Maya Research: The Business of Culture I 2025 I Download Now
How Project44 Built a Business Case for Employee Experience
I 2025 I DEEP DIVE INSIDER PROFILES
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What if culture was your company’s greatest competitive advantage? For Kendall Raymond, VP of Talent at project44, the answer has always been clear. She has built her career on the conviction that when employees are deeply engaged and supported, performance follows — and so does growth across the business.
“When you’re in HR, the value of employee experience feels obvious,” Kendall says. “But that doesn’t mean everyone else sees it that way. Our job is to make the business case, to translate engagement into numbers and stories that resonate.” Her approach at project44 blends data, listening, and storytelling into a strategy that has made employee experience part of the company’s language. With Maya’s tools providing the insights, Kendall and her team have been able to connect employee sentiment directly to outcomes executives care about.
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Numbers are often the most persuasive entry point. Maya’s research highlights the tangible return of getting employee experience right: higher share price growth, dramatically lower turnover, stronger productivity, fewer sick days, and greater innovation. Kendall uses figures like these as a starting point but quickly grounds them in project44’s own reality. “Even just doing some back-of-the-napkin math is powerful,” she explains. “It makes the value proposition real.”
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The next step has been moving from perception to knowledge. Kendall insists on building strategies rooted in employee feedback rather than assumptions. Surveys, candidate experience data, 360-degree feedback, and exit interviews all feed into a clearer picture of what is working and what needs to change. Maya’s dashboards have made these insights accessible not only to HR but to managers across the company.
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One example stands out for Kendall. When she was tasked with building a best-in-class onboarding program, she designed an immersive five-day experience for new hires. By tracking cohorts over the next twelve months, she found engagement scores jumped significantly compared to earlier groups. “That’s the kind of evidence that strengthens your business case,” she explains. “It paints a story and validates whether what you’re seeing is real or just perception.”
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Integrating people and culture into everyday business conversations has also been critical. Rather than treating engagement strategies as separate, Kendall brings them into town halls, leadership meetings, and even weekly huddles. “It doesn’t have to be sophisticated,” she says. “The point is to make people, culture, and talent part of the natural language of the organization.”
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She is equally pragmatic about pacing. Employee experience is comprehensive, but trying to tackle everything at once risks overwhelming leaders and diluting results. Her advice is to take one step at a time. “Establish value with one thing. Do it really well. Understand it better than anyone else in the organization. Then build from there.”
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Still, Kendall is quick to point out that data alone is not enough. Storytelling has become one of her most effective tools for building executive sponsorship. By framing survey results in ways that connect to business objectives and illustrating them with real employee experiences, she turns numbers into narratives that inspire action. “That’s where the art of interpreting people data comes in,” she says. “It’s not just about charts. It’s about showing the human impact and tying it back to outcomes leaders care about.”
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The approach has worked. Engagement has become embedded in the way project44 talks about performance. Executive leaders now see culture and talent not as HR’s domain but as part of their own responsibility. “You can put your dollars where your investments are maximized,” Kendall says. “You can capture best-in-class talent, improve retention, and adapt to a world of work that’s changing rapidly in front of our eyes.”
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For Kendall, the value of employee experience is no longer something she has to convince people of - it is something leaders across project44 now champion themselves. And that, she says, is the real business case: creating a culture where people strategy is business strategy.
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