Every employee experiences work differently, from workplace stress to belonging and support. Discover why a lived-experience approach to employee wellbeing can help organisations build healthier, more inclusive and supportive workplaces.
For one employee, a flexible work policy means the freedom to be able to pick up their child from school or attend an important health appointment or work during their most productive hours. For another, it is uncertainty: fewer informal conversations, less visibility with leadership, and a quiet worry that being away from the office means being forgotten. The policy is the same. The experience is not. And that difference is where workplace wellbeing either succeeds or fails.
This conversation is important to have now because the overall employee experience is showing signs of strain. A recent nation-wide report by ADP Research found that employee engagement at Indian corporates fell to 19% in 2025 (down from 24% in 2024) despite continued investment in workplace experience. The decline suggests that organizations cannot judge the success of their well-being efforts simply by standalone programs they offer. They need to understand how those policies and practices actually impact the employees. This is where a lived-experience lens becomes important: it brings the differences beneath the numbers into focus, helping organizations understand what flexibility, inclusion, support and growth mean to different employees in practice.
Why a lived-experience lens is essential to employee wellbeing
Applying a lived-experience lens can significantly strengthen employee wellbeing efforts. It helps organizations uncover the factors that influence wellbeing in practice, whether related to workload, flexibility, inclusion, career growth or psychological safety. This approach enables leaders to design more relevant and equitable support systems, ensuring that policies work for diverse employee groups rather than a perceived average employee. When people feel heard, understood and supported in ways that reflect their individual experiences, they are more likely to feel a sense of belonging, trust their organization and remain engaged.
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A recent Randstad report found that 69% of Indian employees would leave an organization if they lacked a sense of belonging, compared with 55% globally. A sense of belonging also becomes hard to achieve when authenticity is compromised. Michael Page’s Talent Trends India 2025found that 76% of employees felt unable to be their genuine selves at work, with ageism emerging as the most commonly reported bias. Thus, a lived-experience lens clearly seems to be the need of the hour to truly transform wellbeing from a collection of programs into a people-centered strategy that fosters healthier, more inclusive and more resilient workplaces.
Building a “culture of active listening”
Giving employees more opportunities to share their views is just the starting point in enabling a culture of active listening. The end goal is creating a safe workplace where people can raise concerns, offer feedback and talk about what is making work difficult, and trust that their input will be heard without negative consequences.
That requires a more deliberate approach. Organizations can create regular channels for feedback through pulse surveys, small-group listening sessions and one-to-one conversations, but the process cannot end with collecting responses. Leaders should identify recurring issues, assign ownership for addressing them and communicate back what they heard, what they will change, what they cannot change and why. Progress should then be reviewed openly. This turns listening from an engagement exercise into an ongoing way of improving how work gets done.
Managers are central to this exercise. Deloitte’s 2025 India findings show that 62% of Gen Zs and 56% of millennials want more guidance from their managers, but only 44% and 47%, respectively, believe they receive it. Managers therefore need to be equipped to have more meaningful conversations about workload, priorities, flexibility, development and boundaries, and to recognize when an employee may need support rather than simply greater resilience. Organizations can reinforce this by making listening and follow-through part of how managers are evaluated, giving them clear escalation routes when they cannot resolve an issue themselves, and tracking whether concerns raised by employees are actually addressed.
A better workplace design
A lived-experience lens should also change what organizations do with what they learn. If a benefit has consistently low uptake, for instance, leaders should not assume that employees do not need it. The barrier could be how it is designed, how easy it is to access or whether employees worry about how using it will be perceived. Looking at these patterns can reveal where policies that appear inclusive on paper are not working equally well in practice.
The same principle should apply to the design of day-to-day workflows. Employee insights should inform decisions about workloads, staffing, meeting norms, shift schedules, return-to-office expectations and performance systems. These choices have a direct bearing on how people experience their jobs, and should not be treated as separate from wellbeing.
This also means making the connection between employee feedback and organizational action visible. An action tracker can show what employees raised, how it was addressed, what was changed at the enterprise level and where further work is needed. Over time, this creates something more valuable than a collection of feedback; it creates a clearer understanding of what helps different people do their best work.
-This article is authored by Shilpa Sinha Harsh, EVP & Head – Global Corporate Communications, CSR, DEI and ESG
