8 Employee Experience Experts to Follow on Social Media

Kevin Ferguson

Published: 24 Feb 2021

There's a lot to consider when you look at life through the lens of an employee. Collaboration, technology and even office space take on a whole different meaning to employees than they do to employers. Common feedback from employees mention that the function of work environments and corporate culture is very important. The employee experience (EX) experts and thought leaders below regularly share their hard-won wisdom through social media platforms and podcasts. These experts come from different settings and have served in different capacities. But each has a unique perspective worth investigating to improve the employee experience and employee engagement. They include:

Stephan Vincent, founder of the eX Podcast;
Jacob Morgan, creator of Future of Work University;
Ben Whitter, author of Employee Experience and chief executive officer of the HEX Organization;
Bill Burnett, the executive director of the design program at Stanford and creator of the best-selling Designing Your Life books and workshop series;
Amy C. Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School;
Ancella Livers, president of PRISM International and co-author of Leading in Black and White: Working Across the Racial Divide in Corporate America;
Rahkal C. D. Shelton, the chief executive officer of Be The Inspired You
Pasi Nikkanen and Sami Kallio, two Finnish techies who produce one of the more unexpected EX podcasts: HappyToday - The Employee Experience Podcast.

Stephan Vincent

Stephan Vincent is the founder and producer of the eX Podcast and the eX Summit series, and the author of "B2E Branding Manifesto: A Path to Employee Experience." Vincent insists that to build a winning, inspiring and caring corporate culture, leaders must place their collaborators at the center of their strategy. "Leaders who don't care about their employees will eventually be surrounded by people who don't care about their business," he says.

The eX Podcast, which Vincent hosts, features guests whom he considers to be disruptors in the EX space and who are willing to discuss how to create positive employee experiences.

Vincent is also a member of the executive team of LifeGuides, which provides peer-to-peer support to help business teams navigate and overcome their life challenges.

You can listen to the eX Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Libsyn, Stitcher, TuneIn, YouTube, Podchaser and Spotify.

Jacob Morgan

Jacob Morgan has written four best-sellers -- The Future Leader, The Employee Experience Advantage, The Future of Work and The Collaborative Organization. He has spoken at the TED conference and is the creator of the Future of Work University. Jacob's work is seen by millions of people around the world each year and his work has been endorsed by the CEOs of Audi, Cisco, Kaiser, Yum! Brands, Best Buy, MasterCard, Unilever, SAP, Ritz Carlton and dozens of others. He has also been featured in Forbes, USA Today, Fast Company, NPR, The Wall Street Journal and Inc Magazine. His podcast can be heard at thefutureorganization.com/future-work-podcast and he appears widely on various social media platforms:

Facebook: facebook.com/FuturistJacob
Instagram: instagram.com/jacobmorgan8
Twitter: jacobm
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jacobmorgan8
YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=ndVLq_OSLYo

Ben Whitter

Ben Whitter, the author of international bestseller Employee Experience, is known for pioneering and popularizing the concept of employee experience worldwide. He is the chief executive officer of HEX Organization and, not surprisingly, creator of the Holistic Employee Experience (HEX) model, which is used as "a way to differentiate and deliver exceptional business, brand and human outcomes." He also founded the World Employee Experience Institute and has been featured by numerous media, including The Times, The Telegraph, Forbes, the Financial Times, The Economist, MIT Sloan Management Review, Thomson Reuters and many more. He has spoken at major industry events and delivers master classes on employee experience worldwide.

Ben Whitter's work, content and podcast can be accessed at hexorganization.com. Additionally, more information on Whitter and his work can be found at:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/benwhitter
Blog: benwhitter.com/blog

Bill Burnett

Bill Burnett is the executive director of the design program at Stanford University. Renowned for his mechanical engineering and product design skills, he holds a number of mechanical and design patents and awards, and has worked professionally on a wide variety of projects ranging from award-winning Apple PowerBooks to the original Kenner/Hasbro Star Wars action figures. He may be best known for his best-selling Designing Your Life books and workshop series. In addition to his duties at Stanford, he is on the board of directors at VOZ, a socially responsible high-fashion startup, and advises several internet startup companies.

Read the Designing Your Life blog and watch Burnett on YouTube.

And more of his thoughts can be found on:

Twitter: wburnett
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bill-burnett-4225401

Amy C. Edmondson

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. She's an engaging speaker who makes a topic that sounds fatiguingly politically correct seem exciting and pertinent: psychologically safe workplaces. The idea comes to life as Edmondson explains how organizations thrive -- or fail to thrive -- based on how well small groups within those organizations work. Her efforts center on the notion of teaming -- a dynamic form of collaboration needed in environments characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity. Before her career in academia, she worked as chief engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller.

Watch Edmondson speak at a TED conference. You can follow her on:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmyCEdmondson
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amedmondson

Ancella Livers

Ancella Livers is the president of PRISM International, dedicated to making diversity councils and employee resource groups (ERGs) more impactful. For 12 years, Ancella worked at the Center for Creative Leadership where she held a number of leadership roles including global director of open enrollment programs, global program manager of CCL's flagship offering -- the Leadership Development Program -- and program manager of several other programs, including the Foundations of Leadership, the African-American program and the Women's Leadership program.

Ancella Livers is the co-author, with Keith Caver, of Leading in Black and White: Working Across the Racial Divide in Corporate America (2002), which explains how the leadership experience for Blacks is radically different from the experiences of their white colleagues.

You can watch Ancella Livers address a TED conference audience and read more about her on:

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/ancellalivers
Center for Creative Leadership: ccl.org/people/ancella-livers

Rahkal C. D. Shelton

Rahkal C. D. Shelton's story is not one simply of overcoming adversity, but of thriving despite of it. Now the CEO of Be The Inspired You, she was born to a 19-year-old drug addict on the South Side of Chicago, she persevered and was determined to prove that one's past doesn't have to dictate one's future. She became a first-generation college graduate, receiving her B.A. cum laude from Texas Southern University (an historically Black university) and her master's degree in media communications from Governors State University in Illinois.

In 2009, after working for the Chicago Public School System as a mentor and organizer, she began working with disadvantaged youth and coaching employees within elite corporate structures. Since then, she has worked for CNN, Warner Media, iHeartMedia, Fox Chicago News and Chicago's WGN-TV. She is the author of Dreams Bigger Than Texas, Blackbird, and Woosah: A Survival Guide for Women of Color Working in Corporate. Her work and expertise have been highlighted in Forbes, Huffington Post, WGN-TV, VoyageATL, WVON Radio 1690AM: The Talk of Chicago, and Radio One.

Shelton shares her thoughts on:

Company website: rahkalshelton.com/woosah
Facebook: facebook.com/rcarladanielle
Instagram: instagram.com/rcarladanielle
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rahkalshelton
Twitter: rcarladanielle

Pasi Nikkanen and Sami Kallio

Pasi Nikkanen

Sami Kallio

Finnish techies Pasi Nikkanen and Sami Kallio produce one of the more unexpected EX podcasts: HappyToday - The Employee Experience Podcast. The podcast, produced by HappySignals, takes on a lot more than employee experience, focusing more on arcane aspects of service management. But after only briefly skimming through the menu of podcasts, you'll find plenty on EX.

Kallio's background is in service design and in managing consulting-and-design teams. His background includes running a service design unit in TietoEvry -- a Nordic IT services and software company -- and a partnership in Palmu.exe -- part of a service-design consultancy company in Finland called Palmu Group. Nikkanen, co-founder, chief product officer and podcast host at HappyToday, worked for Tieto for nearly six years, most recently as head of digital channels.

Follow Kallio and Nikkanen on: