50 Essential Employee Experience Thought Leaders Globally

Last updated: June 2026

The people who genuinely shape how organisations treat their employees rarely make the front page. They write the frameworks, run the research, host the conversations, and challenge the assumptions that eventually determine whether someone has a good day at work or a dreadful one. As of June 2026, global employee engagement has fallen to 20 percent, its lowest point since 2020, according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, a figure that represents an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity worldwide. Knowing whose thinking to follow matters more than ever.

This list brings together 50 essential employee experience thought leaders from across the globe. They span researchers, authors, practitioners, consultants, and in-house leaders. Some have written the books that define the field. Others run platforms, host podcasts, lead communities, or reshape organisations from the inside. What they share is a documented, active contribution to the field in 2025 and 2026, not just a legacy reputation. This is not a catalogue of famous names. It is a directory of people who are genuinely shaping how employee experience gets designed, measured, and improved right now.

Each person was selected on the basis of verified LinkedIn activity, published contributions, and current incumbency. Every entry includes a confirmed current role, a specific contribution to the public conversation on employee experience, and a sourced credential. Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, compiled this directory to help HR leaders, people operations professionals, CHROs, and any leader who wants to build a better workplace find the right voices to follow and learn from.

If building a team culture that actually holds together under pressure is a priority for your organisation, book Jonno to deliver a Working Genius workshop or executive team offsite by emailing jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Employee Experience Matters in 2026

The term "employee experience" has moved from buzzword to board-level priority in the space of a decade. The shift reflects something measurable and serious. Gallup's 2026 data shows that employee thriving increased modestly from 33 to 34 percent in 2025, even as engagement declined, suggesting that organisations are making incremental progress on individual wellbeing while failing to translate it into collective performance. The gap between what employees experience individually and what organisations deliver collectively is where the real work of EX leadership happens.

Employee experience is not a synonym for perks or benefits. It describes the sum of every interaction an employee has with their organisation across the full arc of their tenure, from the first contact in recruitment through to their last day. The design, technology, and culture dimensions of that experience, a framework Jacob Morgan popularised in The Employee Experience Advantage, determine whether people show up energised or resigned. High-quality employee experience is now documented as a predictor of customer experience outcomes, retention, productivity, and business growth. This is the insight at the heart of Tiffani Bova's The Experience Mindset: organisations that neglect the employee side of the equation eventually compromise the customer side too.

These 50 thought leaders are the people doing the most rigorous, current work on that challenge. For a broader perspective on the people shaping people and culture, explore this directory of HR thought leaders.

How This List Was Compiled

Each person on this list was selected on the basis of documented, fact-checked contributions to the employee experience field in 2025 and 2026, from published books and recognised credentials to active LinkedIn thought leadership and roles directly tied to improving how people experience work. Selection prioritised mid-tier creators who are actively building ideas in public, alongside well-known authors and researchers whose work has defined the field. Every role, organisation, and credential was independently verified.

Section 1: The Architects of EX Strategy

These leaders have built the conceptual frameworks and bodies of research that inform how organisations think about employee experience at a strategic level.

1. Jacob Morgan

Jacob Morgan is the founder of Future Of Work Leaders, an executive community for CHROs and chief people officers, and one of the most prolific voices on the intersection of employee experience and the future of work. His work spans five books, a global podcast, and a daily LinkedIn presence that reaches hundreds of thousands of professionals.

The Employee Experience Advantage, published by Wiley in 2017, was the first book to define employee experience as a strategic design problem across three environments: physical space, technology, and culture. His subsequent books, including Leading with Vulnerability (2023), have extended this framework into how senior leaders model the behaviours that shape the cultures employees actually experience.

2. Josh Bersin

Josh Bersin is the Dean and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, which he describes as the world's most trusted HR advisory firm, and one of the most influential analysts in global HR. His research covers talent management, HR technology, and the evolving role of people functions in organisations undergoing AI transformation.

In June 2026 he launched the HR 2030 Initiative, a research and certification programme at the University of Southern California focused on preparing HR professionals for agentic AI. His annual Irresistible conference and regular publications continue to set the research agenda for how HR leaders understand employee experience at scale, with particular emphasis on the evidence base connecting EX design to organisational performance.

3. Meghan M. Biro

Meghan M. Biro is the founder and CEO of TalentCulture, a media and analyst platform covering HR technology and the future of work, and the host of the WorkTrends podcast with over 900 episodes to its name. She is a globally recognised voice on the intersection of HR technology, employer brand, and employee experience.

Her 2026 LinkedIn content has focused on the gap between skills-based hiring policy and practice, and on what HR leaders are actually hearing from employees versus what survey data shows. As a prolific contributor to Forbes and a sought-after conference keynote, she brings a media-native perspective to EX that translates complex research into practice-ready insight for frontline HR teams.

4. Amy Edmondson

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, and the researcher most associated with establishing psychological safety as a foundational dimension of employee experience. Her 2018 book The Fearless Organization, published by Wiley, synthesised decades of research into a framework that organisations worldwide now use to assess and improve team culture.

Her work has done more to make psychological safety a mainstream organisational concept than any other single contribution to the field. Project Aristotle at Google, which identified psychological safety as the top predictor of team performance, drew directly from her research. For any organisation trying to understand why some teams thrive and others do not, her work is the essential starting point.

5. Tiffani Bova

Tiffani Bova is the Chief Strategy and Research Officer at The Futurum Group, the former global growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce, and the author of The Experience Mindset, a Wall Street Journal bestseller published in June 2023. She is consistently ranked among the top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50.

The Experience Mindset makes the empirical case that organisations cannot sustainably improve customer experience without first improving employee experience, using two years of original research conducted during her time at Salesforce. She hosts the What's Next! podcast, has published in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company, and is a regular keynote at major business and HR conferences.

6. Jennifer Moss

Jennifer Moss is the Chief Research and Strategy Officer at the Global Wellbeing Group and the author of three books on workplace culture and wellbeing: Unlocking Happiness at Work, The Burnout Epidemic (Harvard Business Press, 2021), and Why Are We Here? (2024). She is the 2026 recipient of the Golden Gavel Award from Toastmasters International, the organisation's highest honour for communicators.

The Burnout Epidemic was named by Thinkers50 as one of the 10 Best New Management Books of 2022 and shortlisted for the Outstanding Works of Literature Award. Her ongoing research, writing for Harvard Business Review, and keynote work focus on helping organisations understand what actually causes burnout in their specific context, rather than offering generic resilience advice.

Section 2: UK and European Voices Reshaping EX

The UK and European EX community has produced some of the most practically grounded voices in the field, bringing rigour from psychology, communications, and organisational behaviour.

7. Gethin Nadin

Gethin Nadin is the Chief Innovation Officer at Benifex and Zellis, two of the UK's leading employee benefits and payroll providers, and an award-winning psychologist with over two decades of experience in HR technology, employee wellbeing, and engagement. He is the author of two books, A World of Good and A Work in Progress, and received the 2025 UK Employee Experience Lifetime Achievement Award.

Named as one of the world's most influential HR thinkers in 2023 and profiled by Forbes in 2026, Nadin has been recognised as a top global employee experience influencer for four consecutive years. His work draws on applied psychology and large-scale cross-sector research to help organisations understand what employees actually need from their benefits, wellbeing programmes, and workplace design.

8. Bruce Daisley

Bruce Daisley is the author of two Sunday Times bestsellers, The Joy of Work and Fortitude, the latter of which the Financial Times named the best business book of 2022. A former Vice President at Twitter in Europe, he now works as an independent workplace culture writer and speaker under the Eat Sleep Work Repeat brand, which includes a long-running podcast of the same name.

His contribution to the employee experience conversation centres on evidence for what actually makes work better, drawing on behavioural science and his own experience leading large global teams inside one of the most pressured organisations of the past decade. His LinkedIn presence as a named Top Voice on work and workplace culture reflects a consistent commitment to publishing original, practice-based thinking.

9. Debra Corey

Debra Corey is the founder of Step It Up HR and the author of six books covering total rewards, recognition, and employee benefits. She has held senior HR leadership roles at global organisations including Gap Inc., Honeywell, Merlin Entertainments, and Reward Gateway, giving her applied experience across multiple industries and geographies.

Her writing and speaking focus on the direct relationship between how organisations structure reward and recognition and the quality of the employee experience that results. Her output reflects a sustained commitment to making complex HR strategy accessible to practitioners who need to translate it into decisions about benefits design, recognition programmes, and culture building.

10. Jenni Field

Jenni Field is the founder and director of Redefining Communications and the author of Influential Internal Communication, a book that examines how internal communication functions either support or undermine the employee experience. She works with organisations on the connection between communication strategy and culture, a pairing that is often underappreciated in EX design.

Her LinkedIn content and speaking work bring a communications practitioner's precision to conversations that often default to broad cultural statements. She helps organisations understand that employee experience is not just designed through policy and physical space but through the quality and consistency of how leaders and communicators share information, set expectations, and acknowledge the people doing the work.

11. David Beeney

David Beeney is the founder of Breaking The Silence, a UK-based organisation dedicated to improving workplace mental health and stigma reduction. His work occupies the overlap between mental health advocacy and employee experience, making the case that organisations cannot claim to deliver a positive employee experience while ignoring the mental health of the people inside them.

He is a frequent speaker on the psychological safety and wellbeing dimensions of employee experience, and his approach draws on personal as well as professional experience. His contribution to the EX field is specific: he focuses on the gap between organisations' stated commitments to mental health and what employees actually experience when they try to access support.

12. Gifty Enright

Gifty Enright is a director, keynote speaker, and coach at BUSINESSSCOPE CONSULTANCY, bringing an intersectional perspective to employee experience that combines technology leadership, DEI, and human-centred coaching. Her work addresses how inclusion and belonging function as core dimensions of the employee experience, not as supplementary programmes.

Her speaking and LinkedIn content engage directly with how organisations can close the gap between their stated inclusion commitments and the lived experience of employees who do not see themselves reflected in leadership. She brings both the corporate practitioner lens and the coaching lens to this work, giving her a perspective on EX that is simultaneously structural and deeply personal.

13. Advita Patel

Advita Patel is the CIPR President for 2025 and the director of both CommsRebel and A Leader Like Me, two organisations focused on internal communications and representation in leadership. Her work sits at the point where internal communications strategy meets the reality of who feels included and who does not in any given organisation.

Her EX contribution centres on the relationship between the quality of internal communication and the experience of belonging. She makes the case that employee experience cannot be separated from who gets heard, whose voice shapes organisational decisions, and whether the communication infrastructure of an organisation reinforces or undermines equity.

14. Bryan Adams

Bryan Adams is the CEO and founder of Happydance Careers, a consultancy specialising in employer brand and employee value proposition (EVP) strategy. He is a TEDx speaker and two-time author on the employer brand dimensions of employee experience, with a particular focus on the honesty gap between what organisations promise candidates and what employees actually experience once they join.

His approach challenges the conventional employer branding mindset by arguing that a strong EVP must be grounded in what the employee experience actually is, not what the communications team wishes it were. His LinkedIn content is direct and frequently provocative, which is why it generates the kind of engagement that indicates genuine thought leadership rather than polished corporate messaging.

15. Laura Cooke

Laura Cooke is the co-founder and CEO of Positive Foundry, a UK-based consultancy applying positive psychology principles to employee experience design. Her work draws on the science of what makes work meaningful and energising to help organisations redesign the moments that most shape how employees feel about their workplace.

Her contribution to the EX field is distinct in that it moves the conversation beyond problem diagnosis toward the active design of positive experiences, drawing on a rigorous psychological evidence base. Her LinkedIn activity and speaking work address how HR and people leaders can move from reactive to proactive experience design.

Section 3: Research, Psychology, and the Science of EX

The leaders in this category bring empirical rigour to employee experience, grounding what can easily become an impressionistic field in evidence and measurement.

16. Tracy Brower, PhD

Tracy Brower is the Vice President of Workplace Insights at Steelcase and a senior contributor to Forbes, where she regularly publishes research-based analysis of how workplace design, flexibility, and culture shape employee experience. She is the author of Bring Work to Life by Bringing Life to Work and The Secrets to Happiness at Work.

Her position at Steelcase gives her access to proprietary research on how physical environments interact with the cultural and technological dimensions of employee experience, a unique vantage point that distinguishes her contribution from most EX commentary. Her Forbes writing translates that research into practice guidance for leaders designing hybrid and in-person workplace experiences.

17. Dr Juliet Bourke

Dr Juliet Bourke is a Professor of Practice and human capital advisor at UNSW Business School in Sydney, bringing an academic research lens to inclusion and belonging as foundational dimensions of employee experience. Her work examines how the practices and behaviours of leaders at every level of an organisation shape the lived experience of the people they lead.

Her research on inclusive leadership has influenced how organisations in Australia and globally design leadership development programmes, with a particular emphasis on making inclusion a measurable leadership behaviour rather than a cultural aspiration. Her dual role as academic researcher and practitioner advisor gives her work both rigour and applicability.

18. Dr Amanda Nimon-Peters

Dr Amanda Nimon-Peters is a Professor of Leadership at Hult International Business School, where she researches the behavioural science of what actually changes human behaviour in organisations, including the behaviours that shape employee experience. Her work is grounded in empirical research rather than managerial intuition.

Her contribution to the EX field is particularly relevant to the gap between what organisations believe their people practices accomplish and what the evidence shows actually changes employee behaviour. She brings the scepticism of a trained researcher to a field that is often driven more by enthusiasm for new frameworks than by evidence of what works.

19. Kalifa Oliver

Kalifa Oliver is the Executive Advisor and Global Director of EX Analytics Strategy at Ford, one of the few practitioners with a specific mandate for analytics applied to employee experience at a global manufacturing scale. Her work addresses how organisations can move from anecdotal EX conversations to data-informed decisions about where the employee experience is breaking down and what to do about it.

She was featured as a 2026 speaker at the Employee Experience Summit in Canada, speaking directly to how practitioners can close the gap between engagement survey data and operational action. Her practitioner experience in a complex, global, unionised organisation gives her perspective on EX challenges that most consulting-focused voices cannot replicate.

20. Russell Robinson

Russell Robinson is the founder of Amplified Research and an Associate Professor at American University, combining academic research on communication, culture, and employee voice with practice-facing consulting work. His research focuses on how employees experience the communication practices of their organisations, a dimension of EX that is structurally important but often treated as secondary.

His dual role as researcher and practitioner means his work on employee listening, voice, and organisational communication is grounded in real-world evidence. He is named on the Inspiring Workplaces Engagement 101 2026 list as a recognised global influencer in the employee engagement and experience space.

Section 4: Practitioners Building EX From the Inside

The leaders in this section are doing the day-to-day work of building and improving employee experience inside organisations, bringing the practitioner perspective that strategy-focused voices can sometimes miss.

21. Claude Silver

Claude Silver is the Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia, a global creative and media agency, holding a role that was specifically created to operationalise the organisation's people-first ethos across a workforce that has grown from 400 to over 2,000 employees in her tenure. The title itself has become a reference point in discussions of how organisations can institutionalise empathy at scale.

She has grown from a senior advertising and people leader at Publicis and J. Walter Thompson to a globally recognised voice on empathic leadership, psychological safety, and what it means to make every employee feel seen, valued, and challenged. She is a regular keynote speaker and named a LinkedIn influencer with a consistent track record of posting original content on the human dimensions of leadership.

22. Marissa Andrada

Marissa Andrada is a board director at Krispy Kreme and Chief Culture Officer at WUF World, bringing C-suite experience in people and culture from a career that includes senior HR and culture leadership roles at Chipotle Mexican Grill, where she served as CHRO. Her work on culture transformation at a global quick-service restaurant brand gave her direct experience designing employee experience for a predominantly frontline, hourly workforce.

Her perspective on EX is valuable precisely because it comes from operating environments where most of the workforce is not at a desk: she has designed culture, training, and recognition systems for people working at the counter, in kitchens, and on delivery routes. This is a significantly underrepresented experience in most EX commentary.

23. Angela Cheng-Cimini

Angela Cheng-Cimini is the CHRO at The Chronicle of Philanthropy, a board director, AAPI champion, and a keynote speaker on the intersection of inclusive leadership and employee experience. Her career spans senior HR roles across nonprofit, media, and corporate sectors, and her voice in the EX community brings the perspective of organisations operating under resource constraints that for-profit peers rarely face.

Her LinkedIn content and speaking work address how HR leaders can build meaningful employee experiences without access to enterprise-level budgets, a practical dimension of EX strategy that is often overlooked in conversations dominated by large-organisation case studies.

24. Joanna Parsons

Joanna Parsons is the CEO of The Curious Route and holds the designation of Top 10 LinkedIn Creator in Ireland, a recognition that reflects both the reach and the quality of her content on employee experience, internal communications, and the practice of people leadership. She brings a communications strategist's perspective to EX, grounded in her experience leading people and communications functions across multiple organisations.

Her LinkedIn presence is particularly strong on the relationship between how organisations communicate internally and the employee experience that results, a connection that is structurally important but rarely given the strategic attention it deserves. She is one of a small number of Irish voices with genuine international reach in the EX space.

25. Liz Fosslien

Liz Fosslien leads Brand Narrative and Content at Atlassian and is the co-author of two Wall Street Journal bestsellers on emotions at work, No Hard Feelings (Portfolio, 2019) and Big Feelings (Portfolio, 2022), both co-authored with Mollie West Duffy. The books are distinctive for their illustration-based approach, which makes complex psychological ideas about workplace emotions immediately accessible to a general professional audience.

The core thesis of No Hard Feelings, that organisations perform better when leaders work with human emotion rather than expecting people to leave it at the door, has become foundational to how progressive organisations approach manager development and the cultural dimensions of employee experience. Both books have been translated into over 15 languages.

26. Mollie West Duffy

Mollie West Duffy is the Director of Learning and Development at Lattice and the co-author, alongside Liz Fosslien, of No Hard Feelings and Big Feelings. Her practitioner role at Lattice, a people management software company, means she is simultaneously designing employee experience for an internal workforce and contributing to a product that helps thousands of organisations manage theirs.

Her writing in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Entrepreneur has extended the ideas in her books into practical guidance on hybrid work, manager development, and how organisations can create cultures where employees can be honest about their experience. Her earlier work as an organisational design lead at IDEO gives her a design-thinking lens that is relatively rare in the EX space.

27. Jessica Zwaan

Jessica Zwaan is the Chief Operating Officer at Talentful, a talent operations company, and the author of Built for People (Kogan Page, 2023), which applies product management principles to people operations. Previously COO at Whereby, she has spent a career in People Ops, legal, and operations across the UK and USA, and is currently writing a second book on purpose at work.

Her central argument in Built for People, that organisations should design employee experience the way product teams design products, with iteration, measurement, and user feedback built into the process, has found significant traction with HR leaders who are trying to make their EX investments more systematic. Her LinkedIn content reflects genuine mid-tier influence with nearly 30,000 followers.

Section 5: Community Builders and Connector Voices

These leaders have built the communities, platforms, and networks that give the EX field its connective tissue.

28. Enrique Rubio

Enrique Rubio is the founder of Hacking HR, one of the largest global communities of HR professionals, and the Head of Global Community at Transform. He has built a network that spans more than 40,000 HR practitioners across dozens of countries, making him one of the most important connective voices in the employee experience space.

His contribution to the field is not primarily about original research but about creating the infrastructure for HR professionals to learn from one another, challenge received wisdom, and access perspectives from outside their immediate geography. For HR and EX practitioners who need to stay close to the actual frontier of the field, Hacking HR is a regular destination.

29. Ben Eubanks

Ben Eubanks is the founder and Chief Research Officer at Lighthouse Research and Advisory and the author of Artificial Intelligence for HR, as well as a regular speaker on how HR and people leaders can use AI to improve employee experience. His research covers the full spectrum of HR technology, with particular attention to the tools and practices that are actually working in organisations.

His LinkedIn content and research reports are notable for their practical, evidence-based orientation. Lighthouse Research and Advisory is an independent firm, meaning its findings are not shaped by technology vendor relationships, which gives its analysis of HR technology's impact on employee experience particular credibility.

30. Rob Catalano

Rob Catalano is the Chief Engagement Officer and co-founder of WorkTango, a Canadian employee experience platform built around recognition, surveys, and people analytics. As a practitioner who both builds EX technology and advises on its application, he brings the dual perspective of product creator and people leader to the conversation.

His LinkedIn content focuses on the practical dimensions of employee listening, recognition strategy, and how organisations can turn engagement data into actionable improvements rather than letting survey results sit unaddressed. He is a regular speaker at HR and employee engagement conferences across North America.

31. Tara Furiani

Tara Furiani is the host of Not the HR Lady, a podcast that has built a dedicated following among HR professionals who want irreverent, honest conversations about the realities of people work rather than sanitised conference panel content. She is also an executive coach and DEI consultant.

Her contribution to the EX space is in creating a platform where HR professionals can hear candid perspectives on what employee experience actually looks like in organisations, as opposed to what the employer brand messaging says it looks like. Her willingness to name the gap between stated EX values and operational reality gives her audience a practical orientation that more polished voices often lack.

32. Chris Dyer

Chris Dyer is the CEO of Hopetape and has been named as a Top 101 Global Employee Engagement Influencer by Inspiring Workplaces for five consecutive years from 2022 through 2026. He is a three-time author whose work on company culture and remote work has been recognised by Inc. Magazine, which named him the number one leadership speaker on culture.

His keynotes and writing are built around the premise that culture is the primary driver of employee experience, and that culture can be deliberately designed and measured rather than simply hoped for. His experience as a 5x Inc. 5000 CEO gives his frameworks the weight of someone who has actually tried to implement them in a scaling organisation.

Section 6: The Wellbeing and Mental Health Dimension of EX

Employee experience cannot be fully understood without the wellbeing and mental health dimensions that determine whether people are thriving or merely surviving at work.

33. Chester Elton

Chester Elton is the co-founder and executive coach at The Culture Works and the co-author, alongside Adrian Gostick, of The Carrot Principle, All In, and Leading with Gratitude. He has spent over two decades researching and advising on how recognition and appreciation function as core drivers of employee experience and engagement.

His most recent book with Gostick, Leading with Gratitude (2020), makes the evidence-based case that expressing genuine appreciation is one of the highest-return investments any leader can make in the employee experience of their team. He is a regular keynote speaker and holds a consistent presence on global lists of the most influential voices in employee engagement.

34. Bruce Bolger

Bruce Bolger is the founder and president of the Enterprise Engagement Alliance, an organisation dedicated to developing the discipline of enterprise engagement as a management approach. His work sits at the intersection of employee experience, customer experience, and stakeholder engagement, making the case that these cannot be optimised independently.

He has spent decades building the frameworks and standards that help organisations treat engagement as a measurable business capability rather than a cultural sentiment. His focus on the structural and financial dimensions of employee experience, particularly the ROI of investment in engagement programmes, gives him a distinctive perspective in a field often dominated by qualitative arguments.

35. Craig Forman

Craig Forman is the founder and principal consultant of CultureC Consulting and has spoken at SXSW in both 2021 and 2022, building a profile as one of the more original and culturally alert voices in the EX space. He is also a podcast host, bringing together the worlds of organisational culture and employee experience through conversations with practitioners and researchers.

His work emphasises the cultural dimensions of employee experience, particularly the role of psychological safety, belonging, and identity in determining whether people can bring their full capability to work. His SXSW platform reflects a commitment to taking EX thinking beyond the HR conference circuit and into broader professional conversations.

36. Dawn Christian

Dawn Christian is the CEO and founder of Belong by Dawn Christian and a TEDx speaker whose work focuses on creating organisational cultures of genuine belonging, the dimension of employee experience that research consistently shows matters most for retention and performance but is most difficult to operationalise.

Her executive coaching and consulting work focuses specifically on the experience of leaders from underrepresented backgrounds in large organisations, and what organisations must actually change, not just commit to, to make belonging a lived reality rather than a value statement. Her TEDx profile reflects a capacity to communicate complex organisational ideas to broad audiences.

Section 7: Hybrid Work, Flexibility, and the Changing Shape of EX

The design of where and how work happens is one of the most contested dimensions of employee experience in the current period, and these leaders are doing the most rigorous thinking on it.

37. Brian Elliott

Brian Elliott is the CEO of Work Forward and the co-author, alongside Sheela Subramanian and Helen Kupp, of How the Future Works (Wiley, 2022), a Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today bestseller on the design of flexible work for high-performing teams. Previously a Senior Vice President at Slack and co-founder of Future Forum, he brings practitioner experience from inside one of the organisations most associated with reimagining work.

His current work through Work Forward and the Flex Index focuses on helping organisations make evidence-based decisions about flexibility, rather than following mandate or trend. He is named on the Forbes Future of Work 50 and publishes regularly in Fortune, Harvard Business Review, and Time on the relationship between flexible work design and employee experience.

38. Eric Termuende

Eric Termuende is the co-founder of NoW Innovations and the author of Rethink Work, a book on how organisations can build teams that genuinely thrive in conditions of rapid change. He has been named an American Express Top 100 Emerging Innovators Under 35 and represented Canada at the G20 Summit in Sydney.

His contribution to the EX field draws on his experience studying and working with teams across multiple industries and geographies, particularly on the role of trust, purpose, and the quality of day-to-day interpersonal experience in determining whether employees stay engaged over the long term. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Thrive Global, and the Huffington Post.

39. Mary Abbajay

Mary Abbajay is the president of Careerstone Group and the author of Managing Up, a book on how employees can navigate and improve their working relationships with managers of every type. She is a LinkedIn Learning instructor, a regular media contributor, and a sought-after speaker on the workplace dynamics that shape day-to-day employee experience.

Managing Up addresses a dimension of employee experience that is often left out of the top-down EX design conversation: the experience of employees trying to work effectively within an environment shaped by their manager's style, preferences, and limitations. Her work gives employees and organisations a framework for improving that relationship from multiple directions.

40. Lars Schmidt

Lars Schmidt is the founder of Amplify, an HR executive search and consulting firm, and the host of the Redefining HR podcast, one of the longest-running and most widely followed podcasts in the HR and people operations space. He is also the co-founder of HR Open Source, a global initiative to share progressive HR practices.

His contribution to the EX space is in surfacing and sharing the practices of organisations that are genuinely doing people work differently, rather than defaulting to industry consensus. Redefining HR regularly features voices from organisations at the frontier of employee experience design, making it one of the better resources for HR practitioners who want to understand what is actually working.

Section 8: International Voices and Specialist Practitioners

These leaders bring perspectives from outside the dominant North American and UK voices, and from specialist areas of EX practice that are often underrepresented in mainstream conversation.

41. Anne Fulton

Anne Fulton is the founder and CEO of Fuel50, a New Zealand-based AI-powered talent intelligence platform, and one of the most prominent voices in the Asia-Pacific employee experience community on the career and development dimensions of EX. Her work focuses on the relationship between career growth opportunity and employee experience quality.

Her global platform has given her a dataset on career experience and mobility that is rare among independent practitioners, and her writing and speaking draw on that evidence to help organisations understand what career experience their employees are actually having versus what HR believes it is providing.

42. Steve Boese

Steve Boese is the co-founder of H3 HR Advisors, the co-host of the HR Happy Hour podcast, and one of the most consistent independent analysts of HR technology's role in shaping employee experience. He is a co-chair of the HR Technology Conference, one of the largest annual gatherings of HR leaders and technology vendors globally.

His contribution to the EX space focuses on the technology layer of employee experience, helping HR leaders understand which tools are genuinely improving how employees experience work and which are adding friction or noise to an already complex environment. His HR Happy Hour podcast has featured hundreds of practitioners and researchers over more than a decade.

43. Srikant Chellappa

Srikant Chellappa is the CEO and co-founder of Engagedly, an employee experience and performance management platform. His work focuses on the technology and process design dimensions of employee experience, particularly on how continuous feedback, goal-setting, and recognition systems can be built into the operational fabric of organisations rather than added on as periodic exercises.

His perspective on EX is shaped by years of building technology that thousands of organisations use to manage the people practices that most directly affect daily employee experience. He contributes regularly to HR technology publications and speaks at conferences on the intersection of platform design and experience quality.

44. Ashraf Al Eid

Ashraf Al Eid is the founder of ASHRAF HR Innovation Strategies Foundation, an HR advisory and consulting organisation based in the UAE, and a keynote speaker and author working across the Middle East and internationally. His work brings a perspective on employee experience from rapidly growing economies where the design and culture of work are being built at pace rather than reformed from a legacy baseline.

He is named on the Inspiring Workplaces Engagement 101 2026 list as one of the global employee engagement and experience influencers, and his writing addresses how organisations in the Gulf region and beyond are designing EX frameworks that reflect both global best practice and local cultural context.

45. Helen Bissett

Helen Bissett is the founder and managing director of H&H Agency, a UK-based strategic consultancy specialising in employee experience and internal communications. Her work focuses on helping organisations close the gap between their stated EX ambitions and what actually gets delivered to employees through the combination of communication, culture, and operational practice.

She is named on the Inspiring Workplaces Engagement 101 2026 list and is a regular contributor to UK HR and internal communications conversations. Her consultancy work across multiple sectors gives her a practitioner's understanding of the common failure modes in EX strategy implementation.

46. Dan Riley

Dan Riley is the co-founder and keynote speaker at RADICL, a UK-based consultancy focused on employee experience and organisational culture transformation. His work addresses the conditions under which organisations can achieve genuine cultural change rather than surface-level culture programmes that leave the underlying employee experience unchanged.

He is named on the Inspiring Workplaces Engagement 101 2026 list and is a sought-after conference speaker and workshop facilitator. His approach draws on practical experience designing culture change programmes that hold together under the inevitable pressures of operational priorities.

47. Zech Dahms

Zech Dahms is the president and culture strategist at achieve Engagement, a USA-based consultancy dedicated to practical employee engagement strategy. His work focuses on the operational and cultural levers that organisations can pull to improve day-to-day employee experience, with a particular emphasis on how senior leaders and middle managers shape the quality of experience for the people they lead.

He is named on the Inspiring Workplaces Engagement 101 2026 list and contributes regularly to practitioner conversations on engagement strategy. His consultancy work serves organisations across multiple industries seeking to move from engagement survey participation to genuine improvement in the experiences their employees describe.

48. Angela R. Howard

Angela R. Howard is a global change and transformation lead and the author of Everyday Inspiration for Change, a resource for organisations and leaders navigating cultural and structural change. Her work focuses on the intersection of change management and employee experience, making the case that employee experience quality deteriorates most sharply not during stable periods but during the transitions and transformations that organisations increasingly live inside continuously.

She is named on the Inspiring Workplaces Engagement 101 2026 list and works with organisations on how to design change processes that protect and improve the employee experience rather than treating people as passive recipients of whatever restructuring, technology shift, or cultural transformation is underway.

49. Mike Adams

Mike Adams is the CEO of Purple, a UK-based technology company focused on accessibility and disability inclusion. His work in the employee experience space addresses a dimension that is frequently overlooked in EX design: the experience of disabled employees, and how organisations can build workplaces that are genuinely accessible rather than nominally compliant.

He is named on the Inspiring Workplaces Engagement 101 2026 list as a recognised global influencer in employee engagement and experience. His perspective challenges EX designers to account for the full spectrum of employee needs rather than building for the average, a principle that consistently improves the experience of all employees when applied well.

50. David Ducheyne

David Ducheyne is the founder and managing partner of Otolith, a Belgium-based consultancy that advises organisations on leadership effectiveness, organisational culture, and employee experience strategy. Otolith brings a European perspective to EX shaped by the social, regulatory, and cultural context of continental Europe, where the relationship between organisations and their employees carries different expectations than in the Anglo-American world.

David Ducheyne is named on the Inspiring Workplaces Engagement 101 2026 list and contributes to the international employee experience conversation through writing, speaking, and consulting work across Europe and globally. The focus in this body of work on the leadership dimensions of employee experience, particularly how senior leaders' behaviours shape the culture employees actually live in, gives the work a grounded and systemic quality.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

The field of employee experience is broad enough that any list of 50 leaves out voices who genuinely deserve attention. Among those who came close are Meghan Irons at Perceptyx, whose longitudinal research on engagement drivers is among the most rigorous currently being produced; John Amaechi, the organisational psychologist and former NBA player whose work on psychological safety and belonging is widely cited; and Nate Dvorak at Gallup, whose research on the specific drivers of employee experience in particular industry contexts adds important nuance to what the aggregate data shows.

Beyond these, there is a strong body of work from researchers at SHRM, Mercer, and Deloitte who contribute to the EX evidence base but work primarily through institutional rather than personal platforms. The thought leaders who made this list are distinguished by their active personal voice and their current, traceable contributions to the public conversation on employee experience.

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Employee Experience Strategy

The most common mistake in employee experience strategy is treating it as a programme rather than a system. Organisations launch wellbeing initiatives, redesign offices, or upgrade their recognition platforms and then measure the impact of each initiative in isolation, missing the cumulative effect that a poorly connected set of interventions can have on the experience of employees navigating all of them simultaneously. The leaders on this list consistently point to integration as the distinguishing characteristic of organisations that improve employee experience over time versus those that invest heavily and see little change.

A second frequent error is measuring what is easy to measure rather than what matters most. Engagement survey scores are widely tracked, but they are a lagging indicator of the experiences that shaped them, not a real-time window into what employees are experiencing right now. The shift toward continuous listening that practitioners like Rob Catalano and Kalifa Oliver advocate is a corrective to this: it allows organisations to catch deteriorating experiences before they show up in annual survey data and departures.

The third pattern worth naming is the manager gap. Most EX strategy is designed at the organisational level and then expected to reach employees through their direct managers, but without deliberate investment in giving managers the skill, time, and support to deliver that experience. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety makes clear that the experience of being on a team is primarily shaped by the immediate leader, not by organisational policy. Brian Elliott's flexible work research makes a similar point about how the quality of flexible work experience depends almost entirely on manager behaviour, regardless of what the policy says.

Finally, there is the question of who employee experience is being designed for. Marissa Andrada's career, and the growing attention to frontline worker experience, reflects the reality that most EX frameworks are built around knowledge workers at desks and do not translate well to the experiences of the majority of the global workforce who work in retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and logistics. Building employee experience strategies that account for the full range of how your people actually work is the direction the most thoughtful leaders in this list are pushing.

Implementation Guide: How to Use This List

The most practical approach to using a directory like this is to identify which two or three dimensions of employee experience are most pressing in your organisation right now and then follow the voices who are doing the deepest work in those specific areas.

If psychological safety is the constraint in your team or organisation, the clearest starting point is Amy Edmondson's body of work, particularly The Fearless Organization. If you are trying to understand the relationship between your employee experience and your customer experience, Tiffani Bova's The Experience Mindset provides both the evidence base and the strategic framework. If your challenge is the design of hybrid work, Brian Elliott, Sheela Subramanian, and Helen Kupp's How the Future Works gives you both a conceptual framework and a practical playbook.

If you are an HR or people operations leader looking to upgrade the sophistication of your function, Josh Bersin's research and Jessica Zwaan's Built for People together address both the strategic landscape and the operational methodology. If wellbeing and burnout are the most visible symptoms in your organisation, Jennifer Moss's The Burnout Epidemic is the most credible and specific treatment of the subject currently available.

Following thought leaders on LinkedIn is valuable but only to the extent that you translate what you read into action. The leaders on this list are most useful not as a collection of inspiring quotes but as a set of practitioners and researchers whose frameworks you can test against your own organisational context. Each of them would tell you the same thing: the goal is not to be well-informed about employee experience. The goal is to improve the experience your employees are actually having.

For more context on the people shaping people and culture and the 

If your organisation is ready to invest in the leadership culture and team cohesion that are the foundation of a great employee experience, engage Jonno White to deliver a keynote or Working Genius facilitation session for your leadership team. Jonno is the author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold) and a Certified Working Genius Facilitator who works with corporates, nonprofits, and schools around the world. His podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Email jonno@consultclarity.org. Whether virtual or face to face, Jonno is available globally.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between employee experience and employee engagement?

Employee engagement refers to the emotional commitment an employee has to their work and organisation, often measured through surveys. Employee experience is broader: it describes the totality of what an employee encounters, observes, and feels across every interaction with their organisation over the full arc of their tenure. Engagement is an outcome. Employee experience is the input that determines whether that outcome is likely to be positive. Organisations that focus on measuring engagement without designing for experience tend to see engagement scores fluctuate without understanding why.

Who are the most influential employee experience thought leaders globally?

The most influential globally recognised voices include Jacob Morgan, who introduced the three-environment EX framework in The Employee Experience Advantage; Amy Edmondson, whose research on psychological safety is foundational to understanding the team-level experience; Josh Bersin, whose analyst work shapes how HR leaders understand EX investments; and Jennifer Moss, whose work on burnout and wellbeing addresses the most visible employee experience crisis of the current period. Beyond these, the Inspiring Workplaces Engagement 101 2026 list features 101 globally recognised influencers in the EX and engagement space.

How has AI changed employee experience in 2025 and 2026?

AI has moved from a conversation topic to an operational reality in many organisations. The shift has two dimensions for employee experience. The first is positive: AI tools are reducing friction in routine tasks, enabling more personalised feedback and recognition, and giving managers better data on which to base their leadership decisions. The second is more complex: the pace of AI adoption is generating anxiety and uncertainty for employees who are unsure how their roles will change, and research from Perceptyx shows that change management capability is now the single strongest predictor of employee engagement. The leaders on this list who are most actively addressing this include Josh Bersin, Brian Elliott, and Jacob Morgan.

What should I read first if I want to understand employee experience?

The Employee Experience Advantage by Jacob Morgan gives you the foundational framework for thinking about EX across physical, technological, and cultural dimensions. The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson is the essential read on psychological safety as a team-level experience driver. The Burnout Epidemic by Jennifer Moss addresses the most urgent and widespread employee experience problem of the current period. If you want to understand the overlap between employee experience and customer experience, The Experience Mindset by Tiffani Bova provides the clearest evidence-based argument for why the two cannot be managed independently.

How do I improve employee experience at my organisation?

Start with listening. The practitioners on this list, from Kalifa Oliver at Ford to Rob Catalano at WorkTango, consistently emphasise that the first step is understanding what employees actually experience rather than what leaders assume they experience. From there, focus on the manager layer: research from Amy Edmondson and Gallup consistently shows that the direct manager relationship is the single strongest determinant of the day-to-day employee experience. Invest in giving managers the skills, support, and time to deliver that experience well. Then look at the specific moments that matter most in your employee journey, whether that is onboarding, periods of high-pressure delivery, or the clarity and quality of internal communication.

Final Thoughts

Employee experience is a field that has matured significantly in the past decade, moving from a recruitment marketing term to a substantive discipline with its own research base, methodology, and community of practice. The 50 people on this list represent the breadth of that maturity, from the academic researchers defining what we know, to the practitioners building the tools and platforms that make EX strategy operational, to the in-house leaders designing experiences for real workforces at scale.

What unites them is not a shared framework or a single methodology. It is a shared commitment to taking the experience of employees seriously as a strategic and human priority, and to building, publishing, and advancing the ideas that give organisations a better basis for doing that well.

The work matters. Gallup's 2026 data on global engagement decline is a reminder that progress in this field is neither automatic nor guaranteed. The leaders on this list are making it more likely. For HR and people leaders who want to build on their thinking, following them consistently, reading their books, listening to their podcasts, and testing their frameworks against your own context is a better investment than any single training programme or engagement survey. The people doing the best work in this field are posting it publicly, speaking it at conferences, and, in many cases, responding to comments on LinkedIn. The access is there.

If your organisation is ready to invest in the leadership culture and team cohesion that are the foundation of a great employee experience, engage Jonno White to deliver a keynote or Working Genius facilitation session for your leadership team. Jonno is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, the author of Step Up or Step Out, and the host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, 150+ countries). Email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. Many organisations find that flying Jonno in costs less than engaging high-profile local providers.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

Gallup. State of the Global Workplace 2026 Report. Gallup, 2026.

Next Read

Employee experience does not exist in isolation from the broader questions of people and culture leadership. The same forces shaping EX, engagement decline, the rise of AI, the shift to skills-based work, and the changing expectations of employees, are also reshaping what it means to lead people effectively. For a broader look at the leaders shaping that conversation, explore the next post in this series.

Keep reading: 50 Best Thought Leaders in People and Culture (2026)