Employee experience became a leadership priority the moment IT stopped being the only department that could deliver it.

That's the actual inflection point, though you won't hear it framed that way. The narrative usually goes something like: companies finally realized that treating employees well is good business, or that the future of work demands it, or that retention depends on it. All true, probably. But the reason it's actually happening now, why it's not just another buzzword that dies in budget cycle, is something more structural and less inspiring.

For years, EX was mostly IT's problem to solve. Better tools. Faster connectivity. Fewer password resets. The bar was set by IT's ability to execute, and IT could only do so much. Then HR realized they had a stake in it. Then facilities got involved. Then communications. Then operations. Suddenly you had five departments arguing about who owned the experience, which meant someone had to sit above it all and actually coordinate, which meant someone had to actually care about the coherence of the whole thing rather than just their slice of it.

That someone turned out to be leadership.

It wasn't a values shift. It was a geometry problem. You can ignore something messy as long as one department owns it. Once it's spread across enough departments that they're stepping on each other, you either kill it or you elevate it. And organizations chose to elevate it because the cost of misalignment was getting visible. A new collaboration tool that nobody uses because the workspace isn't designed for it. A learning platform that competes with the communication platform for attention. A wellbeing initiative that contradicts the meeting culture.

This is why it's real now. Not because the CEO suddenly had an epiphany about human dignity, but because fragmentation became expensive enough to warrant a fix. The finance team sees it in adoption metrics. Operations sees it in their ticket queue. HR sees it in exit interviews.

There's actually something encouraging in that. It means EX isn't dependent on maintaining some higher moral ground or proving its worth through faith. It's just become obvious that it works better when someone's job is to make sure everything points the same direction. Which is boring and obvious, but also means it'll stick around through economic cycles because it's not aspirational anymore. It's practical.

The skeptical version of me wonders if we've just renamed 'alignment' and called it transformation. The optimistic version thinks that's fine. Sometimes the infrastructure of getting things to work together is the real work, and the label doesn't matter as much as the fact that it's finally getting done. Either way, this is the actual story. Not the philosophy. The structure.

And that's why it's probably here to stay.