How your employees’ journey really feels – and how you can effectively optimize it
It’s time to change your perspective and understand your employees’ journey at your organization from their point of view. Why is this vital? Because it helps you boost employee engagement, drive improvements, and make noticeable enhancements at all relevant touchpoints across the employee lifecycle. Overall, it enables you to create a more positive employee experience, strengthen staff commitment and loyalty, and improve productivity and your bottom line.
In this blog, we’ll show you what’s behind the employee journey, list the relevant touchpoints to focus on, and explain how to continuously improve using employee journey mapping.
Understand and optimize the employee journey
What is employee journey mapping?
Which touchpoints are important in the employee journey?
How do I create an individual employee journey map?
How can I optimize the employee journey?
Why it’s worth optimizing the employee journey
What is the employee journey?
The employee journey includes all stages of an employee’s lifecycle with your company. The employee journey covers the entire journey of your employees – from attraction and recruitment through onboarding and daily work, to career progression and eventually leaving the company.
What is employee journey mapping?
By using an employee journey map, you can define all of your important touchpoints with employees and display their entire journey visually. This way, everyone understands which touchpoints are really relevant and which factors play a role at each touchpoint.
Which touchpoints are important in the employee journey map?
Of course, every employee journey map is individual and depends on your company goals and structures. However, while bearing this in mind, the employee journey map normally covers seven higher-level touchpoints:
1. Attraction
The employee journey in a company begins even before a potential recruit applies to your organization. Have they heard of you? What is your reputation in the market? Are you seen as a good place to work? Ensuring your employer brand attracts the right applicants starts with listening to wider feedback and using it create a compelling value proposition that appeals to new recruits.
2. Application and Recruitment
Poor recruitment processes mean you lose talented candidates unnecessarily. Remember, the recruitment experience is the first chance you get to impress potential employees face-to-face. You need to ensure the process is easy, open and consistent, reinforces your values and shares what it is like to work at your organization. Feedback is crucial to this – if you know what applicants really think, you can optimize your recruiting processes. What’s going well? What is going badly and needs to be improved so that you recruit the right talent?
3. Onboarding
Is the employee onboarding journey well organized? Did the new employee get all the support and resources they needed? Were they welcomed by their team? Were any promises made during the recruitment phase honored? There’s a clear correlation between successful onboarding and the length of time someone spends at an organization. The first day at work and the entire induction phase are vital to making new employees feel at home and getting them up to speed quickly. At the same time, a smooth onboarding phase serves to seamlessly integrate employees into corporate culture.
Use feedback to find out where onboarding processes need to be optimized in order to achieve even better onboarding in the future. Communicate company processes in simple, understandable ways to get people up and running fast.
4. Engagement
As the war for talent continues to intensify, companies need to understand how they can improve their employees’ daily working lives – and it’s about more than fruit baskets and end-of-year bonuses. You need to ensure they are fully engaged with their role and company objectives, and that there are clear communication channels in place.
Research shows that engagement isn’t about monetary rewards. Other factors determine whether employees have a positive experience or whether you need to make changes to how you operate. Factors include:
- Further development: Are there opportunities for further development? Are all employees offered reviews and mentoring? What opportunities are there for training and promotion?
- Support: How supported do employees feel around achieving their goals?
- Recognition: Do employees feel noticed and appreciated? Is their good performance recognized and compensated fairly?
- Communication: Are there regular conversations with teams and managers? Do employees receive and understand all relevant information about company goals and objectives? Are they being listened to by their managers?
- Leadership behavior is particularly crucial for daily work: How do managers communicate with their reports? How is performance recognized? How do you support managers in achieving their goals?
In addition to everyday work, recognizing and prioritizing emotional moments is also important to ensure a positive employee experience journey. This includes personal events, such as:
- Getting married
- Starting a family
- Divorce,
- The death of a loved one
- Illness of the employee or someone close to them
and company-related moments, including:
- Company events
- Shared successes and milestones
- Team members personal successes
These moments are meaningful for your employees – you need to recognize them and respond appropriately. It’s important to deal with both the highs and lows that employees face.
5. Development
As employees progress, they will take on new responsibilities, move into new roles and face new challenges. How they are supported during these changes is key to their success. Do they receive the right support to allow them to thrive? Are they clear on what their objectives are?
Analyzing their feedback and communicating clearly with employees as they develop is key to keeping them engaged and ensuring that you have the right processes in place to progress your talent and reinforce your leadership team.
6. Exit
Why do employees decide to leave? How does this reflect on their employee journey up to this point? Where could things be improved? What are the positives and negatives of the experience?
Exit interviews provide the opportunity to gain receive honest feedback that can be used to improve both overall processes and any specific issues that have caused people to leave.
7. Alumni
Today’s world of work is much more flexible, with employees often returning to previous companies later in their careers. Equally, they may become customers or be asked whether they recommend your organization as somewhere to work by their contacts. That means it is vital to turn leavers into ambassadors, keeping in touch with them and using their feedback to build a wider, positive network around your company.
How do I create an individual employee journey map?
1. Define employee personas
Responsibilities and training opportunities will vary depending on an employee’s role and seniority. Define the employee journey map so that it is relevant to particular groups and levels. For example, a customer support agent is likely to have a different journey to a software developer.
2. Find critical touchpoints and create individual employee journey maps
Critical means: Which touchpoints with the company are likely to be remembered by the person? What does the person need at this touchpoint? Where are the possible challenges?
Keep in mind that your employees also provide relevant insights based on their own experiences: Which moments are critical to their journey? Could these touchpoints be improved? Don’t just talk to long-term employees, but also to those leaving and new joiners too.
Build a parent map with individual submaps. This allows you to manage both company-wide lifecycle stages by creating an employee journey map template which can be tailored to build specifically address individual, personal touchpoints that matter to different groups.
3. Base actions on data and define KPIs
To build your individual employee journey maps, start by analyzing relevant employee data across all relevant touchpoints. Look to answer questions such as: What is our current churn rate? What offices or roles are performing best for retention? How long do employees stay? How long does the application process take on average?
Use quantitative and qualitative KPIs.
4. Conduct surveys
Conduct quantitative analysis based on employee data, but also talk to managers and the HR team to get qualitative feedback.
5. Develop and implement measures to improve the employee journey
Use the results of the surveys to develop relevant measures and initiate effective changes. Take your employees with you on this journey, inform them about the results and the changes derived from them.
6. Measure the success and make the optimization of the employee journey a permanent process
Check whether your measures bring the desired success and continuously optimize the employee journey.
In the end, optimizing the employee journey will improve the overall employee experience.
Make the whole process easier for yourself: Use smart software to support your work
You can define and map the employee journey manually, collecting feedback and using this to continually improve your employees’ journey. However, it is more efficient and flexible if you work with employee journey software that plans, automates, and monitors management of the end-to-end lifecycle, supporting you in continuously optimizing the journey.
Tivian’s software makes it easy to optimize the employee journey at every critical touchpoint. While DISCOVER XI provides key answers, showing exactly what’s going well, what’s going poorly, and where your employees need support, COMMUNICATE XI makes it easy to deliver the right content to your employees at the right moment.
DISCOVER XI and COMMUNICATE XI help to create a happier workplace.
How can I optimize the employee journey?
Obtain regular feedback
Thanks to your employee journey map you will have defined and visualized the most important touchpoints in the lifecycle. In order to optimize the entire journey with all of its individual stages, it is vital to monitor your performance and drive continual improvements – and this is only possible through regular feedback.
Regular feedback uncovers any issues, highlighting where your employees see strengths and weaknesses, enabling you to take data-driven actions, communicate with staff, or to share best practice.
Base your improvements on data by using the right software
Leave your employee journey management to Tivian’s software solution. It provides you with structured, automatically recorded and seamlessly integrated data, based on the specific touchpoints you have defined. Visual, interactive, and personalized dashboards help to identify trends and problems, plan appropriate actions based on feedback insights and then implement them to successfully improve performance.
Tivian’s Employee Journey Software consists of the following modules:
- Entry Pulse helps you to collect qualitative and quantitative feedback on the recruitment and application process after the first week, tailored to employee role.
- Onboarding Pulse provides you with feedback on the entire onboarding phase so that you can measure satisfaction and highlight areas for improvement.
- Exit Pulse uncovers issues and processes that have weakened employee loyalty and commitment to your company.
Get to know Tivian’s employee journey software – and ensure a better employee experience.
Personalize the employee experience
Individual employee journey maps are the first step in delivering a tailored approach, rather than relying on standard solutions. Personalizing the employee experience is also about communicating individually with your employees and sharing the right dynamic content at the right time in compelling formats.
Communicate XI, Tivian’s communication platform, helps foster meaningful relationships and encourages engagement between businesses and their staff. With dynamic video, infographics, SMS, email, and audio, employers can deliver personalized, targeted communication to their employees, announcing new initiatives and policies, or celebrating successes.
Think ahead and keep the entire employee experience in mind
Delivering the right employee experience is about constant improvement. So, keep asking yourself how you can make your company even more attractive to your employees. Develop your leaders, promote diversity and maximize the potential of every employee to drive company success.
Achieving this transformation means relying on employee experience software that is adapted to today’s complex workplace. Tivian’s solution is employee survey software that goes further. Get to know our employee experience solution and find out what your employees really want and to provide a superior employee experience throughout the full lifecycle, using data to uncover what’s really happening at your organization.
Why it’s worth optimizing the employee journey
Lower churn
Highly skilled employees leave a company if they feel that managers are not helping them develop and grow. Companies that continually improve the employee journey and offer opportunities for development therefore benefit from lower employee churn over the long term.
Higher employee engagement
Employees who feel that their performance and opinion count are more committed, happier and more motivated. Listen to your employees and take action based on their insights. This is key to continually improving employee engagement and performance.
Stronger employee loyalty
A positive employee experience is central to driving loyalty. Employees who feel they have a voice, and are developed and supported, feel emotionally connected to a company. An investment in the employee journey is also an investment in building employee loyalty.
Positive corporate culture
Improving the employee journey also leads to a stronger, more open company culture where work-life balance is optimized, and managers are committed to reducing employee stress and enabling staff to develop fully.
Positive image
In our always-connected, digital world, it’s easy to share bad experiences with others, either through word of mouth, social media or employer review sites. Companies that continually work to improve the employee journey build a better reputation, generate more positive reviews and become known as a great place to work.
Easier to attract new employees
Ultimately, improving the employee journey makes your company more attractive to potential new recruits. By learning from employees who have left and asking new employees about their initial experiences, you can continually improve your processes and differentiate from your competitors in the war for talent.
Find out more about how Tivian’s all in one platform combines feedback discovery and clear communication to transform your approach to the employee journey.