What is an employee journey?
An employee journey is the journey that employees take at an organization. It starts when applying for a job and ends once the employee leaves the organization. During the journey, employees encounter different things, have experiences and feelings. All of this is summarized in the employee journey. Take onboarding, for example. Being in conversation with new employees every week will improve their feelings and experiences about the company and make them more likely to stay longer.
Is this the same for every employee?
The journey is different for every employee and every department and therefore is not static. For example, one employee just joined the company and another has been working for 5 years. It can even vary from day to day. In short, everyone is at a different stage of the "employee journey. Therefore, it is impossible to understand employee experiences through an annual survey. To make the employee journey as appropriate as possible, the first thing to do is to think about the most important milestones in the employee's career. For example, the application process, onboarding, training, development and offboarding. This way you can gain more insight into the most important moments employees experience in the employee journey so you can respond accordingly. Later we will take you step by step to the perfect Employee Journey.
Why is it important to understand the employee journey?
In recent years, the concept of the employee journey has become increasingly important to HR departments and managers. The reason for this is that more and more organizations are realizing that a positive employee experience is one of the most important elements to a company's success. Employees who are not engaged, do not enjoy going to work or are stressed will not be able to do their best work either. In addition, with the improving economy, it is important to attract the right employees and retain them. So it is good to first figure out how to make sure the right people want to come to work for your organization and then how to make sure they want to continue working for you.
How do you get started?
We are happy to explain step by step how you can get started:
Segment your employees and create personas Within an organization, there are often many different personalities working. Even by department, this can vary enormously. A software developer probably has a very different experience than a salesperson. Therefore, start by identifying your employees first. Segment based on personalities rather than demographics such as age and gender. Create a persona for each group of employees. Compile the journey for each persona Now that you have compiled the personas for all groups, you can begin to map out the contact moments the groups of employees have with the organization. Our journey feature automatically captures this. Start with the first contact moment (often the job application) and build this up to the moment they leave the organization. Sometimes it goes even further than the moment the employee leaves the organization. At the bottom of this article you will find all the moments from almost every employee journey. Write down all the moments for each persona and for each moment, write down how you will address it. This will result in a concrete plan that you can start working on immediately. It is important to start small and build big. For example, start with small adjustments for a certain employee group and measure what the effect was. Measuring is knowing, and therefore if it works, you can then build it out further. Include all stakeholders in the Employee Journey Most likely, different stakeholders are involved in the Employee Journey of different employee groups. For example, one employee does the onboarding program, but another facilitates the training sessions. Make sure the entire organization takes the same approach and uses the same metrics when soliciting feedback. This makes it much easier to bring all the data together and adjust or build on it. Ask for feedback! To know the impact of each interaction among different employee groups, it is important to ask for feedback . Through feedback, you learn to understand how to support employees and see where the pain points are. Using a mobile app like Treams , you can send a feedback request after every moment in the Employee Journey. When you do this through an app, it's easy and approachable for employees to reply and give feedback. When you ask at the moment you get the most valuable, honest feedback. If you wait longer it is no longer top of mind and the feedback is less valuable. With the feedback you get, you can adjust or build on the journey.
Moments in the employee journey
Although the journey is different for every employee (group), there are a few moments that occur virtually in every employee journey:
The first interview The first day at work The first one-on-one with the manager The first progress interview The first appraisal interview The employee's birthday The exit interview