Experience Ops: The Invisible Operating System Behind the Future of Work
Credit: Unsplash
WRITTEN BY:
SARA LORETTA
OCTOBER 2025
When I started my first “big kid job” at a local nonprofit in 2012, I expected the usual new-job nerves. What I didn’t expect was the invisible chaos. My onboarding included a 10-minute tour of the office filing cabinets, and a quick meeting with IT to set up my Google account. No clear processes, two managers, and a whole lot of paperwork piling up to be entered into an Excel sheet.
It felt like putting IKEA furniture together without instructions. I was doing an unsustainable job, and needed to question how to do it better.
That’s the reality for most modern teams; they are high-reaction performing on the surface, but incredibly fragmented underneath. Work keeps moving, but no one’s quite sure how. It’s definitely not for a lack of effort or talent. It’s a lack of structure that scales with humans in mind.
And that’s exactly where Experience Operations comes in.
The Engagement Crisis We Keep Ignoring
For years, leaders have been told that the future of work is about location — remote, hybrid, in-office. But the deeper truth is that it’s about experience.
The numbers tell a sobering story:
In 2024, only 31% of U.S. employees said they were engaged at work — the lowest in over a decade (Gallup, 2024).
Globally, that number drops to 21%.
Gallup’s longitudinal data shows that highly engaged teams produce 21% greater profitability, 59% less turnover, and higher customer satisfaction.
Meanwhile, burnout costs U.S. companies an estimated $190 billion annually in healthcare and lost productivity (Harvard Business Review).
The takeaway: disengagement isn’t a personal issue, it’s an operational one. Teams aren’t just burned out by workload. They’re burned out by work design that doesn’t make sense.
What Is Experience Operations?
Experience Ops is the discipline of designing and maintaining the systems, rituals, and technologies that make work feel seamless, connected, and human, no matter where it happens.
It’s the connective tissue between your tools, your team, and your culture. It ensures that how people work together feels as intentional as the work itself. Where traditional operations focus on efficiency, Experience Ops focuses on experience-driven efficiency by creating workflows that run smoothly and feel good to use.
The Three Pillars of Experience Ops (SCT Model)
Systems | Workflow design, automations, clarity of responsibility
Culture | Rituals, communication norms, shared values
Technology | Tools, data, and integrations
The goal of all three pillars is to make great work sustainable. And when these three elements — Systems, Culture, and Technology — align, work stops feeling like a grind and starts feeling like momentum.
Meetings become meaningful. Onboarding becomes intuitive.
And the “way we work” finally supports why we work.
Why Experience Ops, and Why Now?
Complexity is outpacing design
Work has become a web of overlapping systems. The average midsize company uses over 130 SaaS tools across departments (Productiv, 2024).
Each new app promises clarity, and delivers chaos when it isn’t integrated into a larger operational design. Experience Ops doesn’t just pick tools. It orchestrates them.
Experience Has Become a Competitive Edge
Employee experience is now one of the top predictors of business growth.
Companies with strong employee experiences outperform competitors by 2x on innovation and 4x on profitability (MIT Sloan, 2023).
This isn’t about perks or ping-pong tables. It’s about how work feels every day; how frictionless it is to collaborate, how confident people are in the process, and how visible progress feels.
Automation & AI Demand Better Infrastructure
AI can summarize meetings, route tasks, and schedule follow-ups — but it can’t fix a broken process. Without an underlying operational design, automation only amplifies the mess.
Experience Ops builds the architecture that makes intelligent systems actually useful — connecting tools, data, and humans into one shared rhythm.
Culture Can’t Be Left to Chance
Culture doesn’t scale naturally. It has to be engineered into the way work happens.
That means codifying rituals; weekly reflections, async updates, and team handoffs, so culture becomes a system, not a slogan.
“Experience Ops felt like invisible glue,” one operations partner told me after a company-wide workflow redesign. “People stopped asking where things lived. They just did their work, knowing the system had their back.”
Experience Ops in Practice
A Notion workspace that aligns projects, goals, and rituals across departments
An onboarding process that automates logistics and nurtures belonging
A team retreat designed not for escape, but for alignment
A Slack automation that celebrates milestones automatically
A workflow that tracks ideas from brainstorm to implementation; without a single “just checking in” message
Each of these examples might look tactical. But collectively, they form an ecosystem that turns everyday operations into experiences people remember.
The Future of Work Runs on Experience
The companies that win in the next decade won’t just have better products or faster teams. They’ll have systems that scale humanity; operational design that turns connection, clarity, and collaboration into their biggest advantage.
Experience Ops is how we build that future.
It’s not about choosing between efficiency and empathy.
It’s about designing systems where they coexist; where technology amplifies culture, and culture gives meaning to the technology.
Because the future of work isn’t just about getting things done.
It’s about making work worth showing up for.
AT UNMUTE™, we help creative teams rediscover connection, creativity, and momentum through operational restructuring and in-person experiences that make culture come alive again.
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