What is an Employee Journey? Benefits and Journey Mapping
What is an Employee Journey?
An employee journey comprises all the various events, activities, and milestones that the employee experiences during their employment with an employer. It can also be thought of as the moments that matter during the employer-employee relationship.
Why is the Employee Journey Important?
Why do human resources professionals focus on these important moments in the employee journey? When a company understands the employee experience journey, it learns which elements must be present for employees to be well-motivated and fully engaged in their workplace.
The employee experience journey starts after a person is hired by an organization and starts interacting with fellow employees. The journey ends when the employee leaves the company voluntarily or involuntarily.
What is Employee Journey Mapping?
Employee journey mapping is a technique used to establish the critical points in the employee journey for the company. These key points are identified and listed chronologically to find moments that matter to employees.
Example of Employee Journey Stages
For this example, we'll assume that your company has already completed the recruiting process to attract top talent to the organization.
1. Use Fair Hiring Processes
The company uses an objective hiring process to assess talent and predict performance to find the best candidates to fill available positions.
2. Onboarding Should Help New Hires Fit in Quickly
Ideally, the onboarding process should include more than teaching a new hire "how we do things here." It should also help new employees fit in with their peers and feel connected to the company's mission statement and values. Ultimately, the onboarding process is a starting point for new employees that should help them understand how to use their talents to help the company grow and thrive.
3. Assist Employees in Developing Professional Strengths
Employee engagement is about much more than creating a pleasant work environment. Today's workers want to find a manager who takes a personal interest in them, holds them accountable professionally, and offers them career growth opportunities.
4. Offer Regular Feedback
Employees want to find out how well they perform and whether any areas need improvement. They need to feel that the feedback provided results from fair and comprehensive performance reviews.
5. Provide Professional Development Opportunities
Very few people would find it satisfying to start work with a company on the understanding that there is no career path. Employees want to see that they will have opportunities to learn new skills, work with new people, or have more independence as they gain experience.
6. Make Leaving the Company a Positive Experience
When someone leaves the company, it can be an emotional part of their employee journey. Exit interviews are a great strategy to determine how a person felt about their job and whether there was a specific point when employee engagement started to falter.
Attract, Engage and Retain: The Employee Experience Advantage
In addition to ROI, employee experience measures help companies succeed at retention and recruiting.
Why is Supporting the Employee Journey Important?
Why would a company support the employee journey? It's simple. These journeys result in employee benefits as well as advantages for the employer, including the following:
An Employee Journey Map Allows for Better Understanding of Employees' Experiences
An executive may not immediately be able to understand an employee's journey during different points in their career. Introducing an employee journey map may help clarify the situation by focusing on specific, relatable events common to all company employees. In other words, the employee journey map measures the employee experience from when the employee is hired to when they leave the company.
Employers Can Plan Learning and Development Activities
The employee journey map helps the company's human resources department and managers successfully plan activities connected to onboarding, learning and development, employees' performance, employee surveys, coaching, etc.
Employee Satisfaction Increases
When an employer creates an employee journey map, it allows the company to develop a plan for improving the employees' experience. Employees will feel that they are valued members of the company community. Workers are more likely to be loyal to an employer that takes steps to make them feel their contributions matter.
Employee Turnover Rates Drop
Employees who feel satisfied with their jobs are less likely to quit and move on to another employer. According to LinkedIn, employees who feel their skills aren't being fully used in their current job are ten times more likely to seek employment elsewhere.
On a positive note, employee journey mapping helps employers decide when to offer training to employees, which training would benefit employees, and make a plan for their professional development. Employee turnover rates drop, and the company grows due to this strategy.
Employee Engagement Grows
Gallup is a world leader in employee engagement, and the company states that 87% of employees are disengaged at work.
Companies need to know how to improve employee engagement numbers over the long term. When executives and managers understand their employees' engagement journeys, they have multiple opportunities to identify shortcomings. Once these shortcomings have been identified, the company can correct them.
The company can plan engagement activities at different points in the employee journey and keep track of the results.
Company Culture Becomes More Positive
When employees have a career plan with the company and know what the employer expects from them daily, company culture becomes more positive, and employee relationships improve.
How important is having a distinct workplace culture to business success? In Deloitte's Core Beliefs and Culture Chairman's Survey findings, 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe having a distinct workplace culture is "important to workplace success."
Attract, Engage and Retain: The Employee Experience Advantage
In addition to ROI, employee experience measures help companies succeed at retention and recruiting.
How to Map an Employee Journey
Once a new employee has accepted a job offer to work with your company, you can start mapping their employee journey. At this point, the new hire is forming a relationship with the company.
Pre-boarding
What information can your organization share with a new hire to help them feel more comfortable before they arrive at work on the first day? A letter confirming the company's employment offer and the day and time they are to start work is the bare minimum the new employee should receive.
A new hire would likely also appreciate some information about parking near the building and public transit routes. The new employee would also like to know the name of the person they should report to on their first day and whether the company has a cafeteria/lunch room.
Onboarding
It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone in the office that a new employee is joining the company the first day they start work. On the new hire's first day, their workspace should be ready for them, and the new employee's computer should be set up when they arrive at work.
Someone should meet the new hire when they arrive at the office to show them around the space and indicate the essential features: where to hang up coats, get coffee or tea, and where the washrooms are. The new hire's "work buddy" should also be available to introduce them to fellow team members. The work buddy can act as a contact person to answer the new employee's questions within the next few days.
LumApps' Employee Intranet includes electronic documents for new hires to complete on their first day. The platform contains links to the company's human resources department, company news, communities, and employee-created content. It is an excellent place for new employees to get their bearings.
Employee Compensation and Benefits
Compensation and benefits are an essential part of the employee journey. When someone new joins the company, make sure they know how much they will be paid, when they will get paid, and when the employer will review their salary and performance.
New employees should receive a benefits guide to familiarize themselves with the company benefits plan. If the new hire needs to work a certain number of hours or weeks before they can participate in the company benefits plan, make sure that this policy is made clear.
Ongoing Employee Learning and Development
To keep employees engaged, the company will want an ongoing learning and development program. If the business stalls in this area after a certain amount of time, employees will feel they are stalling in their career development. If employees become frustrated due to a lack of professional development opportunities, they will start to look for employment elsewhere.
Performance Review and Feedback
All employees should receive feedback on how they regularly do without waiting for their performance review. If an employee is doing something well, getting some positive feedback will help them continue in the same manner. Employees who need to improve in specific areas can start to change their behaviors without waiting for their formal review to begin improving their performance.
Ending the Employer-Employee Relationship
At some point, the employer-employee relationship will end. The employee may decide to retire. They may decide to move on to a job with a different company. The company may need to decide to let some of its staff go (either with or without cause).
Employees may leave their job with the company, but the journey is still ongoing. Their circumstances may change in the future.
- The retired employee may be interested in returning to work part-time.
- The worker who left for another job opportunity may decide they aren't happy in their new work arrangement and want to return.
- A laid-off employee may still be interested in returning to work for the company when its finances improve.
These workers have specific knowledge about how your business runs and experience working in your business that someone coming in cold can't match. Does it make sense to welcome these former employees back to the company, perhaps in new roles?
Discover LumApps, the Employee Experience Platform
How to Create a Strong Employee Journey
What guidelines should you use when creating an employee journey map? You'll want to ensure it is a good fit for the workforce.
Think about your workforce as different groups.
Classify workers by department, age, gender, and other types of employee personas to describe them. They can also be divided according to their stage of the employee journey (junior, intermediate, or senior employees who may be close to retirement).
Create several employee journey maps.
You don't have to create separate employee journey maps for each group you created in the first step (above). The important thing here is to be inclusive and allow for variations inside the groups (and the maps).
Conduct employee surveys.
Ask employees what they think about their experience working for the company. What do they like about it? What areas could be improved?
Ask for specific feedback to improve your employee journey maps.
How did new employees find the onboarding process? Did they have all the help they needed during the first few days and weeks with the company? If not, what would they change about it?
Measure the data to track your success.
Set some parameters to measure the success of your efforts in onboarding new employees, recognizing their efforts, offering ongoing training and development, etc.
Attract, Engage and Retain: The Employee Experience Advantage
In addition to ROI, employee experience measures help companies succeed at retention and recruiting.
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