Beyond Citizen or Customer: Working People

I recently posted about the City of Edmonton management perhaps focusing more on department performance rather than the complete citizen experience. It has drawn more than 8,500 views. I have been asking myself what struck the nerve, and I think it’s because many Edmontonians feel something is fundamentally wrong at the core.

The following observation may contribute to this malaise: City governance often measures and focuses on department success. Yet citizens live in an integrated city. Those are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where trust is won or lost.

Have we been making the same mistake inside organizations?

Everything green, and nobody is well

A city can fill its potholes on schedule, answer 311 inside the service standard, issue permits within the posted window, and clear the snow routes in the committed order. Every department reports green. A resident can still finish their daily life convinced the place does not work. Nobody lied on the scorecard. The scorecard simply never captured their daily experience.

I have seen the same thing from a boardroom seat. On the board of a health care company, the department executives reported green on their projects at every meeting, while the entire patient experience did not improve. It didn’t pass the “smell test”.

Now apply this to work. Talent acquisition reports time to fill. Learning reports completion rates. IT reports ticket resolution. Facilities reports uptime. Finance reports expense cycle times. People and Culture reports an engagement score that moved two points in the right direction. Every function is green.

Meanwhile, a first-time supervisor has been quietly drowning since April. Her laptop took 11 days to set up. Her onboarding partner left in week three. She was promoted without preparation because the leader who was meant to guide her was consumed by a reorganization. When her mother got sick, she had to tell the story to four different people in three different systems, and the last one asked her to submit a form.

No single function failed her. The seams failed her. And there is not one scorecard in that building with a seam on it.

Satisfaction is a temperature

Employee satisfaction may be the fuzziest number we have collectively agreed to take seriously. It is often gathered just once a year, averaged into a figure that conceals both extremes, shaped in large part by the people being evaluated, and presented to leaders who would very much like it to be fine. It tells you the temperature of the room. It tells you almost nothing about what actually happened to anyone standing in it.

The customer experience field abandoned this ground years ago and moved to measuring negative friction across the whole experience. Not whether you were satisfied, but how much friction it took to get what you needed. Effort tied to outcome is specific, observable and fixable. Satisfaction is a mood.

Measure journeys, not functions

If I were designing this for a client tomorrow, I would build in these principles.

Choose the moments that carry weight. Onboarding. Becoming a leader for the first time. Being passed over. Living through a reorganization. Caring for a dying parent. Returning after illness. Leaving. These are the moments people narrate at their own kitchen table, and again, years later, to their next employer. Essentially, it is managing the moments that matter most in a person's working life and personal experience.
Measure end to end, handoffs included. The unit of measurement is the journey, not the function. If the journey crosses six functions, measure the journey across six functions and let the functional numbers serve it rather than replace it.
Ask about negative friction rather than just the end result . How many people did you have to tell? How many times did you repeat the story? How long between the decision being made and you learning about it? Those answers point at something a leader can go and change tomorrow.
Name an owner for the whole. This is precisely where cities get stuck. Nobody owns the citizen experience of a snowfall, so it belongs to everybody and therefore to no one. Organizations are no different. Who owns the experience of becoming a first-time leader in your company? Not People and Culture on its own. Designate a human being.
Keep only what changes a decision. If a measure has not altered a decision within one quarter, stop collecting it. Otherwise this becomes another dashboard, and we have enough of those.

The part I find most instructive

Here is where I want to push back on my own analogy, because the real insight is sitting just behind it. The obvious move is to lift the language of customer experience and lay it over employees. I think that may be too simplistic? A customer holds claims and carries no obligations. They buy, or they leave. Frame people as internal customers and you manufacture entitlement, and you quietly excuse them from the very thing that makes an organization work.

A citizen is a different proposition altogether. A citizen holds claims and obligations at the same time. They expect the street to be cleared and shovel their own walkways. They expect the city to function and show up to the meetings, pay the taxes, and keep an eye on the neighbor. Citizenship is a two-way arrangement. Consumption is not.

Employee experience is co-created. The organization owes a coherent experience across its seams, especially at the moments that carry weight. The person owes accountability, respect and abundance back into the same system. Measure only the first half and you get a paternalistic program. Measure only the second and you get a compliance exercise. Measure both and you finally get close to the truth about a place.

What I would do on Monday

Pick one journey, ideally the one you already suspect is the worst. Interview twenty people who lived through it in the last six months. Map it end to end, every handoff marked. Count the points where somebody had to tell their story again. Then put that map in front of your executive team without a single average anywhere on it.

I would wager that one map moves more than three years of engagement scores did. It is also considerably harder to do.

Think Big, Start Small, Act Now,

Lorne

Garrett's View: What is a green score actually for? Too often, it seems to be a pat on the back and a way to stay out of trouble. And "trouble" is a low bar: measurably worse than the competition, no reason for good people to join or stay, or, in the worst case, barely operating within the law. When the bar’s in the basement, green tells you almost nothing.

So why aim higher? Money and reputation tend to talk. A shining experience for your people can result in better fiscal performance, and nobody enjoys being known as the place that's a mess. Beyond that, it's a question of standards. Shouldn't we want the best possible conditions for people who work here? No organization is a utopia, and none needs to be. Yet, a handful of honest conversations will surface what an engagement score never will, and that's often enough to power wash the worst of it.

- Garrett

AI Response: Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace reports that global engagement fell from 23% in 2022 to 20% in 2025, and estimates that low engagement costs the world economy about $10 trillion a year, roughly 9% of GDP. The sharpest decline sits at the seams of leadership: manager engagement dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, and the engagement advantage managers held over individual contributors shrank from 11 points to 3, which is your first-time supervisor story playing out at scale. It isn't inevitable, though, since best-practice organizations recorded manager engagement of 79%, nearly four times the global average. On the effort-versus-satisfaction point, the customer-experience research behind the shift is striking. Gartner (originally CEB) found that 96% of customers with high-effort experiences became disloyal, versus only 9% of those with low-effort experiences, and the high-effort triggers it identified include having to repeat information and interacting a second time, which is almost exactly your "how many times did you repeat the story" question. The original study also showed why satisfaction is a mood: 20% of "satisfied" customers intended to leave, while 28% of "dissatisfied" customers intended to stay. One caveat if you cite these: the effort findings come from customer service research, so present them as evidence the CX field moved from satisfaction to effort. That fits your own point that the customer framing shouldn't be lifted wholesale onto employees.

Beyond Citizen or Customer: Working People

Search Blog Posts:

Follow Us: