Create an Excellent Employee Experience at Every Stage of The Journey

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.