Employee Journey: What is it and How It Improve the Employee Experience

Senior Writer: Hiba Ali

Reading Time: 8 Minutes

Published : October 21, 2022

Employee journey mapping can assist organizations in better understanding the various stages of their employment lifecycle. As a result, employers can improve employee satisfaction and create memorable experiences by understanding these stages.

Creating the best employee experience is about listening to your employees at every step of their employment life cycle. You can also take help from various employee journey templates to help you further understand the procedure.

Onboarding, offboarding, and beyond are crucial milestones in your employees’ journey, so creating a detailed employee journey map is a must if you want to understand your colleagues better. As part of this blog, we will explain how to map an employee journey and describe the components of an employee journey.

What is Employee Journey?

An employee’s journey is the period that an employee spends at an organization, from when they apply to when they resign. Employee journey framework helps HR understand and enhance employee experience by understanding the sum of all the incidents experienced by an employee over their time with an organization.

Employees’ experiences are shaped by these moments and milestones (big and small) – and they provide opportunities for you to tune in to their needs, make your workplace more equitable and inclusive, and close any gaps that employees may have.

You can help your employees build a strong foundation for a positive employee experience by pointing out these crucial moments – but they may not remember the second or third day.

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What is Employee Journey Mapping?

An employee journey map illustrates the total employee experience in an organization.

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A map of your employees’ journey while your organization employs them is the key to improving employee experience. Organizations can prioritize resources and funding, clarify roles, and identify critical moments that matter through Employee Journey Mapping.

The employee journey mapping process should contain detailed information about when and how individuals will receive feedback on their performance.

In addition, employee journey mapping allows you to visualize the various steps and emotional states your employees experience while interacting with the company.

1. Ensure the organization views employee experience from a common perspective.
2. Emphasize the moments that matter most in the EX program.
3. Streamline employee-centric thinking and actions.
4. Prioritize resources and funding.
5. Clarify critical roles within the organization

What are the Benefits Of Employee Journey Mapping?

Increasingly, organizations are seeking feedback and insights at every stage of the employee journey.

This enables you to understand better the moments that matter most, how these moments affect employee experiences, and how to improve metrics such as engagement, attrition, and productivity at each stage.

Employee journey mapping is a powerful tool for designing and implementing better experiences throughout the organization, based on insights gained from the mapping process.

As businesses acquire a better understanding of the employee journey, here are some benefits they enjoy:

1. Reduced turnover

When a company invests more in its employees’ careers, 94% of employees who leave will stay there longer.

When you understand your employees’ journey, you can determine what learning and development opportunities are right for them and how to plan their development paths accordingly.

2. Increased employee engagement

According to a Gallup study, it is no surprise that most HR departments are constantly tracking and improving their KPIs in this area, given that 87% of employees are neither engaged nor actively disengaged.

Identifying areas for improvement and fixing any obstacles that could hinder employee engagement is more effortless when you understand your employees’ journeys. 

Further, you can coordinate fun engagement activities to boost employee morale while tracking each initiative’s success at every step. 

3. Positive company culture

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As 88% of employees agree that unique workplace culture is crucial to the success of a business, mapping an employee journey provides conditions for a positive work culture to thrive, bolsters relationships between employees, and encourages teamwork.

4. Revealing and Optimizing Unseen Experiences

Employee journey mapping helps you analyze the more hidden aspects of the employee experience. There are multiple employee journey maps that you can implement and smoothen employee journeys.

5. Fixing Bad Experiences More Effectively

You can use journey mapping to determine why you haven’t met employee expectations and how to remedy the situation.

5 Stages to Map the Employee Journey 

From the point an employee applies for a job until the day they leave, there are five employee journey mapping stages:

1. Recruitment

Among the steps involved in hiring a new employee are the following:

• The length of time it takes to hire
• The cost of hiring
• The acceptance rate of offers
• The quality of the hire

Were your job postings attractive and clear enough for the best candidates to apply? Were your interview processes engaging and reassuring enough for great candidates to accept your job offer quickly?

2. On-Boarding

The procedure where a new employee learns about the company’s systems, tools, and processes, as well as the role’s expectations, is known as ‘ramp time.’ For new hires to be productive in their job, they need ‘ramp time.’

During an effective employee onboarding process, an individual’s initial excitement about their new job becomes a meaningful, long-term connection to the company and a commitment to doing great things.

3. Development

Employee development occurs at different rates and across various skills, and this is the ongoing stage of employee development. Therefore, your goal should be to quantify employees’ productivity, team player skills, and promotion goals as they develop within their roles.

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As an increasingly important differentiator for employees seeking to build a portfolio career of many different experiences, you should also offer them the opportunity to expand their skill sets.

Often, this stage involves incremental steps or an annual event, such as:

• Role changes
• Promotions
• Performance evaluations

4. Retention

Having ramped up and incorporated employees into the organization, it is your responsibility to keep them executing, contributing, and developing to the company’s success and ensure they are inspired by and connected to its core values.

Organizations employ countless strategies to retain talent, but programs that support employee experience take the following forms:

• Inclusive parental leave
• Extended leave
• Celebrating anniversaries and birthdays

5. Exit

Employees can leave your company for various reasons: they may decide to retire, move to another company, or make a life change.

Eventually, every employee will leave your company, and finding out why is an ideal opportunity for improving and developing the employee experience. Because they feel they don’t have anything to lose by being brutally honest, those who leave may be more candid about why they’re going.

6 Steps to Design an Employee Journey Map

1. Segment Your Employees

Segment your employees based on their roles, not their demographics like age or gender. By identifying your employee personas, you can segment the data later. For example, the experience of an engineer will differ significantly from that of a marketer.

2. Establish the Journey for Each Persona

As soon as you have identified your personas; you can begin mapping out their interactions with the company from the moment they first contact (usually before they are hired) to the moment they eventually leave the organization.

This requires input from a cross-functional team since different departments and units will likely interact differently in the future. Additionally, you might consider the interactions post-exit since retirees, and former employees can sometimes come back or act as advocates for the organization later.

3. Map Feedback and Insights into the Employee Journey

It is essential to map employee feedback to each phase of the lifecycle to truly understand the impact each interaction has on the employee experience.

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To ensure that the feedback mechanism for each persona meets them where they are in the journey and allows them to give feedback right at that moment, make sure each stage of the journey is linked to a feedback mechanism.

As you’ll get the most honest and valuable feedback while they’re still thinking about it, this is much better than postponing up to 12 months to ask them about it.

4. Align Your Measurements at Different Stages in the Employee Journey

Your recruiting, training and onboarding teams will likely manage different stages in the journey. To connect insights across the journey, you must ensure everyone agrees on a consistent approach to measurement to increase employee satisfaction.

For example, it can be an easy metric like eNPS with open-text follow-up questions or a set of five-point Likert scale items consistent across measures (e.g., Engagement).

To have consistent core metrics across many of your measurements, you must have a set of core metrics. For example, exit and onboarding surveys may still contain custom questions unique to those processes. Still, by using the same set of items in each measurement, you can compare them to see how their experiences relate to one another.

5. Combine the Employee Journey with Your Employee Surveys

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You don’t have to stop conducting employee engagement surveys to bring a lifecycle approach to employee journeys. Instead, it should be your cornerstone – but one that provides a more detailed view of employee experience and the key drivers that positively or negatively impact it.

An alternative to the annual survey is to conduct shorter, more frequent surveys, such as biannual engagement or monthly pulse surveys.

First, however, you must connect it to your feedback mechanisms regardless of how you run it. Employee onboarding feedback, for example, is likely to provide insight into how your onboarding process is perceived and how you can improve it.

6. Use Automation to Manage Feedback at Scale

It takes a lot of resources to send out a survey to every employee every time they take a training course, get promoted, or interact with any other moment on their journey.

Set triggers to automatically send feedback to employees when they reach certain milestones by integrating your employee experience program with your HRIS.

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Best Examples of Employee Journey Mapping

How do you ensure your employee journey map fits everyone in your diverse workforce when creating one?

We will discuss some critical guidelines for mapping an employee journey before getting into the specifics so that you can ensure a positive experience from day one to the end of the employee journey.

1. Segment your workforce
2. Create multiple employee journey maps
3. Carry out employee surveys
4. In light of feedback, revise
5. Measure your success at every step

Employee journey mapping illustrates an employee’s interactions within an organization at various stages of its lifecycle. We’ve compiled two stunning employee journey mapping examples we love and suggest you use or tweak them for your company or use the employee journey map template for a more straightforward process.

A. Example #1

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B. Example #2

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Bottom Line

At first, the journey mapping idea was mainly with customer experience. It identified areas to improve customer satisfaction, but later on, companies applied it to employees for the same reason it was developed for, rightfully so.

If used correctly, Employee Journey Mapping can be a massive asset to employee engagement. When done correctly, creating an engaging experience can boost employee morale, retention, motivation, and other benefits.

It will help to remember that journey maps are merely a starting point for determining your organization’s next steps in improving employee satisfaction.

A journey map should be part of a broader employee experience strategy – the actual value and impact will come from actions the organization takes, whether they gather additional feedback or provide the tools employees need to make improvements every moment. Additionally, the employee journey templates will make designing the process easier.

Moreover, it will help you lead better, so now is the time to take the first step!

Updated : September 15, 2023

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