Employee experience economy: Why it’s the key to growth

Are you looking for business growth? Then you’ll know that superior customer experience is no longer enough. That’s because we’re now in the employee experience economy, and effectively managing your workforce is more critical to success than ever. This was the word from Russell Howe, UKG Group Vice-President EMEA on a recent visit to South Africa.

“Happy employees mean happy customers, which leads to growth,” he says. It’s hard to argue with that; companies that invest in their employees are four times more profitable. Because employees are customers of other brands, they’re familiar with the customer experience, and increasingly, they expect that from the companies where they work.

Howe was speaking at a series of workshops hosted by Altron Digital Business. UKG positions itself as a leading provider of HR, payroll and workforce management software. More than 80 000 organisations around the world use UKG solutions, and the company has enjoyed a presence in South Africa for 30 years through its partnership with Altron.

In January 2025, UKG released a report that identified three mega-trends shaping the future of work. These are:

1. Escalating global labour deficit
2. The amplified employee experience imperative
3. The human-AI advantage

By 2030, it’s predicted that there will be a shortage of 85.2 million jobs unfilled because of a number of factors, including the misalignment of job and skills requirements. Only 5% of executives surveyed agreed that they were helping employees to learn new skills, while at the same time, employees, accustomed to the experiences offered by customer-obsessed brands, now want the same from their employers. Customer-obsessed brands are winning, but employee obsessed brands are defining markets.

Then there is the human-AI advantage. It was no surprise that one of the hot topics at the roadshow was the impact of AI. “There’s so much noise about what AI is and that’s the part we need to start to unlock,” says Howe. “The real winners of AI are the companies that focus on data.”

To dramatise the scale and amount of the data we’re producing, Howe likes to compare a megabyte to a grain of rice. With 5.9 million Google searches per minute, 347 billion e-mails and 328 trillion megabytes of data created every day, we could fill the Pacific Ocean with rice every three days. It’s overwhelming.

That’s why AI, used smartly, can improve productivity in employees and managers, reduce cognitive overload and foster innovation. While the hype has focused on AI as a job displacer, Howe argues that it is actually a powerful enabler. “Think of AI as a force multiplier instead of the hype,” he says.

UKG employs a multi-layered approach to AI. It begins by leveraging Google’s world-class AI capabilities, then builds on that foundation with UKG’s own industry-specific data and expertise. A third layer is added by incorporating each customer’s unique data, ensuring solutions are tailored to their specific needs. This layered strategy allows UKG to deliver AI that is not only powerful, but also highly accurate, relevant and impactful.

This is why accessing all of the relevant data within an organisation will be the game-changer. “Human AI interaction is a balance we’re all trying to find,” Howe points out. “The real bit that’s overlooked is data, especially unstructured data.” According to Forrester, only 27% of data is structured; the other 73% lies below the surface, largely inaccessible to analysis. As AI becomes more capable of understanding the drivers of business performance and the nuances of employee behaviour, the data it learns from influences other aspects of the business. “That data asset also starts to influence your CR, ERP and supply chain that need to come together to give you that technological advantage.”

Martin Blignaut, Lead: Workforce Management at Altron Digital Business.

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“When you manage the entire employee experience, from access control and time capture to payroll – you unlock a goldmine of workforce and operational data,” says Martin Blignaut, Lead: Workforce Management at Altron Digital Business. With AI natively integrated into these systems, he explains, businesses can “sift through the rock to find the gold” real-time reporting and AI-powered insights that drive cost control and strategic “what if” planning.

UKG is in a unique position to help organisations reinvent work for the future by offering three pillars. “We offer companies an external benchmark in the form of 22 million-user survey data that allows us to understand what culture looks like, 40 years’ worth of workforce management experience and integrated client ecosystem data to inform a company’s use of UKG technology,” Howe explains.

Ultimately, employees, like customers, want to feel valued, supported and empowered. They also want to feel fulfilled in the work that they do, and that they can trust their employer. In practical terms, this means being paid on time and correctly; that it’s easy to swap shifts if you have a personal emergency, and that there are opportunities for career growth. These will be critical for employee engagement that drives business growth over the next decade of the workforce experience.

AI’s role in the employee experience economy will not only be to automate repetitive tasks. It will also provide users with more insights and guidance based on learning people’s work preferences, patterns and intents, while generating new insights, delegating tasks and personalising experiences in a world in which adaptability and flexibility matters more than ever. As Howe says: “AI is a force multiplier. The reality is the human AI imperative we’re in right now.”