The EX Tradeoff: What Companies Sacrifice When Employee Experience Comes Last
- Debbie Braden
- Sep 15
- 2 min read

Leaders say they want engaged employees. But too often, engagement is treated like a box to tick—HR’s job to manage, or an employee’s responsibility to make the connection to the company that pays them.
The truth is much more nuanced. Engagement is an outcome of leadership choices. When companies prioritize customers and cost savings, they sacrifice the employee experience that makes both sustainable.
The numbers tell the story:
86% of CEOs prioritize customers
73% prioritize investors and shareholders
Only 45% prioritize employees (Weber Shandwick, 2025)
And the tradeoff is real:
40% of frontline workers say their company doesn’t care about them as a person (Workvivo, 2025)
U.S. businesses lose $1.2 trillion annually due to poor communication (Harris Poll, 2024)
When employee experience comes last, engagement isn’t the outcome. Neither is execution, retention, or customer experience.
In my more than 20 years of experience, I've seen the difference when companies choose to invest in employee experience. During COVID, I worked for an organization where the C-Suite gave up their entire paycheck, and leaders down to the Manager level took pay cuts so frontline employees could continue to be paid. The choice reflected the trust and alignment built long before the crisis. And when the company needed it most, employees responded with loyalty, engagement, and a willingness to go the extra mile for each other and for the business.
So, here are the real questions: What tradeoffs are you making that either fuel or drain the engagement? Because if customers come first, shareholders second, and employees last—how long before CX starts to suffer? And imagine this: if CEOs tied their bonus pay to EX metrics, what would change first?
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