Ford: If HR tech 'isn't solving a problem, it's an irritation'

The $184.9 billion-revenue Ford Motor Company is a quintessential American brand – however, it actually has a huge global presence.

According to its financial reporting, last year, Ford sold 4.5 million vehicles through wholesale globally with huge sales in China, Canada, the UK and Germany, in addition to the US.

Driving this business success is Ford’s 171,000 employees worldwide.

They get a special mention in Ford’s 2024 annual report – the automotive giant is very aware of the need to “create an employee experience that enables an inclusive environment of excellence, focus, and collaboration among team members”.

To help achieve this goal, Ford leans into employee listening.

At Qualtrics X4 2025 in Salt Lake City, UNLEASH sat down with the executive in charge of Ford’s employee listening program – Kalifa Oliver, Global Director of Employee Experience (EX) Analytics Strategy.

In this exclusive interview, we discussed how the automotive giant listens, and drives actions on feedback, at its huge, global scale and complexity.

Ford, employee listening and Qualtrics

Ford has been a customer of Qualtrics for a while, but last year, the automotive giant expanded the contract and revamped its employee experience approach.

It is reaping rewards; Oliver tells UNLEASH that Ford has had a 25-point increase in response rate in just a year, and at Qualtrics X4 the automotive giant and Ford were recognized with the Qualtrics XM Breakthrough Artist Award for EX.

A central part of this is really meeting Ford’s employees where they are.

This starts with communication and explaining that buying Qualtrics is “an investment in you”, it is going to solve a problem you have, and it will make your life easier.

“It’s just making things relatable to people”, and then being there to answer any questions they might have.

The next step is proving the communications to be true, and showing (rather than just telling) that it will make things simpler and easier to employees in their day-to-day jobs.

Oliver shares: “It is very easy when you do listening to focus only on your corporate type employees who are sitting in front of emails” – but what about the frontline workers who make up the majority of Ford’s business?

“How do you listen to them? How do you act on that?”

Oliver shares that last year, Ford redesigned employee experience dashboards specifically for the frontline “to match what their morning meetings look like” – this makes the data more relevant and useful to them, and then allows them to take action on the feedback.

“We use the insights to prompt them to action by putting it right there for them,” notes Oliver.

Importantly, the dashboards and insights are seamless to access, and are in their flow of work.

For Oliver, if you try to do the opposite, and bring people to technology, you end up creating more problems than you solve.

Ultimately, when it comes to HR tech, “if it isn't solving a problem, it’s an irritation”, she tells UNLEASH.Ultimately, when it comes to HR tech, “if it isn't solving a problem, it’s an irritation”, she tells UNLEASH.

Oliver shares that the ability to create these seamless, scalable yet customizable experiences is what Qualtrics such a great partner for Ford in the EX space.

‘Let technology be your friend’

Ford is far ahead on its EX and employee listening journey – but Oliver is very candid that she doesn’t know “if I’d have been able to tell you that a year ago”.

The past year was about “setting the foundation and getting us to best in class” the question is now how do we maintain that?

UNLEASH was keen to find out Oliver’s top tips to her HR and EX peers who are struggling to move the needle with employee listening.

Her first tip is to just start.

“You do not have to start to be the best” – instead focus on the problems you want to solve – “don’t try to boil the ocean”, just focus on small things.

“You don’t need 100 pulses. Start with a small survey”, and build up the trust with your employees.

For Oliver, “the best skill for anybody that is doing EX is humility – you don’t know what you don’t know”.For Oliver, “the best skill for anybody that is doing EX is humility – you don’t know what you don’t know”.

“You’re going into it with a blank state with time to figure [out] what people need”.

Then the key is to “let technology be your friend”, let it help you solve the problems that your employees are identifying.

“We’ve got to get the point where people aren’t afraid of technology” – there’s a lot of work for HR and EX practitioners to do to show people “the value of the tools to them” – how is it impacting their experiences at work, and not just making the lives of the HR team easier?

“As long as you focus on solving a problem, and explaining to people how this impacts their experience, we should get fear out of the door”, and really reap the rewards.

The future of AI in EX

AI was top of mind at Qualtrics X4 in Salt Lake City – in fact, the tech giant announced its own agentic AI offering at the conference.

In this context, UNLEASH was keen to find out how Oliver and Ford are thinking about AI and EX.

Ford has been leveraging Qualtrics Assist, a dashboard AI assistant, on a “small scale until we understood it and how we could use it”. Now the automotive giant is rolling the tool out to people leaders to get them comfortable with the tool.

It is helping Ford get insights faster, and driving efficiencies for its people. However, during her session at X4, Oliver was very clear that AI must not be making the final decisions about actions taken based on feedback. Privacy, ethics and risk with AI must be top of mind for HR leaders as they build out their EX programs.

On the new agentic AI capabilities, Oliver jokes: “I’ve told Qualtrics, if you need somebody to test it, call me.”

While AI agents will come to the EX space, “I do think first we’re going to have to see how it’s working in the customer experience (CX) space”.While AI agents will come to the EX space, “I do think first we’re going to have to see how it’s working in the customer experience (CX) space”.

“I always keep my eye on CX” – this helps Oliver to stay ahead of the game and prepare for the next technological wave.