Success Stories: State of Iowa Employee Productivity & Retention Program | Experience Community
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Success Stories: State of Iowa Employee Productivity & Retention Program

  • August 13, 2025
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Success Stories: State of Iowa Employee Productivity & Retention Program
jbaker
Groups Administrator
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Hello Government Community!

The State of Iowa has a very strong experience management program that has seen wonderful results - and we wanted to share their success and learnings with you! Please see the full summary in the PDF attached - in the meantime, here is a summary!

  • What they did: Utilized Qualtrics to run employee listening programs across the entire lifecycle (candidate → onboarding → engagement → exit), surveying employees during pivotal points in their lifecycle and adding targeted pulses and lifecycle surveys.
  • Why it matters: Continuous listening leads to higher engagement, productivity, and retention — which lowers hiring costs and improves customer/constituent experience!
  • Program goals: improve engagement, enable continuous improvement, increase retention, and shorten time-to-productivity for new hires.
  • Outcome: A coordinated, data-driven employee experience approach that helps agencies prioritize actions, close the feedback loop, and drive statewide workforce improvements.

Also just in is our 2025 Government Experience Trends report - this report outlines average trends in the Government space for customer engagement as well as employee experiences. The PDF for this is below, but here is a quick summary of this as well:

  • Employee KPIs (favorable in 2025): Engagement 61%, Inclusion 67%, Wellbeing 65%, Expectations exceeded 30%, Intent to stay 3+ years 67%.
  • Trust: 49% of government employees rate trust in leadership as favorable (global average 63%); U.S. government employees = 57%.
  • Customer experience gap: Customer satisfaction with government = 60%, which is ~16 percentage points below the cross‑industry average.
  • Customer data & personalization: 64% of customers want personalized interactions; ~42% are comfortable with using web/behavioral data; 53% are worried about privacy; only ~33% trust service providers to use data responsibly.
  • Productivity pressure (employee): 29% of government employees feel pressure from employers to increase productivity.

Please let us know if you have any success stories or comments on how YOUR government agency is handling employee experience!

  1. How are you listening to employees at different points in their experiences?
  2. What barriers have you encountered when collecting employee feedback?
  3. What successes do you feel other customers could replicate in their institution?