Companies can’t hope to offer a first-rate customer experience if their employees are not happy and engaged. This means that HR professionals must lead the charge to map, analyze and hone the employee journey.
In this article, I will consider the role of the employee journey and how it can be mapped by HR teams to help them understand company culture metrics like absence, productivity, engagement, and the intention to leave the company.
Employee Experience and Journey Mapping
Identifying the key moments in the employee journey for an organization can be achieved through a process called employee journey mapping. The goal is to identify and list the ‘moments that matter’ for employees.
There are quantitative and qualitative components to this process
On the quantitative side, mapping the employee journey can provide valuable information about which points employees become disengaged.
If, for example, HR pros are seeing high turnover in the first year of an employee’s journey, it can be an indication of poor onboarding practices and can be predicted by a low employee experience in the first weeks of the employee journey.
If there’s a peak in churn at year 3 and 4, this can be an indication of a lack of internal promotion opportunities. A further high in turnover at around year 7 could indicate a lack of internal promotion opportunities in the company after having made the first step up the ladder.
Using this data can help form several hypotheses about why disengagement and turnover increases at certain points. This can lead into the second stage of mapping the employee journey; using quantitative data for conversations with employees who leave the company in year one, year 3-4, year 7 or later. This helps HR understand why employees decided to exit or stick around for longer.
Once a firm has mapped the employee journey and the employee experience at the ‘moments that matter’, it can be useful to reinforce learning with other measurement techniques like employing onboarding apps and pulse surveys.
This helps to get a bigger sense of the impact of employee behavior and how the ‘moments that matter’ correlate with absence, productivity, engagement, and the intention to leave the company.
In episode 144 of the HRchat show, I interviewed Aaron Barth, founder at Dialectic, about how merging scientific research, instructional design, and creative arts can translate knowledge into high-impact thinking solutions to improve HR processes.
Dr Barth is a strategic learning expert, an innovator in the field of instructional design, and a thought leader in applying the science of human reasoning to the workplace. Passionate about people, he frequently speaks on the power that a scientific mindset can have to transform organizations, accelerate employee learning and improve employee (and customer) engagement.
Dialetic’s technology offers insights for HR pros and leaders based on employee journey mapping.
Like the process of customer journey mapping, employee journey mapping focuses on the key moments in an employee’s daily experience. By looking specifically at what’s happening for an employee throughout their day, HR teams can get a bigger picture of the things that hold employees back, frustrate them, and energize them to do the work they love.
Employee journey mapping can also be used by HR pros and leaders to better understand the perceived company culture at a higher level by highlighting commonalities across employees and teams.
When done in the right ways, employee journey mapping, suggests Barth, can help companies understand and eliminate otherwise undiagnosed employee engagement problems and create a first-rate culture.
This is done by going beyond the superficial data aggregated through employee surveys to find the true sources of employee issues and the information leaders need to design fixes.
About the Author
Bill Banham is Editor and Publisher at The HR Gazette magazine, Co-Founder of the InnovateWork event series for HR, Talent and Tech pros and President at Iceni Media Inc. He has 13+ years experience in B2B publishing and events. Bill’s previous roles include Editor at HRreview magazine and Marketing Manager at Sprigg, the performance management tech platform.