Understanding crucial moments using employee journey mapping
Add bookmark
Many employers and human resources (HR) teams are moving towards an employee lifecycle approach to structure, understand, and measure employee experiences. These approaches capture important employee feedback at every stage of their employment lifecycle with a company, from recruitment to exit. Employee lifecycle tracking helps business leaders learn where they need to boost staff morale and address issues, as well as where employees experience the greatest reward. These insights are critical to managing employee job satisfaction, especially given the improved quality of work and increased productivity that engaged employees deliver.
Collecting data from employees to track job satisfaction is nothing new. Surveys on office culture, task enjoyment, and other employment-related topics are commonly distributed throughout offices and workplaces. Most of these surveys ask respondents to rank a statement from ‘least correct’ to ‘most correct’, or from one to five, however, these surveys only scrape the surface when it comes to garnering meaningful information about a company’s employees.
Standard annual or semi-annual surveys fail to account for the fact that everyone is at a different stage in their employee journey. This means that the survey results will be based on important variables managers might never know about and, therefore, can’t address or explore. In addition, while annual surveys are useful, they only allow an organisation to be reactive to results that can often be outdated by the time it analysed. HR leaders should consider a pulse surveys that enable them to track improvements over time with more frequent feedback from your employees. They also allow you to measure the fluctuations in engagement and step in to improve the experience faster than ever.
The more recent phenomenon of journey mapping is classically associated with customer experience (CX) tracking programs. However, business leaders who realise the necessity of providing positive, rewarding and satisfying work environments to their staff have begun tracking various stages of their employees’ careers, length of duty, and job progress, to make important decisions about employee experiences. In the same way customer experience professionals map out consumer journeys to identify pain points along the path from browsing to purchase, HR teams can plot entire employee journeys to understand how each stage impacts employee experience as a whole.
Workplace journey mapping and lifecycle approaches to employee experiences are more realistic, personal, and informative than traditional sources of information gathering. Organisations need to recognise the differences between each employee and value their separate personas. Organisations should identify their employee segments to better understand their different needs and backgrounds. For example, a member of a company’s IT team will have different work experiences than a marketing director. Organisations need to establish guiding principles for employee personas, to establish a path for quality feedback, and align relevant insights with each staff member’s employee journey. Feedback mechanisms should meet employees at each point of their lifecycle, so they can communicate their experiences in training, career progression, and more, over time.
It’s also likely that different stages in this journey will be managed by different teams, including recruiting, training, and onboarding teams. It’s important different teams use consistent measurement approaches to measure the experiences of different groups of employees. This could include, for example, eNPS and open-text follow-up questions, or five-point scales. It’s impossible to compare written responses to numeric values, so, leaders who want to grasp an understanding of employee experiences individually, or as a whole, need to enact a shared and compatible value system for gathering employee data.
In terms of workload, HR teams shouldn’t bear the brunt of learning more about employees’ experiences. While delivering increased feedback, automated processes can save HR teams work, automatically sending feedback forms to each employee at the right times for important milestones. Automated processes can also collate and analyse data, meaning HR teams have more time to work with business leaders to interpret survey results, and determine where employees’ best moments and experiences can drive positive change.
Journey mapping employee experiences at stages from recruitment to onboarding, development and retention, and even employees’ final stages at a company, can help business leaders understand what matters the most to their employees. This information can leading management to repeat or emphasise these moments and features, so employees are supported, engaged, and motivated to perform to their highest potential.
Businesses need to prioritise their employees, and learn from their feedback. Data collection needs to take into account that each employee is unique, with different backgrounds, work experiences, and needs, and that replicating employees’ most valuable moments will deliver value to the company.
Failing to consistently track employee sentiment across different progress and lifecycle points means organisations are missing out on accessing critical information about the most meaningful moments in employees’ work lives, and are thus unable to enhance these areas of reward and positivity, or improve experiences which rated poorly. Workplaces need to evolve and change to keep employees interested, motivated, and productive, and leaders need to right data to fuel the right changes.
See the latest report:
State of Play - Employee Experience in Australia and New Zealand | Singapore | Malaysia
ABOUT QUALTRICS
Qualtrics is the technology platform that organisations use to collect, manage, and act on experience data, also called X-data™. The Qualtrics XM Platform™ is a system of action, used by teams, departments, and entire organisations to manage the four core experiences of business—customer, product, employee and brand—on one platform. Over 9,000 enterprises worldwide, including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100 and 99 of the top 100 U.S. business schools, rely on Qualtrics to consistently build products that people love, create more loyal customers, develop a phenomenal employee culture, and build iconic brands.
To learn more and for a free account, visit:
Qualtrics Australia | Qualtrics Singapore
