Hey,

Hello beautiful wonderful people, I thought I would change up the day of sending this week as a few mentioned it gets lost in their inbox on a Monday.

Today's focus:

TL;DR: Experience Leak is what happens when organisations design for process and strip out everything that makes the experience worth subscribing to. This piece explains where it comes from, how to spot it, and what it's actually costing you.

Most people teams are measuring more than they ever have before, be it sentiment surveys, lifecycle listening, pulse checks, social and ambient listening. Some even do one-question feedback loops after every HR process.

With all of this data, most HR still can't tell the board exactly where their people's commitment breaks, or where revenue is lost from a PX point of view. They can tell you how people felt about the feedback process, but whether the experience of transformation and growth is actually happening, whether someone is becoming more capable, more connected, or more certain they're in the right place, that's a completely different question.

Every one of those questions measures the interaction, not the experience. A specific moment, a single touchpoint, a process in isolation. The layer that actually drives commitment sits underneath all of it and is completely unwatched.

Engagement surveys capture sentiment at a moment in time and are at best a rear-view mirror insight. An employee can feel generally positive about their job and simultaneously be losing trust in the system that runs it. Those two things coexist right up until they don't, and the survey catches the first one while missing the second entirely.

HR can point to engagement scores and say "people are satisfied." But satisfaction isn't the same as commitment. Satisfaction means "I'm not actively unhappy." Commitment means "I'd choose this place again." The gap between those two is where your best people quietly disengage, stop volunteering for stretch projects, stop referring friends, stop investing discretionary effort. They're still employed, but they're no longer thriving.

Since 2019 I've been thinking about people experience the way a product company thinks about subscriptions. Your employees are subscribing to the experience you give them, every single day. Your strategy, your products, your interactions, your experiences and services, all of it is a value exchange between the business and its people, and yes while pay matters we are no longer in the 1950s. Pay is more just the price of entry to join, not the reason why they stay.

The real question is whether the experience is something people would actively choose to keep subscribing to daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. Here's a simple reframe for you:

The programmes they'd unsubscribe from tomorrow morning are your leaks. You're spending money on things that aren't creating enough value for anyone to choose them freely. Most HR will never admit on record that they have built an entire portfolio of programmes that look right on paper, score fine in surveys, and would survive all of about thirty seconds if employees had an unsubscribe button or had to pay out of their own pocket.

Congratulations.

You just built the world's most efficient way for people to not give a shit.

People don't often leave organisations in one dramatic moment, unless it's something pretty horrific. Often they just get fed up of living Groundhog Day and slowly but surely stop feeling the value exchange between them and the business until one day they decide to cancel the subscription and the resignation comes in hot.

Their reason to stay is the sum of value they get across five layers of the experience: the strategy behind it, the products built for them, the interactions they have every day, the experiences that shape how they feel, and the services that hold it all together. When that sum drops, or when another employer offers more of the one thing that matters most to them, they switch. And most of the time, what pulls them across isn't a bigger salary but the one part of the experience you stopped investing in because nobody was measuring it.

There's a version of this that's even harder to spot. Silent attrition, the employees who haven't left but have stopped investing anything beyond the minimum. By every metric they're fine, but they stopped renewing the emotional subscription months ago. When someone finally offers them something that re-ignites the spark, they leave, and the organisation is genuinely surprised because every indicator said they were engaged. Being present and being engaged are two very different subscriptions, and most organisations can't tell the difference between them.

The measurement gap, the silent attrition, the programmes nobody would pay to keep, they're all symptoms of the same structural failure. I call it Experience Leak. Experience Leak is what happens when an organisation over-designs for process, doesn't see their culture as a collection of value-compounding SPIES, and strips out everything that makes the experience worth subscribing to.

Every leaked moment is a renewal point your people didn't choose to come back from. Experience Leak is revenue leak. It happens in three ways: through what you're not measuring, through what you're not designing for, and through situations and states you never built to flex for.

Plug the leak in the experience and you plug the leak in the P&L. Replacement spend, productivity drag from people who are present but have stopped investing, the premium you're paying to hire because your reputation is slipping, all of it traces back to an experience nobody would choose to subscribe to. Most organisations have never added those numbers up, which is exactly why the people strategy and the business strategy keep talking past each other.

And here's the part that should keep people leaders awake. There's a 35 to 40 point perception gap between what leaders think they're delivering and what employees actually feel. That gap is the subscription illusion: the organisation believes the experience is earning loyalty because the metrics are green, while the workforce has already mentally cancelled and is waiting for a better offer to land in their inbox. Only 32% of employees trust their engagement survey accurately captures how they feel. The instrument designed to catch the leak is leaking too.

There's something around how we design experiences that most people strategies miss entirely, and it has to do with situations rather than steady states. Your system is built for the default version of someone. A new hire on day one is in one state. That same person on day 21, when they still don't know who to ask when something goes wrong, is in a completely different state with completely different needs.

Your experience only knows how to handle the steady version. The moment reality shifts and the experience can't shift with it, the subscription lapses.

When I ran a diagnostic at a previous client, everyone assumed onboarding was the problem. It wasn't great, but the real experience leak was happening between day 12 and day 37, in the gap between the induction ending and the person actually feeling like they belonged somewhere. Nobody had designed for that situation because nobody was looking at it.

That's what I call a Friction Market, an unserved situation where the current experience doesn't flex for the reality someone is actually in. Your competitors haven't found theirs either, which means every one of those gaps is an edge waiting to be claimed.

This is where most people strategies get stuck. You spot a leak and fix a programme: better onboarding, a new wellbeing initiative, a revamped performance process. Each one solves the thing it was designed to solve, and the experience still leaks because the fixes were never designed to work as a system.

Your people strategy is a subscription architecture where every layer either compounds value or quietly drains it. Treat it as a collection of programmes sharing a budget and the leaks keep opening.

I use a framework called SPIES to map these layers: Subscription Strategy, Product, Interaction, Experience, and Service. Every organisation delivers all five whether they realise it or not, and every one of them is a renewal point in the subscription. Most measurement sits at the Interaction layer. The other four go completely unwatched. Fix one renewal point in the right place, where the subscription is actually lapsing, and the value compounds across the whole system. Chase the wrong fix and you pour resource into a programme that was never the real problem, just the most visible one.

The subscription lens forces you to stop auditing individual programmes and start designing a portfolio that earns its place across all five layers. Map your current people strategy against those five layers and be honest about how much of it is process and programmes, and how much of it is a subscription people would actively choose to keep paying for.

Pick your highest-investment programme, ask a cross-section of people inside it the subscription questions, and let their answers tell you what your strategy is actually worth.

This week's wrap up is pretty simple, pick your highest-investment programme, ask a cross-section of people inside it the subscription questions, and let their answers tell you what your strategy is actually worth.

If the number makes you uncomfortable, you've found your first leak.