How Prioritizing the Employee Journey Leads To Long-Term Retention
Your company wouldn’t spend money crafting a new marketing campaign or pitch deck without a thorough understanding of the experience, needs, and desires of your customers, right?
So why do most enterprise companies confine journey mapping to customers when most actually struggle to retain an arguably more valuable asset— employees?
The labor market still hasn’t recovered from The Great Resignation of 2020 — there is no return to normal for large employers. Remote work options, clear career development tracks, and strong company culture are now the bare minimum for talent retention.
Still, many large organizations are slow to adjust, and a recent McKinsey report outlines the extent of this failure:
“In the United States alone, there were 11.3 million open jobs at the end of May—up substantially from 9.3 million open jobs in April 2021. Even as employees scramble to fill these positions, the voluntary quit rate is 25 percent higher than pre pandemic level.”
This high attrition rate has a two-fold impact: dragging down company productivity and the bottom line. Conservative estimates of the replacement cost for an individual employee range from 0.5-2x their annual salary — with that number increasing to about 4x for executives.
Say you’re leading HR for an enterprise company 2,000 strong. With the current turnover rate of 25% and an average salary of, say, $50,000, the estimated replacement cost is somewhere between $6.25-$25M. And remember, that’s just the conservative estimate. Labor shortages and the new global job market put replacement costs for skilled workers at a premium.
In this era of employee attrition and turnover, the single most important thing enterprise HR departments can do to improve long-term talent retention is to create a quality employee experience (EX). But the first step to addressing the EX issue is understanding the problem from the perspective of each and every worker within your organization. That’s where employee journey mapping comes into the picture.
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The Employee Journey: Everything You Need to Know
The journey each employee takes through your organization is much closer to a rollercoaster ride than a linear path. It’s full of emotional, cognitive, and social ups and downs. Every moment they spend as a part of your organization, every milestone, and each day in between constitutes the entirety of the employee experience. If that experience contains more downs than ups, you risk losing that employee for good.
But before creating an environment conducive to a quality EX, you need to know how each and every role within your organization is navigated, from their first exposure with the company to after they finish. Doing so helps you understand the timeline of an employee’s experience within your company, their level of engagement, and the critical events that can make or break their overall experience.
The modern employee journey looks something like this:
The benefits of keeping your workforce out of the low engagement “danger zone” are well established. But employee journey mapping is also a powerful tool for HR, IT, and IC directors looking to maximize retention across the board.
Automation is Essential for Employee Journey Mapping at Scale
As it is with customer journey mapping, getting an accurate timeline for each and every position within your enterprise is no small feat. In fact, it’s more labor intensive.
Companies generally have a handful of personas and an ICP to tailor their marketing, sales, and customer success strategies around. But on the labor side, they may have hundreds of unique roles within their organization across all departments. That’s a lot of journey mapping.
HR, IC, and IT leaders need to invest in the right platforms and ensure that protocols are in place to:
- Capture the qualitative and quantitative data behind each employee’s experience through surveys, interviews, social channels, and IC content engagement
- Curate this data into journey maps that accurately represents the experience of the people navigating these roles
- Highlight the key milestones and points of friction within each journey where the company is at risk of losing employees to low engagement
To fully appreciate the insights that an informed employee journey map provides, you first need to understand each of the 6 stages of these journeys and how they contribute or detract from the employee experience.
Breaking Down The 6 Stages of The Employee Journey
Understanding each stage of the employee journey is an essential first step to understanding the tool's utility. While many companies focus on the more obvious stages, like development and retention, the earlier and later portions of an employee’s journey are equally informative. Each stage provides distinct, valuable insights that enterprise HR departments can use to improve the employee experience.
With this high-level view, it’s easy to see how the experience at each stage sets expectations for the next.
1. Attraction: The Stage That Sets The Tone of the Organization
In a time of unprecedented turnover, companies need to treat employees like they would their customers — and it all starts with attracting the target audience.
A company’s positioning in public spaces like websites, social channels, job boards, and ads can be just as influential for potential employees as they are for potential customers. This means dedicating time to developing materials that honestly depict company culture, values, and experiences.
Focusing on these types of employee-centric assets can also help lighten the load for your recruiters and HR teams by bringing in candidates that are “warmed” to your company.
2. Recruitment: The Stage of 21 Questions
During recruitment, your HR team actively corresponds with a potential hire about their experience and fit for the role and company. This stage of the journey involves going over resumes, conducting interviews, and negotiating salaries.
The recruiting and hiring process is where enterprise HR departments make their first promises to candidates regarding their experience at the company. These promises include:
- Compensation and benefits packages
- Skill development and employee learning plans
- Company retreats and culture-building activities
Future employees get their first glimpse at the validity between the company’s promotional content and their actual dedication to employee wellbeing during this stage.
3. Onboarding: The Stage That Requires Dedicated Support
HR experts have long warned companies about the risks of a poor onboarding experience, and the last few years have clarified these risks.
The first day of onboarding is where reality sets in.
The new hire has been wowed by the company’s PR and marketing efforts → gone through the recruiting and interviewing process → and now gets their first glimpse of the company’s operational prowess and cultural quality.
But this stage isn’t just about high-level introductions. One of the most important aspects of onboarding is centering it around the individual. Particularly how the company will invest in their professional development, keep them connected to the company culture, and provide an overall quality experience.
4. Development: The Stage Where Opportunities Arise
Development is the ongoing stage where employees fully immerse themselves in the company. This part of the employee journey offers plenty of opportunities to engage employees as they:
- Execute their role
- Navigate challenges and growing pains
- Build skills through learning and development opportunities
- Form relationships with coworkers and leadership
The best way to keep employees engaged during the development phase of their journey? Provide them with plenty of opportunities to expand their skills, knowledge base, and social and professional networks.
This is obviously beneficial for the employee, but it also helps the company identify prime candidates for advancement and identify who may require initial support. In each case, the worker feels supported and seen by the company.
5. Retention: The Stage of Regular Check-ins
If an employee is already signaling their interest in leaving, it’s far too late to start retention efforts.
Ensure that your HR and IC are consistently checking in with employees via surveys and interviews to identify any employees who are not engaged with their work. Using an employee engagement platform, large enterprise companies can easily collect and analyze information on employees to identify whether there are structural issues in particular journeys.
Alternatively, stay interviews are a great way to find out what your company is doing right. These structured sessions collect the experience and opinions of tenured employees and those who have just agreed to stay. This type of information is invaluable to building out your journey map for that particular position or identifying which processes to implement (or eliminate) across the entire company.
6. Separation: The Bittersweet Moment You Need To Prepare For
It can seem easy to cut your losses and head straight to the candidate pool when an employee decides to move on. But taking this approach means losing out on crucial information about your company’s ability to retain talent.
To maximize the value of separating employees, HR departments need to deploy exit interviews and surveys. This is where you can ask departing employees to reflect on the previous stages of their journey and identify key moments that contributed to low engagement that you can then use to improve the accuracy of existing employee journey maps.
Learn how LumApps’ Journeys can help your organization enhance long-term, personalized experiences for team members.
Inform Your Employee Experience Strategy with LumApps Journeys
Enterprise C-suites wouldn’t dream of operating without a quality CRM to monitor the customer lifecycle. Well, employee experience platforms are the CRM equivalent for your workforce.
With employee turnover rates approaching 25% and costly practices like ‘quiet quitting’ on the rise, enterprise employers are on the hook for millions of dollars annually. Developing an accurate employee journey map is the first step towards creating an enterprise environment conducive to employee engagement.
The LumApps employee experience platform allows enterprise companies to create highly-personalized, automated employee journey maps.
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