The new EX imperative: From employee engagement to Organizational Velocity

A new EX blueprint

For years we’ve spoken about employee engagement as the holy grail of enterprise success – the illusive sauce that powers the world’s most high-performing organizations. But despite significant efforts and investments, global engagement levels remain stagnant.

It’s become clear that engaged employees alone can’t combat the challenges of a volatile business landscape. In our new workplace and changed world, there’s more to succeeding than connecting employees with a compelling mission and sense of purpose. For the performance champions of tomorrow, Organizational Velocity is the new imperative. But what is it, and how can you attain it?

What is Organizational Velocity?

Organizational Velocity is the ability to make sharp pivots, accelerate decision-making, and eliminate operational friction to stay one step ahead. To thrive in the next economy, performance champions are focusing on this new imperative for success.

According to PWC, 40% of global CEOs believe their companies will no longer be viable in ten years’ time if they continue on their current path. But as the need to shapeshift intensifies, a growing sense of lethargy stands to jeopardize transformation efforts.

Modern organizations are finding themselves unable to move at speed to meet the pace of change. Bloated and fragmented digital ecosystems, lack of clarity on where to go for accurate, timely information, notification noise that’s inhibiting focus, and entrenched siloes that hold back innovation amount to a velocity drain that is holding back progress.

• 80% of CEOs say it takes too long for their companies to execute change (McKinsey)
• 75% of executives say silos are the biggest hindrance to speed (Accenture)

Where we once thought of employee engagement as the holy grail, we now understand that this is just the tip of the iceberg. In a workplace where friction abounds, it’s no longer enough to focus on employee engagement alone. Shrewd business leaders are asking a new strategic question: How do we maneuver our complex, multinational organization at new speed, with a modern digital workforce? 

Broken down into smaller parts, this big question could appear in your organization in the following ways:

• How do we get everyone aligned around our mission?
• How can we break down silos?
• How can we eliminate digital fiction from our people’s workday?
• How can we empower and enable our employees to make faster decisions?
• Do we know who is disengaged in our workforce?
• How can we connect with our people on a deep level and at scale across our hyper-distributed organization?
• How can we use AI to move our business forward, faster?

Unily believes that digital employee experience transformation underpinned by a True EX Platform is key to unlocking velocity across the organization. In our digital-first workplace, companies need a sophisticated solution to supercharge connection and culture and drive performance gains through deeper alignment, engagement, and empowerment of hyper-distributed employees and teams. Intranets of the past are not equipped to handle the complexities of today’s workplace. Enterprises need an integrated digital fabric.

The performance champions of the next decade will be those who maximize Organizational Velocity across a modern workforce that is distributed and borderless, expects unprecedented levels of flexibility, and is increasingly unbounded by traditional roles, functions, and hierarchies. 

Some organizations are already on the road to transformation…

How are the first enterprises putting Organizational Velocity into practice?

For Hattie Roche, Strategy Partner at Fauna, who boasts a 15-year career shaping EX strategy for the likes of Cisco, Hershey, and Ericsson, the velocity framework helps to articulate what it takes to create a high-performing workplace culture at a time when the need for change has never been more apparent. 

Currently Hattie is at the start of an exciting journey working with Altice USA to identify and eliminate barriers to velocity across its 10,000-strong distributed workforce.

Ahead of a full-scale digital employee experience transformation that kicks off with the implementation of its new EX platform, the company is already beginning to embed a velocity culture into the organization's fabric, starting with a fresh approach to leadership training.

Organizational Velocity allowed Optimum to rethink leadership - not just as a theoretical concept, but as an actionable reality. Leaders were identified as key players in fostering a high-velocity culture, and their training was built with specificity in mind, stripping away ambiguity. Rather than abstract theories or vague values, leaders were equipped with three clear guiding principles to apply in their day-to-day roles, creating an immediate impact.

The next phase for Optimum involves ensuring these standards are seamlessly applied not only in the physical workplace but also in the digital environment. 

It's time to reshape for velocity

While employee engagement has been the bedrock of EX strategies for years, engagement alone is not a holistic solution that truly satisfies business needs and may even be holding back passionate EX leaders from their true potential. The lack of movement in engagement scores is a testament to this.  

Engagement is foundational—it’s essential for fostering a connected, motivated workforce—but Organizational Velocity is what ultimately turns that engagement into impactful, business-wide outcomes.

Velocity offers a holistic path for leaders that goes beyond the old school bounds of engagement and can unlock both EX investment and clear business value. The path to Organizational Velocity is an ongoing journey, but as we move forward, one thing is clear: the future belongs to organizations that can adapt and move at speed, and employees that make it happen.