What is an employee journey?
An employee journey encapsulates all of an employee’s interactions with your company, from considering working for you, getting hired, going through onboarding, performing their job within your company’s processes and operations, fitting into your company’s culture, growing or learning on-the-job in service of a promotion or raise and their eventual departure from your company (whether through retirement, resignation, termination or other reason for leaving). You’d be hard-pressed to find a company that excels at each of these steps, but the very best companies to work for tend to pay close attention to each and are always looking for ways to improve. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the steps of the employee journey and how your company can succeed at each.
Related Articles: The Secret to Improve Company Culture
Consideration
Long before an employee joins your company, they interface with your company’s employer brand. They see what presence your company has on social media and what people are saying about your company not just as a place to work, but also as a participant in the marketplace. Do you make good products? Do you have a reputation for great customer service? Is your website intuitive, and your social media fun and trendy? These may seem insignificant, but they drive consideration when it comes to whether or not someone aspires to work at your company. If little is known about your company, your reputation is poor or you invest little to no attention into your corporate website or social media, there’s a good chance you’ll have a harder time recruiting top talent to work for you. Changing jobs is a huge shift in peoples’ lives, and they aren’t just going to blindly trust your company because you’re willing to put a job offer in front of them.
Hiring
The hiring process is vitally important to get right, as it sets the stage for what the employee can expect from your company. If you maintain clear and consistent communication, stick to timelines and keep interactions positive, candidates will form a positive perception of your company and start the employment relationship on the right foot. The hiring process can also be mismanaged quite badly, which causes frustration among candidates. Nobody likes being strung along by an employer who takes forever to respond to queries and continuously pushes back deadlines and dates. Refusing to maintain clear and consistent communication can signal to potential hires that your organization is run in a similar manner. Even if the rest of your company is run well, neglecting your hiring process can create a bad first impression.
Onboarding
Once you’ve extended a job offer to the right candidate and they accept, you need to onboard them to your company. A good onboarding can make the difference between an employee hitting the ground running and being able to contribute to your company right away, and that same employee feeling lost, hopeless and discouraged before they’ve even had much of a chance to work for you. Try to expose the new employee to as many facets of their new job right away, instead of making them wait to take on projects or duties. Maintain open communication so they can ask questions about anything they are struggling with. Having a policy booklet or resource for them to refer to is also useful. If you have trouble onboarding a new hire to your processes and systems, it may be a sign that your processes and systems are too complicated and are in need of an overhaul.
Related Articles: How To Improve Your Workplace Communication Skills
Performing
Speaking of your company’s processes and systems, they will play a major role in your new employees’ ability to thrive at your company. It is your responsibility as an employer to give your employees the conditions necessary to thrive. That means putting them on a team with people who complement their strengths, removing bureaucracy, giving realistic and attainable goals to reach and not being afraid to allow them some ownership over their work. All of these are ways to empower employees and give them a sense of accomplishment. The opposite of this would be constraining an employee and smothering them with needless minutiae that has nothing to do with their day-to-day responsibilities.
Developing
You shouldn’t expect an employee to know everything right off the bat when you hire them, which makes training and development important. The way your company values and invests in its employees will pay off in both increased employee satisfaction and productivity. By offering relevant, timely, industry-specific training, you position your workforce to succeed compared to your competition. By not offering training, or offering substandard training, your employees will feel stagnant. They won’t be equipped to deal with new challenges or to capitalize on new opportunities your company could take. This will lower everyone’s morale and make your company less competitive in the marketplace.
Departing
Finally, the way an employee leaves your company matters. If it’s their own choice to leave, it should be the result of an opportunity they feel is too good to pass up. If they are a star employee, you should try to retain them by matching or beating whatever competing offer they’ve received. If they’ve already made up their mind about leaving, conduct an exit interview where you learn more about their decision to leave and whether anything could’ve been done differently. This will ensure you don’t make the same mistakes with your remaining employees and should inform you on what to emphasize when looking for the employee’s replacement. Working someone to the bone for all two weeks of their notice period, making them take on other peoples’ work or merely ignoring them after they tender their resignation are all surefire ways to annoy them and make them tell others about how awful their experience was.
Related Articles: 8 Exit Interview Questions that You Should Ask
By focusing on each stage of the employee journey, you can play a major role in influencing what people think about your company and what it’s like to work there. By ignoring it, you risk your reputation, and all sorts of negative sentiment can build in short order. Take control of the employee journey and reap the benefits of having happier, engaged, more productive employees.
