In this edition of HRTech Top Voice, we sat down with Miriam Connaughton, Chief People and Experience Officer at Simpplr. With a diverse career spanning the oil industry, consulting, and HR technology, Miriam shares her unique journey to leading the people and experience strategy at Simpplr.

She discusses the evolution of employee experience management, the role of AI in transforming the workplace, and how Simpplr is leveraging technology to create a seamless, productive environment for its global workforce. In this interview, Miriam offers valuable insights into the future of HR technology, leadership, and the ever-changing employee experience landscape.

Join us as we dive into an insightful conversation with Miriam Connaughton about the future of employee experience and HR technology. Don’t miss her expert perspective on how AI is shaping the workplace and empowering people leaders.

HR Technology Insights (HTI): Hi Miriam, welcome to the HR Tech Top Voice Interview Series. Please tell us about your journey as a people’s leader and role at Simpplr. 

Miriam Connaughton: My route to Chief People & Experience Officer at Simpplr is probably a little different than most. I started my career in the oil industry (I studied Applied Geophysics at university), but after seven years, I shifted to consulting. Working at a boutique firm, I focused on broad change management and business transformation. However, before too long, we were acquired by what is now WillisTowersWatson. This turned out to be the beginning of my exposure to the broader human capital agenda. 

I spent nearly three decades at WillisTowersWatson and then EY, where I deepened my expertise across HR strategy and technology, talent, and change management domains. Along the way, I gained increasingly senior leadership roles, running various parts of these businesses. In 2021, I started my own consulting business, focused mostly on working with start-ups and scaling companies. Throughout my career, I’ve “looked over the fence” a few times at HR leadership roles, but I never felt the right fit. That changed when Simpplr became one of my clients. 

When I joined Simpplr as Chief People & Experience Officer in early 2023, the transition seemed very natural. Simpplr is focused on solving problems for HR and internal comms leaders, which gives me the best of both worlds. At a high level, Simpplr’s unified EX platform is all about enhancing the employee experience.  

I feel lucky to work with Simpplr’s amazing R&D team as we innovate our product and support our GTM teams. I also get to put my consulting experience into practice as the leader of our People Team. I think it’s pretty special to be the Chief People and Experience Officer at a company that is about the employee experience. I get to use our own product every day to help provide everyone at Simpplr with an amazing employee experience.

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HTI: How do you define “Employee Experience Management” at Simpplr? How has this definition changed over the last 4 years?

Miriam: I view employee experience management as a broad term that refers to all of the organizational components that shape and influence the employee experience. In that way, employee experience management touches just about every aspect of the human experience at work. 

Employee experience management at Simpplr is all about leveraging AI-powered technology to help organizations deliver a great employee experience. Over the last four years or so, employee experience management has, rightfully so, become centered on creating a more unified, seamless experience for employees – wherever they work. We talk about our EX platform being “where engagement meets productivity,” and I think this encompasses large components of what we’re aiming to influence when we talk about employee experience management.  

As the world of work continues to evolve, I think the world of employee experience management will become evermore interoperable and extensible. Today, many organizations cobble together multiple systems, and the experience usually ends up frustrating employees. However, I believe we will continue to see a push toward a more seamless experience that is powered by a unified system of engagement and action that integrates seamlessly with all the applications our users need. How great would it be to have that “one place to go” for employees to find what they need to connect, communicate, get things done, and get on with their day? 

HTI: Could you tell us about your HR technology stack and solutions that you use for your organization-level employee management and automation?

Miriam: Not surprisingly, Simpplr is a key piece of our HR tech stack. It really is the “digital home” where our Simpplifiers (that’s what we call ourselves) can find information, connection, community, and much more. It is both our communication platform and a place where people can get things done easily, like give recognition and rewards, respond to a pulse survey, or get answers to questions. It is our “wrap around” engagement layer across our enterprise tech-stack that gives employees one place to go to get their job done.

In addition to Simpplr, we also rely on other core elements of a typical HR tech stack, which currently includes software like Bamboo, Lattice, CompUp, and Carta. While we do have multiple employee-facing apps, we’ve integrated them in a way where employees aren’t app-hopping all the time, or struggling to find what they need – and Simpplr is a big part of that. We use integrated app-tiles to bring relevant data and actions from these applications right into our Simpplr-powered Intranet, which we affectionately call “Backyard.” In this way, we are enabling our employees to access whatever applications they need to, all from one place. 

We are also at the stage of working with PEOs and other service providers to deliver payroll, benefits, and the like, which can also be accessed through our unified intranet. We use Simpplr’s many automated features and integrations with our tech-stack to create a more seamless experience. For example, our AI Assistant chatbot enables employees to get answers to questions and, if needed, raise a help desk ticket that integrates into Jira. Another example is where smart writing is built into our platform, leveraging generative AI to make the drafting of communications much easier. 

I especially love our auto-governance feature, which allows us to set the life-span of content we publish to our intranet automatically, including giving the publisher of content “nudges”  when it’s time to review something to decide its fate. All of these productivity gains and user-experience improvements are made possible by thoughtful automation. 

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HTI: What is the biggest challenge for CP-XOs in 2025? How does an AI-powered platform like Simpplr alleviate these challenges?

Miriam: The biggest challenges facing CP-XOs are always evolving, while some have endured and will be with us for years to come. Looking at the year ahead, here are seven key challenges facing people leaders in 2025:

• Continuing to adapt our organizations to the diversity of work models that were always the norm, but that continue to shift
• Embracing a wider definition of well-being
• Continuing to embrace technology and use it to enhance the workplace experience and delivery of employee services
• Looking for practical applications of AI over the hype, and continuing to be mindful of the implications to talent and organizational change 
• Being attuned to what I  believe is the reformulation of DEI and keeping the right elements at the forefront as the language evolves 
• Unlocking the “magic” of managers is so important to the employee experience, yet organizations too often fail to provide adequate enablement or support 
• Ensuring we use data in the right way and get the breakthrough people analytics that HR leaders have been long-promised 

Simpplr’s platform helps alleviate these challenges in many ways. For example, our workforce is a combination of remote and hybrid, and our teams are spread across India, the US, Canada and the UK. Our platform provides the “glue” for our distributed workforce and is a real asset in supporting the diverse ways in which we work. 

With AI throughout our platform, I never feel like we’re falling behind in leveraging the practical applications provided by this type of technology. Simpplr reduces “digital friction,” which for me is one key aspect of employee well-being. Our platform is also where we have a site dedicated to information and resources that people managers need to support and guide their teams effectively. In addition, Simpplr’s MyTeam dashboard gives managers easy access to helpful information about employee engagement at an individual and team level, which they can then use to better manage and motivate them. 

HTI: What books are you reading or listening to, for employee experience and leadership management? Would you recommend podcasts for CPOs and CHROs?

Miriam: I honestly don’t get as much time as I’d like to read – my barely touched reading pile is growing! But I recently read, Unlock Your Leadership Story by Pat Wadors, an amazing Chief People Officer and now, author. I had the pleasure of chatting with Pat about this on our Cohesion podcast, during which we discussed some of the great insights from her book. 

I  also just started reading Touching all the Bases, a book about the power of mentorship, written by a long-time colleague and friend of mine, Mike Fox. When it comes to podcasts, I have fun hosting episodes of Simpplr’s podcast, Cohesion, and love tuning in for those episodes hosted by my partner-in-podcasting, Carolyn Clark. 

When I am not reading books, I listen to various work-related podcasts put out by BBC Sounds. I’m currently enjoying their series called The Artificial Human, which explores societal, and sometimes workplace issues and opportunities related to AI. One recent episode explored the question of Will AI Eat Itself? It was both informative and entertaining. 

HTI: 3 Tips for talent management in the:

• Financial Services industry

• Healthcare 

• Manufacturing   

Miriam: I don’t have specific talent management tips for the financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing industries, but I think there are three tips that all sectors need to continue to be attuned to: 

• Skill currency and relevancy: Help employees keep their skills relevant to what your organization needs now and in the future. This will serve you well and help retain talent. Plus, whenever people leave you, they are more likely to feel good about the time and effort they spent at your organization. 
• Know your talent: Identify your influencers, differential contributors, and future leaders. Figure out how to make sure they know both their value and power in the organization, as well as how you are supporting them in their growth. 
• Managers can be magic. Invest in your people managers. Gallup research has revealed that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. As their jobs become more complex, our support for them needs to keep pace with the innovations available to us. 

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HTI: What are your predictions for the future of Employee Experience? How do you see AI empowering CHROs in the coming years: Please provide an example or case study from Simpplr’s resources.

Miriam: Starting with the caveat that predictions are notoriously unpredictable, I think the future of the employee experience is going to be defined by the following things:

• Streamlined and personalized experience: The growing simplification of technology can help us provide a more seamless, unified experience that centers around people in our design and delivery, rather than the technology itself. This personalization extends to the individual level, delivering the information, tasks, answers, and more that people need at their fingertips to feel connected and productive. While technology has its limits in enhancing the human experience in the workplace, we know it needs to improve further. We can expect to see better usability and more personalized approaches in the months and years ahead.
• Productivity gains: Technologies will continue to enhance human productivity, making what I refer to as “the admin of work” much easier to accomplish. This will enable us to rethink how we utilize human talent and the time it frees up. For instance, we’ve all become accustomed to AI chatbots, and we are swiftly moving toward AI agents — almost like personal assistants — that can help us get work done, nudge us, coach us, and more. 
• Insights and actions from analytics: AI is already providing more real-time analytics that deliver valuable insights, which is fostering an accelerated path for making changes and improvements. This trend is only going to continue. 

I think that AI is already empowering CHROs to think differently about the human experience in the workplace, including making progress in the areas mentioned above. For me, one of the greatest advances that AI will facilitate is automating more of the core, routine aspects of our HR service delivery. This will enable us to increase our investments in other areas and in new services that genuinely make a difference. One example from my Simpplr experience is in how we leverage AI-powered analytics. For instance, through the Simpplr MyTeam dashboard, every people manager can see what their team is engaging with on our intranet, how they are feeling, what work or other anniversaries are coming up to celebrate, who is recognizing them and for what, as well as nudges if they’re behind on their own recognition, and more. 

AI is making it easier for people managers to gain insights from timely, relevant information that helps them better connect with their people. By leaning into AI, we can accelerate innovation around analytics so the nirvana of predictive, real-time analytics that we’ve been searching for is finally within reach. 

HTI: Tag an HR and experience leader you would like to feature in our HR Tech Top Voice Interview Series:

Miriam: Will Leahy, VP of People at Greenhouse.

Thanks for your answers, Miriam! We look forward to having you again at the top voice series. 

For media inquiries, you can write to our HRTech Insights Newsroom at sudipto@intentamplify.com

About Miriam Connaughton

As Chief People & Experience Officer for Simpplr, Miriam gets to work on their belief that when work is good, life is better. Simpplr, a leader in employee experience software, is fueled by a mission to transform the work experience for billions of people around the world. Miriam gets to apply her three decades of experience in HR consulting, to shape and deliver a great employee experience at Simpplr, through forward-thinking HR and the application of Simpplr’s AI-powered technology. Miriam also helps innovate Simpplr’s solution for the HR user, leveraging her years of consulting experience supporting organizations to transform their HR service delivery, and adapt to the ever-changing world of work. Miriam has worked across a range of industries, from start-ups to Fortune 100 organizations.

About Simpplr

Simpplr transforms the employee experience to create a more connected, engaged and productive workforce. Harnessing AI, our Simpplr One™ EX unification platform provides employees with personalized single-point access to the people, information and resources they need to succeed and thrive. For over a decade, Simpplr has been creating transformative digital workplaces for 1000+ leading brands, including AAA, Eurostar, Penske and Moderna. Simpplr is headquartered in Silicon Valley, CA, with additional offices in the UK, Canada and India. We are backed by Norwest Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Tola Capital.