Despite having innumerable data points at their fingertips, companies do not have reliable indicators of the employee experience of HR. The employee’s sentiment of their HR experience is, as yet, unmeasured. We do not know what comprises it, which aspects of it are most important, nor what real-world actions or behaviors it drives.

Companies have a wealth of knowledge about their employees’ experiences at work, but they lack the ability to understand how HR is contributing to these experiences. All companies would benefit from having a reliable and accurate metric to measure HR service quality.

Beginning in September of 2020, the ADP Research Institute set out to construct a metric to explore and measure employees’ experience of HR. We started with qualitative interviews with HR professionals and identified 67 possible items to measure HR service quality, and fielded these items across four samples totaling over 32,000 participants, across 25 countries, to pinpoint what strategic and tactical actions the HR function can take to increase service quality.

Our intent with this research was threefold:

1. Define the psychological experiences that drive higher HRXPS (HR XPerience Score)
2. Build a metric to measure these experiences
3. Identify both the causes and effects of higher HRXPS