It’s 2025, and employee expectations have changed faster than most workplaces have kept up. Hybrid is here to stay; 87 percent of UK companies now offer some form of it.
Yet Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report still puts global engagement at just 21 percent. That disengagement costs the global economy over $438 billion per year. It’s no wonder companies are paying more attention to measuring employee experience and trying to find issues before they mutate into financial losses and employee turnover.
The problem is that most companies still have a disjointed strategy for measuring EX. They might look at the occasional survey or track turnover rates, but they rarely get the full picture. That’s where the “Net EX score” composite starts gaining ground, a metric that blends employee experience insights with workspace experience KPIs.
So, how do you track Net EX?
Measuring Employee Experience: Defining a Net EX Score
Think of the Net EX Score as your workplace’s health check, part stethoscope, part X-ray. It’s a single KPI, but it’s pulling from dozens of employee experience and workspace experience metrics that matter to enterprise leaders.
The employee experience side typically includes:
- Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): “Would you recommend working here?”
- Employee Satisfaction Index (ESI): Overall sentiment on role, leadership, environment.
- Turnover & Retention Rates: Critical for cost forecasting.
- Absenteeism & Presenteeism: How often are people really showing up?
- Burnout/Well-being Indicators: Are team members stressed, overwhelmed, tired?
- Onboarding Effectiveness: How long does it take new staff members to get up to speed?
To go even deeper, though, companies should also be capturing: lifecycle events (onboarding, promotion), operational signals (service requests), direct feedback (pulse surveys), indirect feedback (chat sentiment, meeting load), and cultural markers (trust, inclusion scores).
Then there’s the workspace experience side, for gathering insights into:
- Desk & Room Utilization (booked vs. actual use)
- Occupancy Rates by zone/day
- Service Request Resolution Times (IT & Facilities)
- Energy Usage per Occupied Seat
Combine the two, and you’ll have a much deeper view of employee engagement. HR can use it to target retention risks, CRE can use it to right-size leases, and IT can use it to fix recurring issues before they kill productivity.
Measuring Employee Experience: The Tools to Use
For most companies, measuring employee experience is painfully slow. By the time you’ve sifted through last year’s engagement survey, half the people who gave low scores have already left. You’ve got the symptoms, but the patient’s gone.
The Net EX Score changes that. It’s built on signals you can capture, analyse, and act on immediately, if you have the right tools.
1. Start with the obvious
Surveys still matter. Short ones sent often. A weekly one-liner in Slack: “How’s your workload this week?” gets you more real answers than a 50-question annual form nobody has the patience for. The trick is timing them around real moments: new hires, role changes, manager changes, big project launches. That’s when you catch the truth.
2. Add the operational heartbeat
The workspace side of measuring employee experience is about the environment people move through every day.
- IoT sensors that track occupancy, CO₂, noise, and temperature show you if people are comfortable, and if your space is being used at all.
- Booking data from tools like Robin or Skedda tells you which spaces are magnets and which are ghost towns.
- Service tickets, whether it’s Teams freezing mid-call or the coffee machine dying, are great for spotting friction points before they turn into employee gripes.
3. Look for what people aren’t telling you directly
Some signals live in the patterns:
- How people talk in Teams or Slack.
- How meeting hours stack up week after week.
- Which teams are isolated from the rest of the org (digital network analysis can show you this).
Some solutions, like Microsoft Viva Engage, can provide direct insights into employee engagement by tracking conversations, reactions, and event attendance.
4. Tie it into energy and sustainability
In 2025, workspace experience metrics feed straight into ESG reporting. Tracking “energy use per occupied seat” can help you save money and improve employee experience. For instance, AI-powered HVAC systems cut building energy spend by up to 30 percent without touching comfort levels.
Plus, the more you know about air quality, temperatures, and other atmospheric conditions in your office, the more you can adjust the space to suit your employees.
5. Handle privacy with care
You need a lot of data to get a full Net EX score, but be careful about what you collect and how you communicate with your teams. If your staff members know you’re tracking sensor data to make their workplace more comfortable and relaxing, they’re more likely to accept it. They might complain if they find out you’re tracking social media use to see when they’re clocking out in the office.
Enterprise Case Studies: ROI from Measuring Employee Experience
Trying to get a clearer view of your Net EX score might sound complicated, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. Plenty of companies have already begun using workplace management tools, combined with surveys, sensors, and even AI, to improve EX:
- Robalino: Deployed YaRoomz for workspace management and full visibility into office utilization. The data they gathered helped them save $324k per year on operational costs and improve employee satisfaction rates for hybrid and in-office teams.
- Braze: Saw a massive increase in staff satisfaction by introducing the Envoy workplace management system to help teams book rooms and desks more efficiently. The company said that the analytics part of the system instantly justified the cost of the subscription.
- Tracelink used Robin’s workplace management system to support its new hybrid work strategy. The solution helped them to boost collaboration space utilization by 166 percent, cut costs on wasted real estate, and reduce employee turnover.
Practical Tips to Improve Your Net EX Score
The Net EX Score isn’t something you set and forget; it’s a living metric. The more you use it, the sharper it gets. But only if the right people own it, the right data flows into it, and the right actions result from it.
1. Get Everyone in the Same Room Before You Pick a Tool
If HR buys the survey platform, CRE picks the booking system, and IT rolls out sensors without talking to anyone, you’re just creating data silos. Get HR, IT, CRE, Facilities and Finance in the same conversation about what success looks like.
- Agree on the workspace experience metrics you’ll track.
- Map which tools will feed them.
- Assign ownership for each data stream.
A shared governance board keeps momentum once the project is live.
2. Pilot Small, Scale Fast
Start with one floor, one department, or one building.
- Measure: Baseline your employee experience signals before rollout.
- Adjust: Fix obvious friction points, like confusing booking flows, before scaling.
- Scale: Once adoption is high in the pilot, extend to other sites.
Create a template for measuring employee experience to share with every leader.
3. Close the Loop
Nothing kills feedback faster than radio silence. If employees report something, whether broken HVAC or meeting overload, show them what you did about it. Even if the answer is “not yet.”
Train managers on transparent, consistent communication. Managers control the day-to-day experience more than any policy. Equip them with real-time dashboards, give them context for the numbers, and train them to act on patterns, before those patterns become attrition.
The Future of Employee Experience Measurement
Currently, most companies are still chasing the basics, tracking satisfaction, desk bookings, maybe some sensor data if they’re ahead of the curve. But in a couple of years, the leaders won’t just be looking at what happened. They’ll see what’s about to happen and fix it before it turns into churn or wasted square footage.
- AI-driven foresight is going to be everywhere. Not in the “creepy surveillance” sense, but in the “Hey, your team’s been booking scattered desks all month, want me to cluster you together next week?” sense. Small nudges that make work smoother without anyone having to file a request.
- Digital twins—virtual replicas of your workplace—are already letting CRE teams run “what if” scenarios before moving a single chair. This will be huge for testing layouts, forecasting energy use, and deciding where to invest.
- EX meeting ESG: Air quality, daylight access, and noise levels will be measured alongside engagement scores, not just to ensure comfort and well-being but also because investors, boards, and employees will expect it.
All of these upgrades should help businesses get a deeper view of their Net EX score and the factors that are really affecting the workplace.
Measuring Employee Experience The Right Way
Defining a Net EX Score is how HR, IT, Facilities, and Real Estate finally share the same view of how work is actually working. When you start measuring employee experience on a deeper level, morale increases, energy bills drop, and space gets used more efficiently.
Start small if you’re trying to upgrade both employee and workplace experience in a way that matters. Pick one pilot space and a few high-impact employee experience metrics, and get your cross-functional team in a room. Watch what happens when the right data lands in the right hands. Usually, it’s the start of better work for everyone.
