Who should own the employee experience (EX)? "There's room for everyone," said isolved Senior Vice President of Marketing Lina Tonk during her guest appearance on the #HRTechChat video podcast. And she's right. The EX occurs everywhere any employee is involved in work. "I do believe the final responsibility should reside with HR. And I think HR leaders will probably agree with that." They probably would, yes. HR's job is not to micromanage the EX, however; it is to shepherd, lead and help shape it. From this, responsibility naturally flows.

Speaking of marketing, have you ever wondered whether, why or how marketing and HR could join forces to bolster and improve EX? I know that I have. And it turns out that it's an idea gaining steam....

In January of this year, isolved conducted a survey of 500 HR leaders based in the United States and from a broad cross-section of industries. The resulting whitepaper, "Transforming Employee Experience: 500 HR Leaders Talk Talent, Tech, Tactics & Threats," is an interesting read that spans several areas of interest as they relate to isolved's goal with the research: ascertaining HR's top challenges of today and top opportunities for tomorrow. And the exercise unearthed some intriguing findings vis-à-vis an emerging role for marketing in the EX and HR's sentiments regarding this.

According to isolved's survey, 65 percent of HR leaders say they want their marketing team involved with EX. Specifically, 52 percent are seeking marketing’s involvement because the department plays an important role in how the company is perceived in the market, and another 40 percent want to leverage marketing’s creative ability.

HR and marketing work together in these ways at isolved. During our chat, Lina described her on-the-job relationship with her colleague Amy Mosher, chief people officer at isolved. "I'm super transparent with Amy," with whom she speaks daily to align goals. During our conversation, Lina got granular in explaining what aligning marketing's goals with HR's looks like at isolved — where HR has its own goals for the employee experience, and marketing has some related to the employee experience, too, "and I believe that cross-functional teams can only work in that manner if goals are attached to them."

Lina delved even deeper, providing a glimpse into what this kind of collaboration, between HR and marketing, looks like from an executional standpoint — something else I've always wondered about. For example, advocacy is incredibly important to isolved, especially for HR leaders because of its impact on retention, which is "key to everything that we're doing," said Lina. Related to this, isolved has an internal advocacy tool that it provides to all its employees. "We needed not only the creativity on the content for marketing, but also the insights and the drive from HR."

Usually, several tangents will surface during the #HRTechChat video podcast, and this episode is no different. Lina and I got to talking about where EX possibly matters most. There's probably no definitive answer to this question, but we both agreed: it's hard to argue that onboarding isn't critical to EX in terms of setting the tone for the long term. Incidentally, speaking to this is a soon-to-be-published report by isolved compiling results from a survey of 1,000 employees. Among the findings is this: 49 percent of employees say they’ve been tempted to leave a new job after a poor onboarding experience that includes limited transitioning, an unprepared first day and excessive paperwork.