The Emerging Role of the Chief Workplace Experience Officer

In today’s incredibly competitive talent landscape, forward-thinking organisations are realising  the strategic advantage of intentionally designing great workplace experiences. As our previous article explored, treating employees as valued “consumers” and crafting tailored experiences that resonate with them can be a powerful retention and recruitment tool.   

The workplace experience encompasses every single interaction and touchpoint an employee has with your organisation – from their first glimpse of your employer brand and interview process to their daily work environments, growth opportunities, and even their offboarding. Each moment, no matter how small, shapes their perceptions, engagement levels, and willingness to stick around. 

As companies have started  prioritising this vital piece of the employee value proposition, a new corporate leadership role has begun emerging: The Chief Workplace Experience Officer. 

The Chief Workplace Experience Officer (CWXO) or Chief Employee Experience Officer is an executive level position charged with holistically overseeing and continuously improving the entire end-to-end workplace experience within an organisation.  

This cross-functional role involves activities like defining the desired employee experiences aligned to strategic objectives, designing every minute detail of those experiences from the employee’s perspective, and ensuring consistent delivery of those experiences across all touchpoints, work environments, and circumstances. 

Why is this role becoming important? 

In today’s environment of labour scarcity, skills shortages, and remote work enablement, delivering stellar workplace experiences has become a key competitive battlefield. Top employers recognise that if they create engaging, supportive, productivity-enhancing experiences for their employees, they can gain advantages in: 

1. Attracting and recruiting top talent 
2. Improving employee engagement and lowering turnover 
3. Boosting workforce productivity and performance   
4. Building a highly valued and defensible employer brand 

At the same time, no single leader currently owns the overall responsibility for the workplace experience from end-to-end. Instead, it often gets fragmented across HR, IT, Real Estate/Facilities, Leadership Development, and other domains. Having a CWXO role helps unite these efforts. 

Furthermore, just as customer experience roles have become crucial for understanding and designing for consumer needs, the CWXO plays a similar role – but focused on the employee’s perspective across all workplace touchpoints and journeys. 

Among other responsibilities, some of the key focus areas for a CWXO include: 

1. Understanding employee personas, needs, and what motivates/enables them 
2. Designing holistic, multi-sensory workplace experiences tailored to those audiences 
3. Ensuring every experience reinforces the company’s culture, values, and voice 
4. Collaborating across departments to choreograph consistent workplace experiences
5. Utilising technology, office design, programming, etc. to enable those experiences
6. Continuously measuring employee feedback to identify areas for improvement 

Unlike siloed HR, Real Estate, or IT roles, the CWXO has a uniquely wide-angle view across all the factors and teams involved in shaping the day-to-day workplace experience. 

The skills and background needed for the Chief Workplace Experience Officer role are quite diverse as well. Ideal candidates need experience across domains like HR, business operations, workplace strategy, design, technology, and employee engagement. They also need strong influence skills to unite disparate stakeholders around a cohesive experience vision. 

Pioneering the new Workplace Experience Officer role 

Already, pioneering organisations have started implementing versions of this role. For example, Airbnb’s Head of Employee Experience leads their #BelongAnywhere programme centred on creating engaging workplace experiences. 

Other companies are tasking existing Workplace Strategy, Change Management, or HR executives to spearhead this charter. And organisations like the International Facilities Management Association (IFMA) have launched formal training programmes around the skillsets involved. 

As more employers recognise that investing in workplace experience is key for winning the talent tug-of-war, expect to see the Chief Workplace Experience Officer role become increasingly established and strategic within the C-suite.