What Happens When PX Leaders Aren’t at the Annual Strat Planning Table
Every strategy depends on how people experience work.
Damon Deaner
Principal, Impact PX
Early in my PX leadership journey, I once walked into a strategic planning session armed with employee data, insights, and optimism. I was ready to influence next year’s priorities with evidence from our workforce, hoping to ensure our strategies were as human as they were ambitious. But I quickly realized I’d been invited far too late. The major decisions were already made. My role was to package them into a story that would feel inspiring for our people, even though their voices had never been part of the process.
That moment revealed a systemic issue. Most organizations still treat People Experience (PX) as an execution partner, not a strategic one. And when that happens, both the employee experience and the business lose out.
The Timing Gap That Keeps PX on the Sidelines
Across industries, business units typically start their strategic planning months before HR or PX ever enter the conversation. Finance builds investment models. Strategy defines the growth plan. Then HR follows, aligning people programs to pre-set business priorities. PX often comes last, forced into reaction mode, creating engagement campaigns and journey maps around outcomes they didn’t help inform or define.
This sequencing undermines one of the most powerful levers of business success: how people actually experience the work that drives those outcomes.
Without PX at the table early, organizations risk:
Misaligned investments that ignore employee realities
Change fatigue and low adoption of new systems and programs
Underutilized technology and disengaged talent
Wasted spend on programs that don’t move business metrics
As 2026 planning accelerates, this is the window for PX leaders to change that dynamic.
Insight 1: Every Strategic Goal Runs Through Human Experience
Growth, innovation, retention, productivity… every major objective depends on people. PX connects those human levers to measurable business outcomes. When strategy teams define what success looks like, PX should define how people experience getting there.
Human-centered strategy design turns assumptions into evidence. PX leaders bring listening data, journey insights, and behavioral metrics that reveal what motivates employees, where friction exists, and how those patterns affect performance.
When PX informs strategy, organizations gain:
Clear visibility into the “experience gaps” blocking execution
Faster change adoption through employee-validated design
Higher ROI on transformation investments
If strategy defines the destination, PX designs the journey that gets you there.
Insight 2: Reframing PX as an Investment Category
Most strategic plans fund Operations, Technology, Marketing, and HR. PX is often invisible or buried under HR or engagement budgets. That’s a mistake.
PX leaders should advocate for people experience as an investment category with measurable ROI, not as a soft initiative.
Tie PX priorities directly to business outcomes:
Reduced time to productivity for new hires
Improved retention in critical roles or early tenures
Increased participation in innovation and learning programs
Higher internal career mobility and performance velocity
When PX outcomes appear in financial models, executives see the link between employee experience and enterprise value. That’s how you move from storytelling to strategic relevance.
Insight 3: Strategy Without PX Leads to Fragmentation
Recently, a global company we worked with struggled to understand why their leadership development program wasn’t improving leader effectiveness. They had invested heavily in multiple frameworks, tiered learning paths, and secured strong participation numbers. Yet, leaders weren’t collaborating effectively, and cross-level communication had broken down.
Our PX team uncovered the root cause quickly. Each leadership tier was being trained in different frameworks, with no shared vocabulary, behaviors, or continuity across the leadership development journey. Leaders at each level spoke different dialects of leadership, making alignment impossible.
The issue wasn’t the content; it was the experience design. Because PX wasn’t part of the original strategy, there was no holistic view of the leadership journey. Once we mapped the end-to-end experience, the gaps became obvious. Fixing those connection points restored alignment, clarity, and consistency. Leadership engagement scores increased, and leadership churn reduced within a year. Leaders reported smoother operations up and down the management system.
When PX is absent from planning, even well-funded strategies produce friction. When PX is integrated, experience coherence drives impact.
Recommended Practices: Embedding PX in the Strategy Cycle
PX leaders can take several steps to shift from reaction to co-creation:
Build early partnerships with Finance and Strategy.
Join the annual planning calendar early. Offer to translate workforce data into insights that inform business prioritization.Redesign the planning process itself.
Facilitate sessions using human-centered design methods. Bring employee insights and journey maps into investment discussions.Prioritize experiences by business impact.
Use a product-management mindset. Focus on the top journeys that most influence strategic outcomes.Link experience metrics to KPIs.
Measure success through retention, productivity, adoption, and growth; not just engagement or satisfaction.Coach leaders to think experience-first.
Help executives see PX as a governance discipline that reduces risk, accelerates change, and strengthens performance.
These practices align directly with the Impact PX Maturity Model across:
PX Strategy & Governance: Elevate PX into enterprise planning cycles.
PX Listening & Actioning: Use data to shape, not just measure, strategy.
Experience Impact: Design cohesive, end-to-end human-centered journeys.
Business Impact: Prove PX ROI through measurable outcomes.
Don’t Let Strategy Leave PX Behind
If your PX strategy isn’t part of annual planning yet, this is the moment to change that.
PX leaders who secure a seat at the table don’t just shape HR priorities, they help shape the business. They bring evidence of what truly drives performance, growth, and retention.
At Impact PX, we help organizations embed PX Strategy & Governance into their planning cycles, so experience becomes a driver of business results, not an afterthought.
…about how to integrate PX into your next strategy cycle.