following launch. More than that, they’ve completely stopped the all-staff email. The more interesting story isn't the adoption figure. It's the decision to rethink the experience around employees' actual working lives.
These examples point toward an important shift.
The next generation of employee experience won't simply extend existing office-based practices to the frontline. It will create experiences that can adapt to the realities of different roles, environments, and working patterns.
And when the frontline feels connected and informed, customers feel it too. We expect employee experience and customer experience to be increasingly measured as one story.
If intelligent tools are primarily designed for knowledge workers, organizations risk creating a new divide between employees who benefit from workplace innovation and those who remain on the sidelines.
In 2027, we expect frontline inclusion to become a more prominent measure of EX maturity.
What does this mean for EX leaders in 2027?
As we said at the start, there's a common thread running through these trends.
Employee experience is becoming harder to separate from the way organizations operate.
That creates an opportunity for EX leaders, but it also raises expectations for every employee experience strategy.
Understanding how employees perceive organizational decisions will always matter. But EX leaders also have an increasingly important role in shaping those decisions and in involving employees in them from the start.
The evidence for taking that role seriously is growing.
In Unily and Gallup's research, 42% of employees with a good Digital Workplace Experience were watching for or actively seeking another job, compared with 66% of those with a poor experience.
The findings are associations, not proof of cause and effect, but they add weight to something EX professionals have long understood: the everyday experience of working for an organization matters.
Looking toward 2027, we believe the most effective EX leaders will be those who help their organizations ask better questions.
Are we making work genuinely easier, or just introducing more technology? Can our employee experiences adapt as quickly as people's needs change? Do employees understand the changes happening around them, and their part in them? Are we creating opportunities for people to grow as their work evolves? And are we designing experiences that reflect the realities of our entire workforce?
These questions won't always have straightforward answers.
But they move employee experience closer to where it belongs: at the heart of how organizations make work better.
Because the future of work shouldn't just be more productive. It should feel better to be part of.
Explore the Research and Conversations Behind These Trends
The State of the Digital Workplace Experience: Unily and Gallup
Discover how Digital Workplace Experiences relate to employee engagement, well-being, and retention in new research involving 2,305 U.S. workers.
Access the insights. Move work forward.
Unite 26 On Demand
Hear directly from the leaders navigating workplace transformation, including stories from The Adecco Group, Etihad Airways, Alshaya, and more on Unite On-Demand.
Explore the trends for your function
Discover what the changing employee experience means for HR, internal communications, and IT leaders.
How EX Trends Have Changed: 2024 to 2027
Year: 2027
Change will become a permanent state; experiences will move from personalized to adaptive; making work easier will outrank adding benefits; trust and alignment will become core measures of EX; the human side of work will grow in value; the frontline will become the real test of inclusive EX
Year: 2026
Top trends
EX became a business operating system; AI moved from enhancement to engine; continuous listening replaced annual surveys; EX ownership became shared across HR, IT, and IC
What happened next
Boards began asking where the value from AI is, and new Unily and Gallup research found only 1 in 5 employees has a good DWX
Year: 2025
Top trends
EX became a shared effort across HR, IT, and internal comms (the EX Super Team); closing the AI gap; tackling burnout by reducing digital noise; reimagining connection for hybrid work
What happened next
AI adoption stayed uneven: Unily research found 32% of employees had never used an AI tool at work
Year: 2024
Top trends
Building engagement through managers; reaching quiet quitters with targeted campaigns; giving ESG communication a bigger role; internal comms moving from order takers to trusted curators; generative AI arriving in comms tools, balanced with authenticity
What happened next
Generative AI moved into everyday tools, and by 2025 AI was no longer optional but integral
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