Enhancing The Employee Experience With Innovative Technology

BY Matthew Koehler | March 28, 2025

Some say high turnover is simply the cost of doing business, and for many industries, that will always be the case. But the numbers tell a different story. Disengaged workers cost the world economy $8.8 trillion in lost productivity, according to a 2023 report from Gallup.

“A number like this shows that the opportunity cost of not investing in the employee experience fully outweighs the investment that you would make. 8.9 trillion dollars [is] 10% of the world’s economy. That’s a staggering number to think about,” said Josh Parente, the director of sales at LineZero. Parente spoke about the cost of employee disengagement, and how to re-engage them during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Salt Lake City conference.

Doing Employee Engagement Well

LineZero is passionate about the employee experience: “We live our values of ‘People Matter.’” “We focus on building and enhancing the employee experience through technology,” said Parente. LineZero has a long-term partnership with Meta’s Workplace and current partnership with Workvivo, and they’ve taken that experience to new organizations they work with. “Our objective when we work with a lot of our partners is to act as an extension of their organizations. We work with our partners to help them build and deploy their employee experience through technology.”

Parente says they start with an employee’s experience from day one, “not just throughout maturity.” They focus on that starting point and “continue to push that positive momentum throughout the lifecycle [of the employee].” HR professionals and leaders should think about how connected their employees are to the mission and whether or not they're “excited and inspired” to clock in every day.

During an impromptu survey with the audience, Parente sussed out a few key items that highlighted the lack of employee engagement and what companies are doing about it. Building trust turned out to be the number one challenge attendees were facing in their organizations. Email was how they were dealing with it. And, budget was one thing they'd increase to mitigate disengaged employees, if a “genie” was available. 

“Investing in the employee experience leads to 43% less turnover, an 81% reduction in absenteeism and a 20% increase in productivity. So if we’re looking at the budget and we’re looking at the opportunity cost, not investing far outweighs the cost of actually making the investment.”

Slide from Parente's presentation, highlighting statistics shared 

When asked whether the above statistics shocked anyone, not a single hand went up. “80% of employees feel lonely. 3 out of 5 are burnt out. These are statistics that clearly articulate that we are facing a massive problem when it comes to the labor market today. So the question is, what are we going to do about it?”

Looking back at the Great Resignation of 2022, the data paints a clear picture. Many boomers took early retirement, while millennials left their jobs in droves. But one statistic stood out to Parente. “Of the millennials that turned over during the 2022 Great Resignation, 47% of them were high performers.” That’s a big deal. “High performers outperform the average employee at a rate of four to one, and they make up about 15% of your organization.”

If companies want to build strong cultures and retain top talent, they need to invest in the employee experience—especially for those high performers because they will help drive the employee experience and "push the [company] culture forward." Millennials, on average, change jobs every two to three years, meaning another wave of turnover is coming. “There’s a good opportunity here for us to start diving into ways to stop this mass turnover, especially with our high performers,” Parente said.

Parente shared another chart inspired by Simon Sinek’s work with Navy SEALs. The takeaway? “The high performance, low trust person—this is a toxic team member. Even though they’re driving high performance, they would sooner select somebody that has low performance, high trust over somebody who has high performance, [low] trust.”

Parente's slide on the relationship between trust and performance 

Take that to heart: The most elite teams prioritize trust over raw talent.

Encouraging the Entrepreneur to be an Intrapreneur

According to a chief people officer at a major enterprise Parente and LineZero works with, “Within the U.S. economy, [that company] [does] a really good job of inspiring and encouraging entrepreneurship,” the officer said. But when companies invest in employee experience, they don’t just keep workers—they create “intrapreneurs,” employees who think like entrepreneurs but stay within the company.

The key is investing in high-trust employees.

“Those high trust categories are those intrapreneurs that you want to encourage within your organization,” Parente said. “Those are the 15% that you want to continue to keep and continue to encourage to be part of the culture.” The solution Parente says is better technology. 

Right now, organizations juggle multiple platforms—productivity suites, HR systems, endless apps—but they don’t talk to each other. “What if we had one? One that connected everybody, our cultures, our productivity tools, and our HR systems? The truth is, we have that at our fingertips today.”

Yet, many companies still rely on outdated communication methods. “Email is still number one." But mass emails with critical company updates? They get buried. “I don’t know if you guys read them, but they usually fall to the bottom of my inbox.”

Parente says we all need to move in a different direction. “Legacy and top down communications [are] something that showed hierarchy. It showed clear efficiency, but it's not effective. It’s not inspiring, it’s not empowering our employees and our team members to go out and be entrepreneurs for the business.”

As organizations look to the future, the way they communicate and engage employees must evolve. Creating an environment where employees feel encouraged, not overlooked, when sharing ideas is (or should be) the future. “If we’re not evolving and moving our organization forward, those statistics are going to stay at 60% of burnout. They’re going to stay at 80% of loneliness,” Parente said. 

“I don’t know about you, but if I go into work and I know that 80% of my coworkers feel lonely. That’s not an inspiring thing. We're not inspiring change. We're not inspiring communication and collaboration. We’re just staying the same.”

Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, LineZero, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.

Matthew Koehler is a freelance journalist and licensed real-estate agent based in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Greater Greater Washington, The Southwester, and Walking Cinema, among others.

(Photo by Sean Ryan for From Day One)

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