Employee Experience Leader
EY · Johannesburg
Employee Experience Leader Job Profile
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
Function: Talent / People
Role level: Senior Manager / Associate Director
Geographic scope: Africa
Employment type: Permanent
About EY
At EY, you will have the opportunity to build a career as unique as you are, supported by global scale, an inclusive culture and technology. EY’s employee value proposition, “Shape your future with confidence,” focuses on developing future-focused skills, providing world-class experiences, enabling flexibility and wellbeing, and creating an inclusive culture of globally connected teams.
The opportunity
The Employee Experience Leader will shape and deliver an integrated employee experience strategy across EY Africa. The role will translate EY’s people strategy and employee value proposition into practical, measurable experiences that help EY people develop, feel supported, experience a strong sense of belonging and build meaningful careers.
The position will provide strategic leadership across employee engagement, culture, wellbeing, recognition, inclusiveness, career experience, internal mobility, corporate responsibility and organisational development. This reflects the scope described publicly for the EY Africa Employee Experience Leader role, which includes defining and helping deliver impact measures for programmes in work-life balance, diversity and inclusiveness, retention, mobility, corporate responsibility and organisational development.
The successful candidate will work across Talent functions, business leadership, service lines, countries and enabling functions to create a consistent EY experience while allowing for relevant local and cultural differences across Africa.
Key responsibilities
1. Employee experience strategy
- Develop and execute the Africa employee experience strategy in alignment with EY’s global and regional business and Talent priorities.
- Translate the EY employee value proposition into clear programmes, leadership practices and employee experiences.
- Build an integrated experience agenda connecting skills, careers, wellbeing, mobility, recognition, culture and inclusion.
- Identify critical moments across the employee lifecycle and redesign them to create a more consistent, human-centred experience.
- Ensure employee experience priorities support EY’s ambition to transform the broader Talent experience.
EY’s internal Talent strategy identifies skills, careers and culture as core experience priorities, with current focus areas including wellbeing, recognition, career mobility and customised development pathways.
2. Culture and engagement
- Lead initiatives that strengthen an inclusive, high-performing and values-led culture.
- Use employee listening data and team-level insights to identify experience gaps and organisational hotspots.
- Partner with leaders to improve consistency in leadership behaviours and team environments.
- Develop targeted interventions that strengthen engagement, belonging, trust and organisational connection.
- Embed employee experience expectations into leadership forums, business reviews and people processes.
Internal EY material highlights inconsistent lived experiences across teams as a risk to wellbeing, inclusiveness, engagement and retention. It proposes clearer leadership expectations, targeted interventions based on employee insights, regular accountability reviews and focused leader capability building.
3. Wellbeing and recognition
- Shape a sustainable wellbeing strategy that moves beyond stand-alone initiatives and embeds wellbeing into everyday work.
- Partner with relevant internal and external providers to create solutions responsive to different employee needs.
- Strengthen recognition practices across teams and leadership levels.
- Promote everyday peer-to-peer and leader-led recognition aligned with collaboration, quality, wellbeing and EY values.
- Monitor programme participation, employee sentiment and business impact.
Current internal priorities position wellbeing and recognition as important parts of the culture agenda, supported by leadership accountability and the embedding of recognition into everyday working practices
4. Career experience and internal mobility
- Champion career agility and make internal career opportunities more visible and accessible.
- Partner with Talent Acquisition, Learning and Talent Consulting to strengthen internal mobility and career pathways.
- Support experience-based and skills-based career movement across service lines, functions and geographies.
- Develop communication and activation plans that encourage employees and leaders to participate in internal career opportunities.
- Reduce organisational barriers that prevent employees from exploring suitable roles, projects and development experiences.
EY’s internal recruitment policy positions internal mobility as an enabler of the employee value proposition and career agility, with the purpose of empowering employees to shape their futures and reducing barriers to internal opportunities.
5. Inclusiveness and corporate responsibility
- Embed inclusiveness and belonging into employee programmes, experiences and communications.
- Partner with relevant stakeholders on diversity, equity and inclusion priorities.
- Ensure employee experience interventions consider different employee populations, locations, career stages and working environments.
- Provide strategic oversight of corporate responsibility and community-impact programmes connected to the employee experience.
- Strengthen employee participation in purpose-led initiatives that support EY’s ambition to build a better working world.
The public EY Africa Employee Experience leadership profile specifically identifies diversity and inclusiveness and corporate responsibility as part of the role’s programme and impact scope.
6. People insights and measurement
- Establish a clear employee experience measurement framework.
- Define key performance indicators and success measures for culture, engagement, wellbeing, recognition, mobility, inclusion and programme adoption.
- Analyse employee listening, retention, mobility, participation and workforce data to identify trends and areas requiring intervention.
- Develop executive dashboards and insights for Africa Talent and business leadership.
- Evaluate the impact of programmes and recommend evidence-based improvements.
- Maintain appropriate confidentiality, data governance and ethical standards when working with employee information.
7. Stakeholder and change leadership
- Act as a trusted adviser to Africa Talent leadership, service-line leaders and country Talent teams.
- Build coalitions across Talent Acquisition, Learning and Development, Talent Consulting, Employee Relations, Reward, Communications and business leadership.
- Lead change-management and communication activities for employee experience programmes.
- Facilitate leadership workshops and employee listening sessions.
- Support countries and business units in adapting regional programmes to local needs without weakening strategic consistency.
- Represent Africa in relevant global and regional employee experience forums.
8. Team and programme leadership
- Lead, coach and develop a multidisciplinary employee experience team.
- Establish clear accountabilities, priorities and delivery standards.
- Manage the portfolio of employee experience programmes, budgets, vendors, risks and dependencies.
- Create governance structures for programme design, implementation and benefits realisation.
- Promote collaboration, innovation and responsible use of technology and AI within the employee experience portfolio.
Internal workforce planning material shows employee experience encompassing inclusiveness, corporate responsibility initiatives, wellbeing and engagement, and it identifies employee experience as part of the proposed integrated Talent Acquisition and Employee Experience structure.
Skills and attributes
The successful candidate should demonstrate:
- Strategic employee experience and culture leadership
- Strong knowledge of employee engagement, wellbeing, recognition and inclusion
- Experience designing and implementing enterprise-wide people programmes
- Organisational development and culture-change capability
- Strong stakeholder management and executive influencing skills
- Employee listening, people analytics and insight-generation capability
- Programme and portfolio management
- Change management and communication expertise
- Commercial and business acumen
- Consulting and problem-solving capability
- Ability to operate across countries, cultures and matrix structures
- Strong facilitation, presentation and written communication skills
- A human-centred, data-informed and outcome-focused approach
- Ability to balance global consistency with local relevance
- High levels of integrity and sound judgement when handling employee information
Qualifications and experience
Essential
- Bachelor’s degree in Human Resources, Industrial or Organisational Psychology, Business, Organisational Development, Behavioural Science or a related field.
- Significant experience in employee experience, organisational development, culture, engagement, HR strategy, change management or a closely related discipline.
- Demonstrated experience leading complex, multi-stakeholder people programmes.
- Experience using employee insights and data to shape strategy and measure outcomes.
- Strong experience advising senior business and HR leaders.
- Proven ability to lead teams and deliver through a matrix organisation.
- Experience operating across multiple countries or diverse employee populations.
- Excellent English communication skills.
Preferred
- Postgraduate qualification in business, HR, organisational psychology, change or a related discipline.
- Professional accreditation in HR, change management, coaching or programme management.
- Experience within professional services or another complex, knowledge-based organisation.
- Experience with employee listening platforms, people analytics, digital employee experience tools or AI-enabled HR solutions.
- Knowledge of African labour markets and cultural contexts.
Suggested success measures
The final measures should be agreed against the role’s mandate and available EY data. Appropriate indicators could include:
- Employee engagement and experience outcomes
- Wellbeing and belonging measures
- Recognition participation and utilisation
- Internal mobility and career-opportunity participation
- Adoption and impact of employee experience programmes
- Improvements in priority employee-experience hotspots
- Retention trends in strategically important talent populations
- Leader participation and accountability
- Delivery against programme milestones and budgets
- Stakeholder satisfaction and quality of employee insights
- Consistency of experience across countries, teams and service lines
Candidate profile
You are a strategic and empathetic people leader who understands that employee experience is created through everyday interactions, leadership behaviours, systems and processes, not only through individual HR programmes.
You can convert employee feedback and workforce data into practical action, influence senior stakeholders and bring together different Talent disciplines around a coherent experience agenda. You are comfortable moving between strategy and execution and can lead change across a complex, culturally diverse and geographically dispersed organisation.
Why join EY?
This role offers an opportunity to influence how EY people experience their careers, workplace, leaders and culture across Africa. The Employee Experience Leader will help bring “Shape your future with confidence” to life by connecting development, wellbeing, flexibility, inclusion and meaningful career experiences.
Shape the experiences that help EY people thrive.
EY is seeking an Employee Experience Leader to develop and deliver an integrated employee experience strategy across Africa. The role will lead priorities spanning culture, engagement, wellbeing, recognition, inclusion, career experience, internal mobility, corporate responsibility and organisational development.
Working across Talent, business leadership, service lines and countries, you will turn employee insights into practical interventions, strengthen leadership accountability and measure the impact of programmes across the employee lifecycle. This is an opportunity for a strategic, data-informed and people-centred leader to help create a consistent and exceptional EY experience.