Why should you care about the Employee Journey? Employees are the heart of every firm, while consumers are the lifeblood. They are the driving forces behind your business and the most critical components in developing and maintaining a healthy culture. Your employees assist in directing and driving client happiness. As a result, firms realise that knowing the employee experience is as important as understanding the consumer experience.

To understand your workers and assist them (and your business) in achieving crucial goals, you must clearly understand the many phases and touchpoints they encounter while working for your firm. The employee journey is adopted and modified from time-tested consumer journey research. HR assists businesses in increasing employee happiness and loyalty by mapping the employee experience like enterprises map the consumer journey.

Companies that have explicit knowledge of the employee journey benefit from the following:

• An increased employee experience and engagement. Employee experience is a critical component of design thinking applied to employees. Employee experience is how employees feel about what they encounter and observe at a company. Empathising with the consumer is the first step in any design thinking process—understanding how an employee perceives a situation aids in defining issues and developing solutions.
• A reduced turnover. Satisfied employees are less likely to quit your firm. Ninety-three per cent of those who leave would remain longer if the company invested more in their career by building an Alliance. 
• Reinforced company culture

What exactly is the employee journey?

The employee journey can be seen as a cycle with several stages.

We all recall our first day at work but not our second day. Only some stages of the Employee Journey are the same. Identifying these “moments that matter” is critical to charting the employee experience. It may be beneficial in terms of enhancing employee satisfaction.

Employer Branding

This stage starts before the recruitment process. Your employer brand is your company’s reputation as an excellent workplace. It is what potential employers and workers genuinely think about you. When you’re not there, it’s what they tell their friends and relatives. Though it may not be visible, your employer’s brand is a valuable asset you must nurture regularly.

Hire

This stage refers to the recruiting process, which includes all the processes of hiring a new employee. Consider the time it will take to employ, the cost of hiring, the acceptance rate, and the quality of the hire. Thorough knowledge of this stage enables you to optimise job postings to attract the finest candidates and uncover any friction pushing potential recruits away. To improve the recruitment process, you must also be aware of and limit unconscious bias. 

You may also be interested in developing Values-Based recruitment.

Onboarding

Onboarding refers to the duties involved in bringing on a new employee and acquainting them with systems, tools, procedures, and expectations. Effective onboarding transforms the early excitement of a new job into something meaningful and long-term. The onboarding process should be tailored to the tasks your recruit will be required to do. As with customers, experiences are crucial to contemporary workers. Firms must deliver onboarding experiences that reflect their organisation’s culture, not just information. Three Questions Every Company Must Answer to Improve Onboarding

1. Do new workers understand what distinguishes you? Few onboarding programs explain why a company’s mission, products, and services are unique and worthwhile. It has significant repercussions for both customers (when workers fail to represent the brand in the marketplace) and employers (when current employees cannot advocate for the organisation as a place to work).
2. Do new workers understand how their work contributes to your company’s mission? Companies must link employees to the organisation’s vision or purpose and show how that individual personally benefits the brand or customer experience. Feeling important in your career is an underappreciated part of performance. It not only impacts brand advocacy but also lowers absenteeism and enhances workplace safety and quality.
3. Do new workers learn about your company’s identity, mission, and values during their onboarding process? Undoubtedly, some aspects of onboarding may differ from business to company. Still, three factors should be fundamental, independent of a new hire’s function or team: the firm’s mission, brand, and culture.

Develop

Engage

Consider the stages of the employee journey that impact employee engagement. These activities should be ongoing and consistent throughout the employee experience. Communication is a critical component of this process; develop a workplace communication plan and choose when and how to interact with employees. An organisation’s capacity to successfully interact with its employees results in a better employee experience.

Develop

Develop is a continuous process as you grow individuals at various speeds and across diverse talents. To map this stage, you must assess their productivity, capacity to work well with others, and professional goals. It’s also critical to provide employees with the opportunity to broaden their skill sets and key differentiation for individuals who want to develop a portfolio of diverse experiences.

Perform

Ramping up and growing employees require motivation to keep improving and contribute to a company’s success. Improve performance by motivating employees and linking them to achieving the company’s vision.

Exit – Offboard

There are several reasons why an employee may leave your company. While you will never prevent employees from leaving, you can better understand why they are departing and how you can prevent future employees from doing the same. Employees will depart at various phases, and exits provide an essential chance to learn what may be improved and enhanced for future employees and Employee Journey.

Alumni

“Lifelong employment might be over, but a lifetime relationship remains the ideal.”

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn

Alumni networks engage organisations and former workers, transforming farewell into lifetime ties. Implementing a corporate alumni network for your firm helps you stay in touch with employees long after they leave their new careers. Creating an alumni network is a significant milestone for companies. It demonstrates that they’ve transitioned from saying goodbye at offboarding to saying hello to new chances to keep alumni engaged as they advance in their careers. Read The Future of employee networks if you’d like to know more.

Employee Journey Conclusion

Many employee experience initiatives still begin and conclude with an employee engagement survey – a single, once-a-year exercise that seeks to evaluate the condition of employee engagement and the effect of various engagement variables. However, consider your own job experience in comparison to others around you. Some employees will have only recently started, while others will have been in the seat for a long time. Each employee will have had a unique experience, whether going through a different onboarding process, attending various training courses, or reaching other career milestones by the time the following survey comes around. Everyone is at a different stage in the employee journey.

Organisations are increasingly adopting a lifecycle approach to employee experience, seeking feedback and insights at each point of the lifecycle. It enables them to understand the critical times throughout the employee journey, how they affect the experience, and what they can do at each stage. David Gousset.