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Simply put, the employee experience is the journey an employee takes within your organisation. Importantly, a journey shouldn’t just happen. It should be carefully planned, prepared, and executed so that every employee feels a part of the organisation, knows their purpose, and has opportunities to grow.
Without those things, employees may lack engagement and become less committed to their jobs over time.
Start Here: Build an Employee Journey Map
The process of plotting your employee’s experiences on a map is a proactive approach to developing a holistic view of stages. It also allows you to better track what’s working and what’s not.
If you’ve ever helped create a customer journey map, outlining and visualising your customers’ or end users’ experiences with your organisation, you’ll be familiar with this exercise. Just as a marketer or operations team would use a customer journey map to improve customer or client experience, so can business and HR leaders use an employee journey map to both visualise and improve employee experience.
First, begin by naming the journey stages. Yours may look something like this:
- Recruiting & Hiring
- Onboarding
- Engagement & Retention
- Development
Next, plot on your map what should be taking place at every stage for the best possible employee experience. What are the objectives for each phase? What will the employee be feeling or experiencing at each phase? What actions should be taken and by whom? What are the touchpoints? How will experience be measured?
This is best when done for each employee “segment” within your organisation. A segment could be specific to the department in which they work (such as sales, IT or marketing) or to their role (such as a manager or coordinator), or, ideally, both. It should also consider their location: deskless employees will have a vastly different experience in their journey than someone sitting in the corporate office, for example.
Let’s take a closer look at each journey stage, along with some ideas for creating an excellent experience at each stage.
Recruiting & Hiring
What the prospective employee might be feeling:
Fear or apprehension about their ability to find a job, or maybe eager and exctied to discover a new role in a new company.
How to make it an excellent experience:
This phase is likely the very first time your prospective employees get a glimpse into your company values and culture. Your hiring process should be clear, engaging, and effectively communicate those values in addition to outlining job requirements. Ease any concerns about your company or organisation with strong communication from this earliest phase.
Onboarding
What the employee might be feeling:
Both excited and nervous about starting in their new role, as well as overwhelmed at the amount of information they must consume and remember.
How to make it an excellent experience:
A Gallup study found that only 12% of employees think their companies do a great job onboarding new employees. Rather than adding your organisation to the other 88%, kick off onboarding strong with a thoughtful approach to this phase of the journey.
- Provide information that is as targeted to their role and as personalised as possible, so they feel welcome and valued (and not like just another new hire). Bonus experience points for offering multi-lingual onboarding support in an employee app.
- You’ll be providing a ton of logistical information, company documents, policies, and so on. Make it digestible, easy to locate and access, and available on any device.
- At the same time that they’re getting up to speed on essentials, make sure they know where to find the fun. For instance, our in-app “Events & Competitions” feature can be customised to bring your employees together (physically or digitally). Check out how Biffa set up some fun competitions on their Thrive employee app, creating connection and increasing engagement.
- Make sure they know who leadership is and how to access other contact information via a readily accessible directory of people.
Engagement & Retention
What the employee might be feeling:
Ideally, they will feel they’re part of a team and that they have valuable skills and ideas to contribute. However, after just six months of employment, enthusiasm declines by 22%. Depending on the experience and other factors, the employee may be discouraged, feel overlooked, or like they don’t quite fit in or measure up.
How to make it an excellent experience:
- Provide the ongoing training and support they need not just to perform their job functions, but to progress professionally, as well. This will lead to greater retention and help your organisation avoid being swept up in the “turnover tsunami” that’s affected so many this year.
- Foster inclusion and encourage all voices to contribute in a variety of ways, whether it’s by creating user-generated content or participating in pulse surveys to share their opinions and experiences.
- Proactively communicate with employees, and ensure they have ways to offer feedback. Then, respond to that feedback so employees know they are heard.
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- Celebrate achievements and empower team members to recognise each other. Integrate an employee app into your existing recognition programmes to make recognition more immediate and “sticky.”
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Development
What the employee might be feeling:
Many employees will be keen to grow their skills and even move up. Some may feel disgruntled and bored. Both types of employees need opportunities to grow and need to be recognised.
How to make it an excellent experience:
- Take pulse surveys and use the resulting data to know where the business can improve upon its employee experience and what employees want in terms of development opportunities.
- Motivate employees with an abundance of training and development modules and other learning and growth opportunities. Make these things easy for employees to access where and when they would like. Personalise training to the employee.
- Continue to recognise employees on a frequent basis by publishing success stories straight to your app (employees can do this, too!).
- Use events and competitions to encourage interaction, connection and well-being.
Next Steps…
An employee communications app from Thrive can help you elevate the employee experience at every single journey stage. Find out how simple it is to get started and how quickly you can get our powerful features in the hands of your employees.
