5 employee experience ideas I picked up on the road this summer 

In his role as Interact’s VP of Customer Success, Wayne Farmer and his team visit customers across a range of industries, offering a firsthand view of what how excellence in employee experience is actually delivered. In this blog, he turns five observations from recent travels across the US into practical employee experience lessons and internal communications ideas, covering organization culture, frontline visibility, feedback, peer learning, and the evolving customer-vendor relationship. 

How customer visits uncover new employee experience ideas 

Nothing matches the buzz and the real-world grit of visiting a customer in their own space and seeing how they work. As VP of Customer Success at Interact, one of the most rewarding parts of my job is getting out to our customers, hearing their successes and challenges, listening to their employees, and supporting them to get the most from their employee experience platforms. Being in the room is what turns my team from technology strategists into genuine partners for our customers. 

Traveling globally and seeing Interact technology at work in the field gives us the best possible understanding of how our technology makes a difference. When we’re on site, we see the physical environment, better understand the needs of the employees, and get a feel for how internal communications and employee experience teams support their workforces.  

That context helps explain why certain choices may work at one organization and not another, as well as which ideas might be useful elsewhere. Over the past few months I’ve visited a number of locations, including Airstream, Kohl’s, RaceTrac, and Houston Methodist. I also attended Message Makers, an Atlanta communications summit hosted by our customer Piedmont. No two visits looked alike, and without fail each one left me with an insight or learning that helps us deliver an even better platform for our customers.  

Here are five employee experience ideas I picked up this summer that could shape the rest of your year, and beyond. 

Airstream: How should culture guide employee experience technology? 

Employee experience technology – the tools that make a workplace more engaging and a workforce more efficient – works best when it reflects a culture people already recognize. It can make that culture easier to see, share, and participate in, but it can’t manufacture identity on its own. That’s why culture should guide platform choices from the very beginning. 

At Airstream’s headquarters in Jackson Center, Ohio, the company’s cultural identity is everywhere. Historic model badges and brand marks are displayed everywhere, telling a tale of pride in their product that is tangible. Camp, Airstream’s intranet, gives that history and identity a digital home, letting employees become participants in a story approaching its centenary. 

The factory itself provided me with a useful metaphor. Airstream takes an opposite approach to many RV manufacturers, completing each trailer’s aluminum shell before adding the interior. The shell then spends 25 to 30 minutes in Airstream’s “perfect storm” water check, where 10,000 gallons of recycled water test it for leaks. The interior only goes in once the structure has proved it can do its job. 

That’s the way the best organizations approach their employee experience. Culture and narrative are the shell: they give the organization a recognizable shape and determine what its digital experience should support. Design, content, channels, and features are the interior. Without a strong cultural shell, the platform is being asked to create the structure itself – a heavy job for any technology, and one that often produces a generic experience. 

That doesn’t mean culture needs to be perfect or static before new technology is introduced. Teams simply need a clear view of what their platform should reflect and reinforce. That gives technology something real to extend, helping more employees connect with and contribute to the culture. 

Kohl’s: Engage with customer success early and often 

Choosing an employee experience platform is a major decision, but it’s only the first step toward improving the way an organization moves forward. The choices that shape the experience continue through implementation, and long after launch. To get more from your employee experience vendor over time, it’s an excellent idea to involve Customer Success to support you in those choices, and continue to develop that relationship as needs evolve. 

This two-way partnership is one of Interact’s core principles, and my recent visit to Kohl’s reminded me why. Customer Success was the first Interact team Kohl’s met after joining Interact three years ago. We worked alongside our delivery and strategy teams to understand the decisions being made, flag any challenges or risks, and document useful context. Most importantly, we learned not only what Kohl’s was building, but the why behind it. 

That early context and understanding changes the quality of our later conversations. Kohl’s brings knowledge of its associates, priorities, and internal pressures; we bring platform expertise, and years of experience improving other organizations’ digital workplaces. Because we’ve been involved from the beginning, new projects and conversations can start immediately, without the need to reconstruct how the platform was delivered and how the customer got to where they are. Those early-day engagements can never be replaced, and a missed opportunity will forever be a gap in the customer-vendor relationship. 

Seeing the before and after at Kohl’s has been especially rewarding. Before Kohl’s partnered with Interact, platform changes had to pass through IT and a development team. Today, they can be made in minutes, and the platform helps 100,000 associates do their best work. We’ve collaborated with the team at Kohl’s throughout that evolution, with their original goals and principles still at the center of our decision-making tree. For internal comms and employee experience teams, the lesson is simple: involve Customer Success while important choices are still open, then keep them in the conversation. Their advice will be more useful when they understand not only what you’re building, but why, and your decisions will be better for it. 

RaceTrac: How can HQ keep frontline realities visible? 

Much like air traffic controllers, an organization’s frontline employees are often out of sight, but indispensable to success. The frontline employee experience stays relevant when headquarters proactively keeps frontline work visible in everyday decisions. That consideration, that a significant percentage of a workforce are neither deskbound nor static, should influence how plans are tested, messages are delivered, and tools are chosen. 

During my recent trip to RaceTrac, I was impressed by how visible the frontline is to corporate workers – and in fact anyone who visits them. The choice to name headquarters the “Store Support Center” seems simple on the surface, but says a great deal about the brand’s commitment to the employees who serve its customers every day. 

Walking through the office, two walls of photographs bear witness to RaceTrac’s mission, one reflecting the company’s history and another showcasing teams from every RaceTrac location that’s been opened across the US. At many organizations, it would be easy to spend an entire day absorbed in systems, forecasts, and projects without considering the frontline teams impacted by HQ’s decision making. At RaceTrac, forgetting the frontline for even a minute feels impossible. 

Displays alone can’t guarantee a better frontline employee experience, but they are proof of a desire to keep the people affected by headquarters decisions visible and constantly part of decision-making. That kind of thinking is what makes a frontline-first culture thrive and keeps RaceTrac moving in a direction that serves every one of its employees. 

Houston Methodist: Ask for specific, structured feedback 

Feedback becomes more useful the more specific you get. Asking the right questions helps participants structure their thoughts and yields concrete next steps they can act on. 

During my visit to Houston Methodist earlier this month, we did a Stop, Start, Continue exercise to dive into the partnership. The exercise is straightforward: we asked for one thing we should stop doing, one thing we should start doing, and one thing we should continue doing to serve Houston Methodist. While this was customer feedback rather than an employee-listening session, the structure transfers well to any employee experience, internal communications, or change management project. 

A broad question requires your audience themselves to define the topic, decide what matters, and judge how candid they can be, all at once. Many people respond with whatever is safest or easiest to recall. Stop, Start, Continue reduces that mental load without steering everyone toward the same answer. The best part is you can apply it in a variety of ways, from a pulse survey or focus group to a targeted check-in with stakeholders from various departments. 

Here’s how the three prompts translate into an employee communication or experience review:

Prompt	What it surfaces	Example for a comms or EX review
Stop	Friction, duplication, or noise	Which updates, channels, or steps have created confusion without adding value?
Start	Unmet needs and missing support	What would help you feel better informed, connected, or equipped?
Continue	Strengths to protect	Which communication tactic or aspect of the employee experience is working best? In other words, what should remain as other things change?

The next step, and the most important one, is doing something with the exercise. The best-designed listening initiative loses value if action isn’t taken based on the feedback you get – and if people aren’t kept in the loop about what’s changed. It’s this kind of initiative and active improvement that helps Houston Methodist deliver an ever-evolving and improving employee experience. 

Piedmont: Where can communicators find new employee experience ideas? 

Now for one that’s a little different. Being in the room is the greatest way to hear and see real-world experience, but being able to discuss the everyday realities of work with peers outside of your own organization often adds a new dimension to your evaluating and reviewing that is different from anything you can produce internally. That was exactly what Piedmont created by hosting Message Makers: A Communications Summit in Atlanta, in partnership with Interact. 

Piedmont built the day around the prominent issues comms teams are managing right now: choosing meaningful KPIs, crafting authentic leadership comms, responding to crises without losing trust, and making purpose tangible. Executives from notable organizations including UPS and The Coca-Cola Company added their perspectives in a series of talks, panels, and fireside chats throughout the day. 

I was proud to be a part of that learning, hosting a panel called Bringing a Lived Mission to Life alongside three nonprofit leaders. They kept bringing purpose back to real people, real choices, and the real work behind a mission statement – something any communicator can put to use. 

It was the mix of authentic conversations and practical advice that made the day so successful. Too many industry events save the stage for polished answers, but Message Makers gave people the chance to talk about work as it actually happens. This is where the best and freshest ideas tend to come from. 

Piedmont gave Atlanta-area communicators an opportunity to grow. Stay on top of the events, seminars, and conferences available in your own area or online (including events Interact hosts and participates in). Alternatively, you don’t need an official event to learn from peers – a quarterly coffee date with a comms colleague or an article like the one you’re reading now can surface internal communications ideas that don’t come as easily when you’re deep in the day-to-day work. 

How to put these employee experience ideas to use 

Use these five employee experience ideas as practical prompts for examining your own approach. Look at what your platform reflects, who remains visible when decisions are made, which conversations need to continue, and where more structured feedback or an outside perspective could help. Start with the question most relevant to your team, then adapt the lesson behind it. 

The examples work in different ways. Airstream begins with culture, Kohl’s with continued conversation, RaceTrac with frontline visibility, Houston Methodist with better questions, and Piedmont with peer learning. Paying attention to those same areas will help you identify the most useful employee experience ideas for your organization. 

Frequently asked questions