Employers are creating and modifying their employees’ experience and employee journey map day in and day out, even if they aren’t aware of it. Each decision and action impacts this.
Employees also contribute to the experience. What they do, when they interact with something and the connections they make influence EX at a team/individual level.
With the experience being layered and complex, it’s essential that employers have the best plan in place to structure a strong, engaging experience.
Here’s everything you need to know about employee journey mapping and how it plays into building employee experience.
Back employee journey mapping with a feature-packed platform
Before getting ahead of things and planning how the experience will be managed, it’s very important that your teams are equipped with the tools they need for taking each point of the map and knocking it out of the park. Also important, a deck of analytics and measuring features are crucial for enabling continuous improvement for the process.
Ensure that you have tools to pull in feedback before, throughout and after campaigns, too.
Once you’ve got your toolkit, it’s time to draft your map.
Employee journey mapping success starts with understanding
The employee journey may conjure up different images in your mind when reading this.
But, simply, the journey is the period of time an employee is at their organization. Right from their initial application to their exit interview, everything that happens is on the employee journey.
The Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) has an informative post that explains this very clearly. Here are the main points you’ll want to pull out:
- The employee journey has two fronts: The employee’s side, and the employer’s point of view. They’ll both (naturally) see one thing differently, and that event has a different impact on each of them.
- The map focuses on key points, like the first interview, birthdays, performance reviews and training events. These “moments that matter” account for both employees and employers.
- Establish the practice of gathering feedback and data regularly beforehand, because this will help build a more informed and accurate map. Think turnover statistics, complaints, engagement rates and more.
- Touch base with different levels of the company. The C suite, new hires and top performers all have opinions that matter, and this will build up a base of diverse angles to pull from while mapping.
Planning a great employee experience from day one
Employee journey maps are clearly a crucial initial step and help to visualize an individual or team’s process before they have even started their first day. Past the intentional results and those mentioned above, the map helps the overall employee experience approach, too.
Everyone who is in on forming the journey map, from managers to polled hires, will be looped in on a practice that makes it clear that employees and employers can both value the same moments.
While the actual journey map doesn’t always need to span from onboarding to ‘moving on’ – it can focus on a particular campaign or phase of the lifecycle – mapping out the entire journey is an exercise that is beneficial for the entire employee experience.
For both shorter maps intended for specific phases and overall employee journey mapping, forming personas either from the feedback you’re gathering or from different activities will help form your list of ‘moments that matter’.
Surveys can power the map, as the employee data you’ve gathered from them lets you know what exactly your employees value. Really, you can start the mapping process and plug in information from activities like your company’s surveys and already be off to a start!
Think of employee journey mapping as manifesting for a positive, engaging employee lifecycle, but backed with informed strategies and data.
A thoughtful and impactful EX goes a long way
Knowing what employees will experience is one thing, but understanding how they experience a process is another more complex, valuable thing.
Taking a careful look through feedback and trends and then mapping out the employee journey helps build a much greater understanding of this. You’ll know which points benefit the experience and engagement, and which lead to negative events.
Honing in on the journey can seem like a huge task, but by taking the proper steps and following the process, everyone from new hires to leaders can have the best experience possible.