The concept of the Employee Experience Platform was introduced by Josh Bersin in early 2019 and then rode the wave of the COVID crisis as remote work became the norm. Major publishers such as Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Oracle have embraced it, promising a revolution in the employee experience through digital tools.
What’s the situation five years later?
The concept seems to have evaporated. There are few flagship projects, no revolution in usage, and even less impact on everyday work.
So what remains of this idea? Is it just another mirage in the long list of digital promises, or a valid insight that has been poorly executed?
In brief:
- The concept of the Employee Experience Platform (EXP), which emerged in 2019 and became popular during the COVID crisis, aimed to unify digital tools and services to improve the employee experience, but has not delivered on its promises.
- Despite initiatives such as Microsoft Viva, EXP proved to be too technology-centric, poorly suited to operational realities, and lacking in consistent governance.
- The idea of an integrated platform responded to real needs (fragmentation of tools, weak intranets, isolation of employees), but its execution often exacerbated these problems.
- By 2025, the term EXP will have largely disappeared, as related projects will have failed to transform the daily lives of employees or find a lasting foothold in organizations.
- The failure stems from reducing the concept to a product, when employee experience is a systemic approach that requires governance, a detailed understanding of work, and organizational transformation.
An idea born out of chaos and a real need
The term “Employee Experience Platform” appeared quietly in early 2019 (The Employee Experience Platform: A New Category Arrives), but it was during the COVID crisis that it took on its full meaning and found itself in the spotlight. Employees, isolated, navigate between silos, compartmentalized applications, and processes ill-suited to prolonged remote work (Remote work: a mirror of the organizations’ weaknesses.). The need for a unified, contextualized, personalized space—in short, a true digital work environment centered on the individual—became evident.
It is in this context that Josh Bersin theorizes the employee experience platform as a new layer of experience, capable of orchestrating content, interactions, HR services, collaborative tools, and data, in a fluid journey (A complicated IT experience. Irritant #7 of the Employee Experience). A kind of “digital front door” for employees.
Microsoft quickly seized on the topic with the launch of Microsoft Viva in 2021, presented as the first employee experience platform integrated into Microsoft 365. At the time, I analyzed this initiative in two detailed posts, highlighting both the announced breakthrough and the ambiguities of the model:
- Microsoft Viva: the revolution in employee experience platforms?
- Microsoft Viva: a market revolution?
Other publishers followed suit: ServiceNow, Workday, and SAP, renaming or repackaging their offerings around the term “experience”.
A relevant concept but flawed execution
On paper, the idea is appealing. It echoes a consensus:
- the fragmentation of the digital experience is tiring for employees,
- intranets are no longer up to modern standards,
- HR services are often scattered and poorly contextualized,
- business tools are piled up without any consistency.
But in reality, Employee Experience Platforms have encountered several pitfalls:
- Too tech-centric: platforms have often been designed as assemblages of tools, rather than living environments adapted to the realities on the ground.
- Not “ops-centric” enough: they have ignored the granularity of work. I already pointed out in a 2022 article that the employee experience is not just about a pleasant UX, but about the ability to do one’s job effectively in one’s own context (What are the digital tools of the employee experience?). Furthermore, it is now clear that employee experience is more about work organization than pure HR (2023 Employee Experience Barometer: the employee experience confronted with its contradictions and From employee experience to operational excellence: HR not so well equipped!)
- No real cross-functional governance: between HR, IT, and internal communications, everyone, and especially each software vendor, sees EX as an extension of their own scope. The result is often a platform with no common vision and no real owner.
Instead of unifying the experience, these projects have sometimes added an extra layer of interface without addressing the root causes of digital inconsistency.
2025: silent disappearance
Today, it must be acknowledged that the term “EXP” has virtually disappeared from publishers’ discourse, and even more so from the real concerns of businesses.
Microsoft Viva survives, but as a constellation of bricks integrated into Microsoft 365, with no clear overall logic for the end user.
Modernized intranets are returning to the forefront, with solutions such as Powell and LumApps placing the emphasis back on personalization and integration, but without mentioning EXP.
Middle management, support teams, and front-line employees are rarely involved in these projects, which often remain top-down initiatives driven by internal HR or communications sponsors who are disconnected from operational practices.
More fundamentally, employee experience cannot be driven by a tool. It is a systemic dynamic that affects the organization, the meaning of work, and the ability to act, decide, and cooperate. A platform can support it, but never replace it.
EXP has therefore ended up like corporate social networks: a vaguely similar philosophy but broadly the same causes of failure (The rise and fall of enterprise social networks).
Bottom line
The relative failure of EXP is not due to the principle itself, but to its reduction to an isolated product, supposed to solve deeply organizational problems on its own.
In reality, the employee experience is a dynamic, not a front-end. It is a distributed responsibility that involves trade-offs, cross-functional governance, and a detailed understanding of how work is actually done. A platform can be a lever, but not an answer in itself. Perhaps the answer lies more in the hands of a chief of work (Do we need a chief of work?).
This observation goes far beyond the scope of EXP. It echoes the limitations I recently highlighted with regard to generative AI in business: we continue to add layers without daring to overhaul what is fundamentally dysfunctional. AI is presented as a “silo breaker”, but it risks becoming just another layer in an already overly complex IT system (Generative AI in business: a silo breaker or just another layer in an already complex IT system?). It also faces the eternal problem of the digital workplace, which is interoperability (Digital workplace, AI, and interoperability: a problem that remains unresolved).
The concept of EXP is not dead. It is just waiting to be taken seriously: not as a product to be deployed, but as a transformation project, aligned with the reality of work and the needs of teams. This is the price that must be paid if the employee experience is to become more than just a marketing buzzword.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
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