Since 2013, I have immersed myself in the worlds of Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) in various capacities. My first project involved capturing and identifying insights and moments of opportunity (MOOs) between CX and EX in a large call center. My goal was to weave these insights together to elevate the network to the number one position for both customer and employee experience.

This was, of course, before EX became the buzzword it is today.

Over the years, I’ve heard “employee experience” described in countless ways, most of which sound abstract and fluffy. Terms like belonging, purposeful, authentic, and harmonized are frequently used. While these are great concepts, ask someone to make them tangible, and the clarity often disappears quickly.

Remember, a business speaks in numbers and stories, not in fluffy terms.

I’ve built my career on turning the abstract into action, and today, I’m going to share with you my SPIES.

SPIES is a framework I created for making employee experience tangible. It breaks the employee experience into five elements: Subscription, Product, Interaction, Experience, and Service. Instead of describing EX with words like "belonging" or "purposeful," SPIES gives you a lens to see the DNA code that brings it to life, so you can actually design, measure, and improve it.

This lens has shaped my approach to employee experience since I began working in the field. I only truly named it in 2019, thanks to a tipsy conversation.

The Drunken Chat and a Unicorn

On June 16th, 2019, I had just travelled to Ghent, Belgium, a few days before I was scheduled to give a talk at a conference on the power of experience design (dressed up as a unicorn).

With the sun out and time to spare, there was only one thing for it: drinks.

Fast forward several drinks later (see below), and David (who hosts a great podcast) and I began talking shop about the alignment and differences between CX and EX, learning, and work in general. It was during this conversation that I hit upon the idea of work and learning being a customer’s choice—something they opt into or out of daily, monthly, and yearly.

This model is similar to how you choose to opt into this newsletter, a streaming service, or even your milk delivery.

I can still remember the key moments and questions:

• Imagine if employees paid to come to work.

• What would they pay to come to work?

• Would work be a subscription?

• Subscriptions need customers—who are they?

• Are employees the customers?

• What benefits and perks would a customer pay for?

From there, we explored whether employees would pay for learning as part of their subscription service, among many other questions. Clearly, with the beer flowing, our conversation moved on to other topics.

However, I remember returning to my hotel and jotting down thoughts influenced by the evening’s drinks:

• What are the employee products at work?

• How much and in what currency would they pay?

• What services do we have, like a milkman? (I told you I was drunk.)

• Why would an employee pay for this service versus another?

After that, it was just a matter of applying my background and understanding of product design, services, and experience design. It was then that everything clicked: the EX is an ecosystem of SPIES.

My Evolving Definition of Each

It’s important to note that it’s your customer (the employee) who decides what it is, not you. For example, you as the CHRP, CPO, or Head of may see Leadership as a product, but your customer may see it as a service. You may describe talent attraction as a service, but your customer may describe it as an experience.

For the sake of my sanity, I currently define these SPES

The operating system of meaning. The blueprint that defines what the organisation stands for, who it serves, what it promises, and what it refuses to compromise. Most strategies get presented once and forgotten by Tuesday because they're built as plans, not as an identity contract people can feel in the building. Subscription Strategy reframes growth from acquisition to renewal, forcing you to treat every decision, every behaviour, every priority as a renewal moment. If it doesn't hold up to that daily test, it's wallpaper.

An intentionally designed and owned solution that solves a real problem for real people, shaped with care and treated like the offer people choose, use, judge, and build stories around. Your onboarding is a product. Your manager's weekly 1:1 is a product. Your first-week experience is a product. And you measure each one by adoption, not delivery: are people choosing it every day, or just complying with it because policy says they have to? From first launch to graceful sunset, product is the hinge where promise becomes reality.

The smallest unit of truth in any experience system. The 1:1 that gets cancelled. The recognition that arrives at exactly the right moment. The first five minutes of someone's first day. Each one is a micro-moment where coherence is either validated or broken, exposing what the organisation actually values, not what the leadership deck says it values. What your next interaction reveals about you is closer to the truth than anything on your values poster. Product is what you build, interaction is how people meet it, and experience is the production you design around it.

First days. Last days. Retirements. Immersive offsites. Company kickoffs. These are choreographed set-pieces where multiple interactions are composed into something people remember, retell, and carry with them. If interactions are the brushstrokes, experiences are the murals. You don't wait for experience to emerge. You design it at scale, with arc, with intention, and with the understanding that these are the productions that become the stories people share when they decide to stay, advocate, or walk.

The invisible scaffolding that makes strategy real, product usable, interactions coherent, and experience possible. It works across people, tech, tools, and time. If it can't be found, used, or understood, it's not a service. Think about your self-service portal, your IT support on day one, your HR ops when someone's life changes and they need the system to actually work. A good service delivers a meaningful outcome, removes friction, and supports the journey from start to finish. If service breaks, the whole system lies, and if service works, the whole system sings. Where product creates the offer, service makes it deliverable.

Why We Need It

Applying the SPIES model to the current experience is like stepping into the matrix. We no longer see the employee experience as abstract words and ask, “Why work here?” Instead, we start to see the DNA code that brings it to life—not 1s and 0s but SPIES.

By questioning whether what you’re building is a service, product, interaction, or experience, you start to see your work differently. Once you identify it through sensemaking, you can capture impactful metrics and measurements.

This model allows you to measure employee experience at an individual SPIE level, which compounds into a holistic view. This shift can be the snowflake that starts the avalanche, helping you see the value in:

• Moving from guessing resources to product resource accounting.

• Shifting from passive team practices to team patterning and tooling.

• Replacing vague HR metrics with a SPIE measurement engine.

• Moving from annual year-end reviews to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).

• Shifting from annual project budget allocation to agile and lean budgeting.

• Transitioning from static strategy to adaptive strategy.

Now, before you end up in a spiral like I have thinking about this, here are a few noodles I had to untangle:

• Yes, a big service can consist of smaller services.

• Yes, a service can consist of products.

• Yes, a product can provide a service.

• Yes, all have interactions and can drive visceral experiences.

• No, not everything is a visceral experience.

• Yes, we can design for experience.

• Yes, only when the foundation of a product or service is in place.

At this point, you may be sitting, rocking in a chair with blood running from your nose. But this is why people use words like belonging—because to make EX tangible, you have to first do the hard thinking work, and not many want to do it… because it’s HARD! This is why we need to see and design the employee experience as an ecosystem of SPIES.

As a builder of the People experience, you have to see all of the above from two points of view:

• The Business

• The Customer

This makes it all the more challenging; however, once you start to see things like leadership, onboarding, rewards, and performance as services, products, interactions, and experiences, you can start to needle and scratch at the value they are truly providing to the business and your customer.

What does SPIES stand for? SPIES stands for Subscription, Product, Interaction, Experience, and Service. These are the five tangible elements that make up the employee experience ecosystem.

Who created the SPIES framework? Danny Seals, founder of Knot (weareknot.co.uk) and author of The Insightful Innovator: How to Level Up Your People Experience. The framework was developed from over a decade of work in CX and EX with brands including Dyson, HSBC, and GSK.

How is SPIES different from traditional employee experience models? Most EX models describe the experience in abstract terms like "belonging" or "purpose." SPIES breaks it into tangible, measurable components. Instead of asking "why work here?", you start asking "is this a service, a product, an interaction, or an experience?" which lets you design, measure, and improve each element individually.

Can I use the SPIES framework in my organisation? Yes. The framework is designed to be practical. Start by picking one people function (onboarding, performance, learning) and ask whether it's operating as a service, product, interaction, or experience. Your customer (the employee) gets to decide what it is, not you. For deeper guidance, read The Insightful Innovator or reach out to Knot at weareknot.co.uk.

Why: FAQ sections are the single most extractable content format for AI. When someone asks a question, AI looks for content that matches the question-answer pattern. These four questions cover the most likely searches about SPIES.