Employee experience is moving fast, and for many leaders, the hardest part isn’t keeping up with new tools or channels, it’s making sense of what all the signals are actually telling you.
In a recent episode of The EX Conversation, host Kaz spoke with Dan Lewis, Senior Director of Internal Digital Channels at Visa. Dan has spent his career working at the intersection of storytelling, technology, and scale; from shaping digital narratives at Sesame Workshop, to leading corporate digital communications at Warner Bros., to building internal digital channels inside a global organization like Visa. That background gives him a practical view of what works, what doesn’t, and where the gaps really are.
Here we distilled our three favorite takeaways from that conversation and why they matter for EX leaders right now.
1. The problem isn’t a lack of data, it’s knowing what to do with it
For Dan, most EX teams don’t have a data problem, they have an interpretation problem.
“The problem with employee experience data right now is it’s very siloed.”
Intranet analytics, email metrics, surveys, and social signals all exist, but they live in different places and arrive at different times. None of it is wrong, it’s just disconnected. That’s why it’s possible to have plenty of activity data and still struggle to answer a simple question from leadership: How is this really landing?
Through the conversation, we learned that Dan doesn’t try to force these signals into a single, overly neat view. Instead, he treats each one as directional. A spike in intranet traffic doesn’t mean success on its own. A dip in survey confidence doesn’t automatically signal failure. Meaning only emerges when you look at how multiple signals move together.
Dan’s response to this isn’t to chase a perfect dashboard or a single source of truth. He accepts the mess and works within it, focusing on patterns, context, and human feedback rather than false certainty.
His advice to EX leaders? Stop chasing perfect certainty and start looking for patterns that help you make better decisions.
2. When analytics fall short, create new feedback loops
Even with a signal-based mindset, Dan is honest about the limits of traditional EX data, especially when it comes to sentiment and trust.
That’s why, at Visa, he helped roll out the company’s first internal social network. Not to boost engagement scores, but to introduce a more immediate, human layer of feedback.
“We rolled out the company’s first ever internal social network, in large part because we wanted employees to feel that we were listening and we cared, and that we were willing to make adjustments.”
Comments, reactions, and conversations don’t replace surveys or analytics, but they do add something dashboards often miss: context. They show how people are responding in the moment, alongside the content itself, rather than weeks later in a report.
The takeaway here is practical. If your current data doesn’t tell you what you need to know, don’t wait. Add ways for employees to respond, react, and speak up, even if those signals are imperfect. They often fill the gaps that formal measurement can’t.
3. AI matters but only if it helps reconnect meaning
Dan is careful not to oversell AI. What interests him isn’t faster content creation. It’s what AI could do for interpretation. For the first time, there’s a real possibility of bringing fragmented EX signals together - intranet data, communications activity, surveys, and social feedback - and understanding them in context.
Dan gives a simple example of what that future could look like:
“Once we can break down those data silos… we’ll be able to say, what was the employee sentiment around our Q3 earnings?”
That’s a shift from guessing to knowing. From inferring sentiment based on proxies to actually understanding how employees reacted and how those reactions change over time.
Importantly, Dan doesn’t suggest waiting for this future to arrive fully formed. He works today in ways that preserve qualitative insight, keep data close to content, and avoid flattening meaning into a single score, so interpretation improves now as well as later.
The TLDR
Taken together, Dan’s perspective offers something many EX leaders need right now: permission to operate realistically.
You don’t need perfect data to move forward. You do need to be honest about what your data can and can’t tell you, willing to add human feedback where systems fall short, and thoughtful about how new technology actually helps rather than adds noise.
Want the full conversation?
This article distills three key takeaways from The EX Conversation with Dan Lewis.
🎧 Watch the full episode to hear more on:
-
How EX leaders should approach AI without the hype
-
Why personalization moves EX from finding information to taking action
-
What most organizations still misunderstand about measuring EX
-
Career lessons from building internal digital channels at global scale
Watch Episode 3 of The EX Conversation and hear directly from EX leaders navigating complexity in real time.
Get started. Get your personalized demo.
