I’m excited to announce the publication of The Forrester Wave™: Employee Experience Management Platforms, Q2 2025. What is an employee experience (EX) management platform, anyway? It’s not as simple a question as you might imagine. There are many vendors trying to define their market space as EX management because their capabilities are integral to employees’ daily work and communications. For example, intranet platforms are increasingly marketing themselves this way. But in our view, an EX management platform is one that enables deep research into how employees are experiencing working for your firm — through multiple channels, methods, and contexts — and provides tools for making that experience better. This is disciplined, detailed work that requires a sophisticated toolset to do well.

Engagement surveys are integral to this work, but they’re only one method and have serious limits in terms of what they can reveal and how often employees will tolerate answering the questions. In a recent interview, the EX leader for a large European bank explained that, while he uses engagement surveys to understand where either engagement or burnout is happening, they can’t tell him how or why people are feeling the way they’re feeling. So an EX management platform that offers other research methods, such as running virtual focus groups or harvesting insights from employees’ daily interactions with each other, can reveal much more. From our exhaustive (and exhausting!) Wave research, we see three key findings worth highlighting:

  • The tools available today can enable broad participation and leadership support. For many firms, EX is a function that sits within HR with limited visibility into, or influence over, other parts of the organization. If that’s your starting point, take heart, because there is so much more you can do with today’s tools and with the right processes and strong leadership support. If the goal of the organization is to improve EX holistically and durably, then most of the solutions we reviewed have methods for helping you do so. But choose wisely, because there are significant yet nuanced differences between them. For example, data model and visualization limitations might make it impossible to segment the data well enough to share it with other stakeholders, effectively limiting participation. Some solutions have more effective and proven methods for inspiring behavior changes across the organization that will improve EX over time. For all of them, though, leadership support is crucial for success.
  • Surveys are an important tool but must be coupled with action. Many firms I speak with are stuck in the cycle of annual surveys, followed by inaction on the results. Accordingly, they make few gains and participation wanes over time. But some of the EX management platforms here have exceptional capabilities for increasing participation with managers with expert guidance and nudges, while others offer strong rewards and recognition capabilities. This latter capability is especially powerful because research shows that people are far more likely to be engaged when they feel uniquely seen and valued for who they are and what they contribute. Conversely, they’re more likely to burn out when they don’t. Nudges and recognition capabilities are effective ways to shift culture to foster better EX.
  • Deep listening is crucial to the future of EX management. Imagine a scenario where you could ask your EX management platform what employees are worried or upset about — or you could look at a group of employees who are showing signs of burnout in survey results and then be able to look back in time at when their emotional states shifted, how and when the topics of their conversations with others changed from optimism to pessimism, and what the topics of those conversations were. On one hand, this sounds creepy, but on the other, it’s also incredible insight when employees’ identity is fiercely protected and their anonymity is assured. Ready or not, this kind of deep listening is what’s coming in the months ahead as vendors ramp up their AI and neurolinguistic processing capabilities, coupled with generative and agentic AI capabilities that make it far easier to produce powerful insights on demand. The leading vendors in this evaluation are all taking this opportunity seriously and developing capabilities for it.

What’s Next?

Forrester clients can access the full Forrester Wave report to learn much more about our evaluation scoring and see how each vendor performs — and not a moment too soon! As we emerge from an EX winter, and as new capabilities become available from vendors, 2025 should prove to be an excellent year for taking stock of where you are on your EX maturity journey and investing in new capabilities to get to the next level. Reach out to me for help.