Blog

Adapted from an article originally published in Inside Small Business, June 2025. Most small professional services firms do not have a formal onboarding process. They have a rough first day, a login to hand over, and a manager who tries to cover the essentials between client calls. That gets the person started — but it rarely sets them up. Only 29% of new employees say they feel fully prepared and supported after their onboarding experience (Gallup). That is a lot of people b

Employee experience refers to the full journey an employee has with a business — from the moment they apply for a role through to the day they leave. It covers every interaction and touchpoint along the way: how recruitment feels, what onboarding is like, the quality of management, the culture they work within, the development available to them, and how they are recognised and rewarded. It is less about any single moment and more about the accumulation of those moments over t

It is easy to look at what the larger businesses are offering — sign-on bonuses, unlimited leave, stock options, in-house everything — and conclude that small professional services businesses cannot compete on employee experience. That framing is wrong, and it leads to the wrong strategy. The businesses that try to replicate what large organisations do with employee experience rarely win. They spend money on initiatives that do not fit their size or culture, and they end up w