What is an employee journey?

An employee journey is the journey people travel within an organisation. It begins when they apply and ends the moment they leave. Along the way they encounter different things and have experiences and feelings. All of that together makes up the employee journey. Take onboarding, for example. By talking to new colleagues every week, their feelings and experiences of the company improve and the chances of them staying longer go up.

Is it the same for every employee?

The journey is different for every person and every department, and it is therefore not static. One person may have just joined the company while another has been there five years. It can even differ from day to day. In short, everyone is at a different stage of the journey. That makes it impossible to understand people's experiences through an annual survey. To make the employee journey fit as well as possible, it helps to start by thinking about the most important milestones in someone's career: the recruitment process, onboarding, training, development and offboarding, for example. That gives you more insight into the most important moments people experience in the journey, so you can respond to them. Later on we will take you step by step towards the perfect employee journey.

Why does insight into the employee journey matter?

In recent years the idea of the employee journey has become steadily more important to HR departments and managers. The reason is that more and more organisations recognise that a positive employee experience is one of the most important elements of a company's success. People who are not engaged, who do not enjoy coming to work or who are under stress will not be able to do their best work. With a growing economy, it is also important to attract the right people and keep them. So it pays to work out first how you make sure the right people want to come and work for your organisation, and then how you make sure they want to stay.

How do you get started?

Here is a step-by-step explanation of how to get going:

Segment your people and create personas Organisations are usually home to a great many different personalities, and even within a single department those can vary enormously. A software developer probably has a very different experience from a salesperson. So start by identifying your people. Segment on the basis of personalities rather than demographic data such as age and gender, and create a persona for each group. Map the journey for every persona Now that you have personas for all the groups, you can start mapping the touchpoints those groups have with the organisation. Our 'journey' feature captures this automatically. Start at the first touchpoint (usually the application) and build it out to the moment they leave the organisation. Sometimes it goes even further than that. At the bottom of this article you will find all the moments that appear in almost every employee journey. Write down every moment for each persona and note how you are going to handle it. That gives you a concrete plan you can act on straight away. Start small and build out from there. Begin with small adjustments for one group, for instance, and measure the effect. Measuring is knowing, so if it works, you can build on it. Involve all stakeholders in the employee journey There are almost certainly several stakeholders involved in the employee journey of different groups. One person runs the onboarding programme while another facilitates the training. Make sure the whole organisation follows the same approach and uses the same way of measuring when asking for feedback. That makes it far easier to bring all the data together and to adjust or build on it. Ask for feedback To know the impact of every interaction on the different groups, it is important to ask for feedback . Feedback helps you understand how to support your people and shows you where the pain points are. With a mobile app like Treams you can send a feedback request after every moment in the employee journey. Doing it through an app makes it easy and low-effort for people to answer and give feedback. Asking in the moment gets you the most valuable, honest feedback. Wait longer and it is no longer top of mind, and the feedback is worth less. With the feedback you get, you can adjust the journey or build it out.

Moments in the employee journey

Although the journey is different for every person and every group, there are a number of moments that appear in almost every employee journey:

The first interview The first day at work The first one-to-one with the manager The first progress meeting The first performance appraisal The employee's birthday The exit interview