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For years, the industry has promised a seamless, human-centred “digital workplace.” If we could just build the right intranet or employee experience platform (EXP), we’d unlock connection, productivity, and engagement.
It didn’t happen.
Despite billions spent, most digital workplaces are still unintuitive and underused. They’re built around systems rather than people, and they serve hierarchy rather than experience.
So what really went wrong, and how can we do better?
Research from Gartner shows that nearly 60% of employees struggle to find the information they need to do their job efficiently, even in companies that have invested heavily in digital workplace tech.
And while intranet usage has technically increased post-pandemic, less than half of workers say those tools make them feel more connected or productive.
In short, we’ve basically spent millions digitising chaos.
Back in 2019, Employee Experience Platforms were billed as the future of work. But as Bertrand Duperrin points out, the idea “seems to have evaporated.” The tools promised connection, but rarely delivered it.
Instead of reshaping how people work, they layered new tech over legacy systems. They centralised content, but ignored context.
Forrester’s 2025 EX Management Platforms report found that only those who combined insight with genuine design thinking made a measurable difference. Most platforms didn’t fail because they were bad products; they failed because they were built for the organisation, not for employees.
So when you drill it down, EXPs just became corporate intranets, acting as a digital filing cabinet with prettier fonts and layouts. But most intranets or “EXPs” collapse under the same pressures: poor search, clunky UX, no (or poor) integrations, and weak governance.
The result being:
According to Digital Workplace Group, most organisations share the same frustrations. These are the symptoms of a broken digital front door:
Between Teams, Slack, HR alerts, and inbox pings, employees live in a state of constant interruption. Each context switch fractures attention and focus.
Gartner found that nearly 60% of employees struggle to find what they need to do their job efficiently (Gartner 2025 HR Trends). The average worker spends nearly two hours a day searching for information that should be seconds away.
Instead of clarity, new joiners face a mess of systems, links, and logins. The first impression of your company culture is confusion.
Without role-based personalisation, interfaces become junk drawers. No signal, just noise.
When the platform doesn’t reflect what employees actually do each day — approvals, priorities, collaboration — it becomes irrelevant.
If content is inconsistent or outdated, employees stop relying on the system entirely. They make their own.
Without governance, pages pile up, duplicates appear, and version histories blur. The intranet becomes a time capsule of yesterday’s priorities.
A messy digital ecosystem isn’t just inconvenient; it’s expensive.
The Asana “Anatomy of Work” Index 2024 found that employees switch between 13+ apps every day, losing an average of 32 working days a year just to digital friction.
When the systems designed to save time steal it instead, trust erodes.
Microsoft’s Work Trend Index shows that 70% of employees feel digitally overwhelmed. And because internal systems don’t meet their needs, 71% of UK workers are now using unapproved consumer AI tools at work (ITPro 2025).
That’s what happens when people innovate out of necessity.
When people can’t find what they need, don’t trust what they find, and feel drained by the process, everything else suffers: productivity, morale, retention, and wellbeing.
DWG calls this “experience debt.” Every bad interaction accumulates emotional friction. It chips away at trust in leadership, systems, and each other. So it doesn’t become about just making tools easier to use, it’s about restoring some agency.
The digital workplace must adapt to role, context, and moment. The best systems feel like they know you, so they’ll surface what’s relevant, and hide what’s not. It’s all about pushing less, and personalising more. Today, it’s all about respecting attention as the rarest resource in the modern workplace.
An EXP shouldn’t just inform; it should enable. Approvals, nudges, tasks, learning prompts, all in one flow.
AI isn’t the star; it’s the scaffolding. It should summarise, recommend, anticipate and never confuse or mislead. Without clean data and clear governance, even the smartest AI just amplifies noise.
The future isn’t “one platform to rule them all.” It’s one entry point that unifies everything else. From your HRIS to your LMS, collaboration tools and comms; utilising smart APIs and context to pull the most important information without needing to leave the platform.
Employee experience platforms didn’t fail because they were bad ideas, they often failed because they forgot who they were for. Whether you call it an EXP, intranet or digital workplace, your digital front doors need to be personalised, AI-powered but human-centred. They must be built to anticipate, not dictate, so that they reflect the individual way employees work. And for the first time in years, that finally feels within reach.
Explore what impact Thrive could make for your team and your learners today.
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For years, the industry has promised a seamless, human-centred “digital workplace.” If we could just build the right intranet or employee experience platform (EXP), we’d unlock connection, productivity, and engagement.
It didn’t happen.
Despite billions spent, most digital workplaces are still unintuitive and underused. They’re built around systems rather than people, and they serve hierarchy rather than experience.
So what really went wrong, and how can we do better?
Research from Gartner shows that nearly 60% of employees struggle to find the information they need to do their job efficiently, even in companies that have invested heavily in digital workplace tech.
And while intranet usage has technically increased post-pandemic, less than half of workers say those tools make them feel more connected or productive.
In short, we’ve basically spent millions digitising chaos.
Back in 2019, Employee Experience Platforms were billed as the future of work. But as Bertrand Duperrin points out, the idea “seems to have evaporated.” The tools promised connection, but rarely delivered it.
Instead of reshaping how people work, they layered new tech over legacy systems. They centralised content, but ignored context.
Forrester’s 2025 EX Management Platforms report found that only those who combined insight with genuine design thinking made a measurable difference. Most platforms didn’t fail because they were bad products; they failed because they were built for the organisation, not for employees.
So when you drill it down, EXPs just became corporate intranets, acting as a digital filing cabinet with prettier fonts and layouts. But most intranets or “EXPs” collapse under the same pressures: poor search, clunky UX, no (or poor) integrations, and weak governance.
The result being:
According to Digital Workplace Group, most organisations share the same frustrations. These are the symptoms of a broken digital front door:
Between Teams, Slack, HR alerts, and inbox pings, employees live in a state of constant interruption. Each context switch fractures attention and focus.
Gartner found that nearly 60% of employees struggle to find what they need to do their job efficiently (Gartner 2025 HR Trends). The average worker spends nearly two hours a day searching for information that should be seconds away.
Instead of clarity, new joiners face a mess of systems, links, and logins. The first impression of your company culture is confusion.
Without role-based personalisation, interfaces become junk drawers. No signal, just noise.
When the platform doesn’t reflect what employees actually do each day — approvals, priorities, collaboration — it becomes irrelevant.
If content is inconsistent or outdated, employees stop relying on the system entirely. They make their own.
Without governance, pages pile up, duplicates appear, and version histories blur. The intranet becomes a time capsule of yesterday’s priorities.
A messy digital ecosystem isn’t just inconvenient; it’s expensive.
The Asana “Anatomy of Work” Index 2024 found that employees switch between 13+ apps every day, losing an average of 32 working days a year just to digital friction.
When the systems designed to save time steal it instead, trust erodes.
Microsoft’s Work Trend Index shows that 70% of employees feel digitally overwhelmed. And because internal systems don’t meet their needs, 71% of UK workers are now using unapproved consumer AI tools at work (ITPro 2025).
That’s what happens when people innovate out of necessity.
When people can’t find what they need, don’t trust what they find, and feel drained by the process, everything else suffers: productivity, morale, retention, and wellbeing.
DWG calls this “experience debt.” Every bad interaction accumulates emotional friction. It chips away at trust in leadership, systems, and each other. So it doesn’t become about just making tools easier to use, it’s about restoring some agency.
The digital workplace must adapt to role, context, and moment. The best systems feel like they know you, so they’ll surface what’s relevant, and hide what’s not. It’s all about pushing less, and personalising more. Today, it’s all about respecting attention as the rarest resource in the modern workplace.
An EXP shouldn’t just inform; it should enable. Approvals, nudges, tasks, learning prompts, all in one flow.
AI isn’t the star; it’s the scaffolding. It should summarise, recommend, anticipate and never confuse or mislead. Without clean data and clear governance, even the smartest AI just amplifies noise.
The future isn’t “one platform to rule them all.” It’s one entry point that unifies everything else. From your HRIS to your LMS, collaboration tools and comms; utilising smart APIs and context to pull the most important information without needing to leave the platform.
Employee experience platforms didn’t fail because they were bad ideas, they often failed because they forgot who they were for. Whether you call it an EXP, intranet or digital workplace, your digital front doors need to be personalised, AI-powered but human-centred. They must be built to anticipate, not dictate, so that they reflect the individual way employees work. And for the first time in years, that finally feels within reach.
Explore what impact Thrive could make for your team and your learners today.
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