Employee Experience Activations: Real-World Examples That Deliver Measurable Outcomes
- FourthWall
- Mar 27
- 7 min read
In organisations today, human connection isn’t a perk or a preference – it’s foundational to how leaders build culture, drive engagement and deliver on their purpose. In-person activations are a critical way to create deep emotional connection and have evolved into a strategic tool to support people strategies and accelerate transformation.
But what are the key outcomes organisations should be looking to achieve from their activations?
In our latest white paper Experience as a Culture Catalyst: Powering Organisational Change we identified six key outcomes of employee activations:
Deepen connection to purpose
Foster belonging and inclusion
Accelerate skills and development
Attract top talent
Recognise and celebrate achievement
Strengthen employer brand
In this article we explore these outcomes in more detail and provide real-life examples of employee activations that have achieved each of them.
1. Deepen Connection to Purpose - LEGO's annual Play Day
Purpose is often clearly defined at an organisational level – but far less often felt at an employee level. The challenge for senior leaders isn’t articulating a vision and purpose so that people understand it but delivering something that will make your people remember how they felt.
In-person experiences play a unique role here, creating moments where purpose moves beyond words and becomes something tangible, shared and lived.
A strong example of this in action is LEGO’s annual Play Day. Each year, the organisation pauses its global operations to bring employees together around a simple but powerful idea: reconnecting with its core purpose of inspiring and developing the builders of tomorrow.
Rather than reinforcing this through internal messaging or leadership communications, the experience is designed around participation. Employees step away from their day-to-day roles and engage in hands-on, creative activities – building, experimenting and collaborating in ways that mirror the essence of the LEGO brand itself.
What makes this effective is its simplicity. By creating space for employees to actively experience play, LEGO reinforces the role it plays not just in its products, but in its culture, mindset and way of working.
In doing so, their purpose shifts from something that is understood intellectually to something that is experienced collectively, and remembered emotionally.
Takeaway: purpose becomes more powerful when it’s experienced, not explained – and in-person activations provide the moments where that shift happens.
2. Foster Belonging & Inclusion – Disney’s Belonging Week Belonging isn’t created through policy alone. It’s built through shared experiences and moments where people feel seen, included, and part of something bigger than themselves.
This can be particularly important in global, distributed workforces, where organisations need to have global consistency while reflecting the local nuances that their people are operating in. Creating this consistent sense of connection across locations, cultures and roles requires deliberate design.
In 2025, The Walt Disney Company launched their Belonging Week – a company-wide series of events focused on inclusion, culture and community.
Delivered across both in-person and virtual formats, the programme brought employees together through keynote talks, themed discussions, and community-led sessions. The structure allowed for scale and accessibility, while still creating meaningful touchpoints for connection at a local level.
Some of the sessions explored ‘The Global Impact of Lilo & Stitch’ and ‘Art of Belonging: Encanto’. The beauty of this was that the company was using its own storytelling to illustrate the universal themes of acceptance, belonging and being part of a community.
It created a shared experience that strengthened connection across the organisation, not just to the company’s values, but to each other.
Takeaway: belonging is built through shared moments – and the most effective activations create space for both collective and individual expression.
3. Accelerate Skills & Development – Walmart’s Immersive VR Training
Learning is most effective when it moves beyond theory and into experience.
Organisations are increasingly recognising that skills are developed faster, and retained more effectively, when employees can actively engage, practise and apply learning in realistic environments.
Immersive, experience-led activations are reshaping how learning and development is delivered.
In 2016, Walmart started using virtual reality to transform their employee training at scale. Faced with the challenge of preparing hundreds of thousands of employees for real-world scenarios, Walmart introduced VR-based training experiences across its academies.
Rather than relying solely on classroom instruction, employees were placed into simulated environments where they could navigate situations, make decisions, and experience the consequences in real time. From managing busy retail moments to handling complex customer service scenarios, the training mirrored the realities of the job in a way that felt immediate and tangible.
What made this approach particularly powerful was its ability to combine scale with immersion. Employees were not just learning what to do – they were experiencing how it felt to do it.
It led to a 30 percent higher satisfaction rating compared with trainees attending traditional courses, and the VR trainees scored higher on content tests 70 percent of the time. They also demonstrated a 10-15 percent higher rate of knowledge retention compared with those who had been through traditional training approaches.
Takeaway: skills are built faster when learning is experienced, not observed – and immersive activations create the conditions for that shift at scale.
4. Attract Top Talent – Lloyds Banking Group’s AI Trailer
Attracting top emerging talent on campus isn’t just about making your brand visible, it’s about creating exciting moments that give people a reason to stop, engage, and imagine themselves as part of something bigger.
In crowded talent markets, where multiple employers are competing for attention, standing out requires more than a strong message, it requires an experience.
Lloyds Banking Group (‘LBG’) were looking to attract top graduate talent, and wanted to stand out on crowded university campuses where many other organisations are trying to engage students. FourthWall designed an AI Trailer activation for LBG, to provide a mobile, high-impact experience that combined emerging technology with immersive design to create a standout presence on campus.
Rather than relying on traditional stands or static messaging, the activation invited students into an interactive environment that brought to life LBG’s focus on innovation, transformation, and future-facing careers. The physical design, combined with the technology-led experience, created a natural sense of curiosity and drew in high volumes of footfall, with over 11,000 students reached. Not only this, but it appealed directly to the intended target audience with 58% of all students reached being STEM students.
Most importantly, it shifted the interaction from passive to active. Students weren’t just being told about LBG, they were understanding how their own strengths and interests aligned with the organisation’s culture and career opportunities.
This activation helped to shape the perception of LBG as a forward thinking, top-tier tech employer, with 97% of students saying their perception had changed.
Takeaway: in a competitive talent market, the organisations that win attention are those that turn attraction into experience – giving candidates something tangible, memorable, and worth engaging with.
5. Recognise & Celebrate Achievement – DHL Express Employee of the Year Events
Recognition plays a critical role in shaping how employees feel about their work and their place within an organisation.
While day-to-day appreciation matters, it’s often the larger, more intentional moments of recognition that leave a lasting impression. These powerful in-person experiences help employees to feel seen, valued and connected to something bigger than themselves.
DHL Express brings this to life through its Employee of the Year events, which celebrate outstanding employees and recognise those who best represent the company’s values and spirit. What makes the programme even more meaningful is that recognition begins with nomination by others, adding a collaborative and appreciative dimension before nominees go through a rigorous selection process. It’s not only the recognition that makes these moments so powerful, but also the scale, care and intention behind the overall experience.
The programme goes beyond a gala celebration. In addition, nominees come together to take part in wellbeing activities, team experiences and community-focused initiatives that reflect DHL’s broader commitment to connecting people and improving lives. This gives the events an added sense of meaning: they are not only about celebrating achievement, but also about giving back to the communities that host them.
By bringing together employees from different countries and functions, DHL Express reinforces a strong sense of collective identity, showing that no matter where people are based, they are part of one connected team.
They highlight the behaviours, values and achievements that matter most – turning recognition into a visible expression of organisational culture. In doing so, they encourage others to aspire, contribute, and see a clear connection between their efforts, the impact they create and the recognition that follows.
Takeaway: recognition is most powerful when it is experienced collectively – turning individual achievement into a shared moment that reinforces culture and connection.
6. Strengthen Employer Brand – Atlassian's ShipIt Festival
Relevant, resonant and impactful employer brands are built and amplified through in-person experiences.
The most effective organisations understand that brand isn’t what you say, it’s what your people say to others about where they work, and demonstrate in their actions. In-person activations play a critical role here, creating high-energy, authentic experiences that naturally generate advocacy both internally and externally.
A great example is Atlassian’s ShipIt – a global, 24-hour innovation festival where employees step away from their day-to-day roles to work on ideas they’re passionate about.
The format is intentionally open, fast-paced and creative. Teams form organically, ideas are explored without constraint, and the focus shifts from delivery to experimentation. The result is an experience that reflects Atlassian’s culture in its purest form: collaborative, innovative and empowered.
But the real impact extends beyond the event itself. ShipIt creates highly shareable moments. Employees document their projects, celebrate their ideas, and take those stories onto platforms like LinkedIn, turning a single internal activation into a ripple effect of authentic, employee-led brand storytelling.
This is where the employer brand is strengthened most powerfully: not through polished messaging, but through lived experiences that employees are proud to talk about.
Takeaway: the strongest employer brands are built from the inside out – when experiences are designed purposefully so that employees become your most credible and compelling advocates.
Turning Experience into Impact
Across each of these examples, a clear pattern emerges - the organisations leading the way in employee experience aren’t relying on messaging alone. They are designing moments that are intentional, immersive activations that bring culture, purpose and brand to life in ways employees can see, feel and participate in.
Importantly, these activations create the moments that employees remember and talk about long after the event itself.
To explore the full framework behind these six outcomes and how to design activations that drive real organisational impact, download our white paper below:
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