Key takeaways
- Employee experience (EX) research is how organisations understand what work is actually like for their people across every stage of the employment journey: recruitment, onboarding, day-to-day, major changes, and exit.
- Engagement surveys tell you what employees think. Qualitative methods like in-the-moment video and diary studies tell you why, with the context that a Likert scale strips out.
- The methods most teams reach for are diary studies, ecological momentary assessment (EMA), and participatory approaches where employees help shape the research themselves.
- EX research is used for onboarding journey mapping, day-in-the-life studies of remote and hybrid workers, new tool rollouts, wellbeing, management experience, and offboarding.
- With Indeemo, HR and EX teams can run in-the-moment studies with their own workforce, analyse in minutes with AI, and share subtitled highlight reels that help leadership feel what their people feel.
What is employee experience research?
Employee experience research is the practice of understanding what work is genuinely like for the people who do it, in context, in their own words. It covers every touchpoint someone has with an organisation, from the first interview through onboarding, day-to-day work, major changes like a reorg or a new system, and eventually offboarding.
EX research grew out of engagement and satisfaction surveys, but it has broadened considerably. Where a traditional survey asks "how engaged do you feel on a scale of 1 to 5?", EX research asks what's actually happening on a Tuesday afternoon when an employee is trying to submit an expense claim and runs into the third system that day. It treats employees as people with layered, contextual experiences, not data points to be tracked against a quarterly benchmark.
Part of the reason EX has moved from HR concern to boardroom concern is the evidence that it pays commercially. Research from MIT Sloan Management Review has linked strong employee experience to measurably better business outcomes, including innovation, customer satisfaction, and profitability.
HR and EX teams use this understanding to guide decisions across onboarding design, internal comms, tooling, wellbeing programmes, management development, and workplace strategy. The shift in thinking is straightforward: your people are your most important stakeholders, and the best way to understand them is to hear from them directly, in their own words, about their actual working lives.
Why do engagement surveys alone fall short?
Surveys tell you what employees think at the moment they fill them out. They don't tell you why, and they don't tell you what happened in the week before the survey that shaped the answer. Gallup's long-running State of the Global Workplace research has found that global engagement levels have stayed stubbornly low for more than a decade, even as organisations have invested heavily in measurement and in engagement programmes. The gap between what surveys capture and what actually shapes experience is part of the reason.
That gap matters. A drop in engagement scores might reflect a genuine cultural issue, or it might reflect a bad week of server outages, or a reorganisation rumour, or a single manager. The number is the same in all three cases. Qualitative research is how you tell them apart.
There's also a problem with memory. When you ask someone to rate their past quarter, they compress it into a single impression — usually weighted toward whatever's happened most recently. This is the recall bias issue that shows up across survey methodology research. Capturing experiences in the moment, as they happen, sidesteps the problem almost entirely.
None of this means surveys are useless. They remain a good way to track direction over time and to spot where you need to look more closely. But they work best when paired with qualitative methods that can explain what the numbers actually mean.
What qualitative methods work best for EX research?
The qualitative methods most EX teams reach for are diary studies, ecological momentary assessment, and participatory approaches where employees help shape the research itself. These are not competing methods — they overlap, and most real-world projects pull from more than one.
Diary studies
A diary study asks employees to share short entries about their work over a period of days or weeks. Entries can be videos, photos, screen recordings, or text. The format is up to the participant and the task — someone might film a 60-second reflection at the end of a shift, photograph their workstation on a particularly tough day, or screen-record a frustrating workflow in a piece of software.
Diary studies are good at capturing how experience changes over time. A single interview gives you one snapshot; a diary study gives you ten or twenty, across different contexts and moods. You see the rhythm of the week, the difference between Monday morning and Friday afternoon, and the patterns that only become visible when you string multiple days together.
Ecological momentary assessment (EMA)
EMA is a close cousin of the diary study, but it's structured around prompts rather than open reflection. Participants respond to short questions or tasks pushed to their phone at set times — every morning, every two hours, at the end of each shift, or whenever the research design calls for it. The point is to catch the experience as close to the moment as possible, before it gets reframed by memory.
EMA works well for studying things that fluctuate: energy levels across a working day, stress around specific meetings or tasks, experience during a period of organisational change. It gives you a time-series view of something that a survey would only see as an average.
Participatory approaches
Participatory research is less a distinct method and more a stance. It treats employees as collaborators in the research rather than subjects of it. They help shape what gets asked, what gets documented, and how the findings are interpreted.
In practice, this can look like an initial co-design session with a small group of employees to define the research questions, followed by a diary study or EMA programme that the wider cohort takes part in, and ending with a review session where participants help make sense of the themes that emerge. This builds buy-in. It tends to surface the questions that matter to employees rather than the ones managers think matter. And it makes the eventual findings harder to dismiss, because the workforce has been part of producing them.
Contextual inquiry
Contextual inquiry is about studying employees where the work actually happens, physically and culturally. That might mean a researcher joining an employee for a shadowed day, or it might mean asking employees to document their own context through video and photography. With mobile video research, contextual inquiry becomes much easier to run remotely and at scale, because the participant's phone becomes the lens.
What are the benefits of in-the-moment EX research?
The short version: you see what work is actually like for your people, instead of asking them to summarise it from memory. The longer version has five parts.
Authenticity and reduced recall bias
When an employee records a video at the end of a long day, you're seeing a genuine reaction, not a reconstruction of that reaction two weeks later. The immediacy strips out the polish and post-rationalisation that creep into retrospective feedback. You see the frustration, the pride, the tiredness, the small moments that would never survive a survey.
Context you can't get any other way
An employee telling you a shared inbox is cluttered is useful. Video of them scrolling through it at 9am on a Monday is more useful. An employee telling you a workflow is broken is useful. A screen recording of them hitting the third error of the day, before giving up and pinging a colleague, is more useful. Context shows you the things that words leave out, and decisions made from contextual data tend to land more accurately.
The "why" behind the numbers
This is the question EX teams are under the most pressure to answer. Engagement is down four points — is that a cultural problem, a process problem, or a specific team? In-the-moment video research gives you the answer in a way that no follow-up survey can.
Reach across distributed teams
Hybrid, remote, and multi-site workforces are hard to research in person. Mobile video research doesn't care where your people are. Someone in a distribution centre in Manchester, a desk in Bangalore, and a home office in Toronto can all take part in the same study, using the same app, in their own language. With automatic transcription and translation in 30+ languages, the findings are comparable across markets within minutes of being submitted.
Rich, multimedia data
A diary study doesn't produce one type of data. It produces a mix of video, photos, screen recordings, and text, all tied to the same underlying question. That variety is useful at analysis time (different angles on the same theme) and when sharing findings, where a clip of a real employee talking lands with leadership in a way a bar chart never will.
What are the most common use cases for EX research?
Most EX research projects cluster around a handful of moments in the employment journey, plus a smaller set of cross-cutting themes like wellbeing and management experience.
Onboarding journey
The first 90 days set the tone for how someone feels about the organisation. An onboarding diary study asks new hires to document their experience in short daily entries: what they learned, what confused them, what helped, what didn't. It surfaces gaps in the onboarding process that no exit interview will ever catch.
Day-in-the-life of remote and hybrid workers
Hybrid working is now the default for many organisations, and the experience of it varies widely. A day-in-the-life study asks employees to document a typical working day: commute or no commute, meeting load, focus time, interruptions, how they balance home and work demands. The findings shape workplace policy in a way that a blanket "hybrid is working" survey result can't.
New tool or system rollouts
Rolling out a new HRIS, a new comms platform, or a new scheduling tool is a painful moment for most organisations. Running a short diary study or EMA programme alongside the rollout — with employees screen-recording their actual use of the tool — gives you real-time insight into where the friction is, while there's still time to fix it.
Wellbeing and mental health
EMA is well-suited to wellbeing research because it captures mood and energy over time rather than at a single reflective moment. Combined with open-ended video reflections, it gives wellbeing teams a view of what's actually happening in people's working lives, not just how they answer wellbeing survey questions.
Leadership and management experience
Managers sit at the pressure point between strategy and delivery. Short diary studies with managers (about their own experience, not their teams') surface what they find hardest, what support they actually use, and where the leadership pipeline is straining. This is hard to ask about in a survey and easy to talk about on camera.
Offboarding and exit experience
Exit surveys are notoriously guarded. A short video diary study with people who are about to leave, or have recently left, captures what the exit survey never does. Some organisations run this with outgoing employees voluntarily; others partner with alumni networks to get honest feedback from people no longer in the employment relationship.
How do you run an employee experience research project?
Most EX projects follow roughly the same shape, regardless of which method you're using. The moving parts are design, consent, recruitment from within the workforce, task setup, moderation, analysis, and reporting.
- Define the question. What do you actually need to know, and what decision will the research inform? EX research works best when it's tied to a specific decision (a programme launch, a policy review, a new manager development initiative) rather than run as ongoing monitoring.
- Design the study. Diary study or EMA? Open-ended reflections or structured prompts? How long? What do you want employees to share: video, photos, screen recordings, text, or a mix? The answers depend on the question.
- Handle consent carefully. EX research sits inside an employment relationship, which raises the bar on consent. Employees need to know what they're signing up for, what will be shared and with whom, and that participation is genuinely voluntary. More on this in the next section.
- Recruit from within. Most EX studies use the organisation's own employees as participants, not an external panel. Recruitment usually runs via HR or team leads, with a clear opt-in process. Small cash incentives or donations-to-charity options are common.
- Set up the tasks. The Indeemo platform supports three tasking approaches: all tasks visible from the start (good for capturing routine behaviours when they happen), scheduled prompts (good for EMA-style studies), and sequential tasks that unlock one after another (good for journey studies). Most EX projects use a mix.
- Moderate as you go. Rather than treating the fieldwork period as a black box, the best EX studies involve active moderation — researchers watching entries as they come in and asking follow-up questions where something surprises them. This is where the richest insights often come from.
- Analyse and report. AI-assisted transcription, translation, and theme detection cut analysis time significantly. Output can be a traditional report, a dashboard, a subtitled highlight reel for leadership, or all three.
How do you handle privacy, consent, and ethics in EX research?
EX research is different from consumer research. It happens inside an employment relationship, and that changes the ethical considerations in ways that matter.
Informed consent has to be genuine
The fact that an employer asks an employee to take part in a study creates a power dynamic that consumer research doesn't have. Employees need to know exactly what they're being asked to do, who will see what they share, and that declining to take part carries no consequences. Participation should be opt-in, and the opt-in process should make the voluntary nature of it completely clear.
Anonymity vs attributability
Some EX studies work best when participants are fully anonymous: exit research, wellbeing studies, research on sensitive topics. Others need attribution to be useful, like onboarding research where follow-up is part of the value. It's worth deciding this at design stage, communicating it clearly to participants, and building the technical setup to match.
Management boundaries
A common worry from employees is that their manager will see their raw video entries. Sometimes that's the design; often it isn't. Decide early who has access to what (moderators, HR leadership, the research team, external agencies) and communicate that clearly to participants. That clarity is critical for trust.
Data security and compliance
EX research typically involves video of identifiable people talking about their real workplace. That demands enterprise-grade security. Indeemo's platform is GDPR compliant, ISO 27001 certified, SOC 2 Type II attested, and supports HIPAA workflows where needed. Full documentation is available through our trust centre.
The bigger principle
Good EX research treats employees the way you'd want to be treated in their place. If something about the design would feel uncomfortable on the other side of the table, it's probably a sign to rework the design.
How do you analyse EX research at scale?
The biggest shift in EX research over the last few years is that analysis no longer has to be the bottleneck. AI has changed the economics.
With Indeemo, submissions are automatically transcribed and, where relevant, translated as they come in, in 30+ languages. That alone changes what's possible for a multi-country workforce. Findings become comparable across markets within minutes of submission rather than weeks.
AI-assisted theme detection and sentiment analysis surface patterns across submissions far faster than manual coding can. Researchers stay in control of interpretation, but the platform does the heavy lifting on the early pattern-finding.
For sharing findings, the single most useful output is often a subtitled highlight reel — a two- or three-minute cut of employees in their own words, talking about the issue at hand. For leadership, this lands harder than a slide deck. For wider communications, it helps the whole organisation understand what the research actually found. Highlight reels can be produced directly inside the platform, with subtitles generated automatically.
The end-to-end shape of an EX project with Indeemo is straightforward: set up the study, invite your workforce, research in the moment, analyse with AI, and share the findings as a report, a dashboard, a highlight reel, or all three.
Do you need to be a research expert to run EX research?
No. Whether you're an experienced EX researcher or an HR team running your first in-depth study, Indeemo can support you.
Use the platform independently if you have the expertise in-house — the app looks and feels like a social network that participants already know how to use, and the research dashboard is built for non-technical moderators. If you'd rather partner with us, our Catalyst team can help with study design, moderation, analysis, or run the whole project end-to-end. If you have research ambitions but not the capacity or expertise to fulfil them, we can lend a helping hand.
Indeemo can be more than a platform. It can be a partnership.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between an engagement survey and employee experience research?
Engagement surveys measure how employees feel at a single moment, usually against a standardised set of questions. EX research explores what working at the organisation is actually like, in context and in employees' own words. Most organisations use both. The survey signals where to look, and the qualitative research explains what's going on.
How many employees should take part in an EX study?
Most qualitative EX studies run with 15 to 50 participants, though larger programmes can include hundreds across multiple locations. Because in-the-moment video captures a lot of data per participant, you tend to need fewer people than you would for a quantitative study.
How long should an EX study run?
A focused diary study can run for as little as five days. Most run somewhere between one and three weeks. Longer-term journey studies (for example, tracking onboarding over 90 days) run considerably longer, with lighter-touch prompts along the way.
How do you handle anonymity when employees are recording video?
It depends on the research design. Some studies are fully anonymous (often for wellbeing or exit research), some are attributable by agreement. The important thing is to decide at design stage, communicate it clearly, and build the project setup to match. Indeemo supports both approaches.
Can EX research work for distributed or multi-country teams?
Yes, this is one of the method's real strengths. Because participation happens on the participant's own phone, location doesn't matter. Automated transcription and translation in 30+ languages means a multi-country study can be analysed and compared across markets without a separate translation step.
