Sometimes it’s the journey, not the destination; employee journey mapping can help everyone enjoy the trip.
Journey mapping, though typically associated with efforts to track customer/patient encounters, can help you identify the moments that matter to employees in their work experience.
What is journey mapping? Generally, it is a process in which you visually plot out the experience your employees have in their tenure with your business, helping to identify opportunities for improvement and highlighting the good and bad parts of the experience. Employee journey mapping enables HR to examine what employees are saying about the organization (for instance, on social media) and determine how closely their experiences match what is described in recruitment and hiring materials. Via mapping, HR can track each stage of employment to understand how it impacts the worker’s experience holistically.
Employee journey mapping starts with needs-based segmentation that groups employees based on their needs and desires. This can help ensure greater insight than grouping employees by title, tenure, or department. For instance, it gives you information you can use to create programming around employee interests such as opportunities to pursue certifications or advance degrees, community/cause-related projects and volunteer programs, and/or greater work flexibility.
Start the journal map with first impressions. What can recruits expect when they come to work for your organization? Do your website, social media pages, and other online sources of information present an honest and clear portrait of your workplace? Are interviewees treated the same as employees? What do employees who stay longer have in common? Ensuring a positive experience from the recruit/employee’s first encounter with the organization can enable workers to be your best advocates and recruiters.
It may be valuable to have different team members—including recruiting, training, and onboarding staff–managing the various stages of the employee’s journey. However, they should all use consistent measurement approaches to document and analyze information. For instance, answers to open-ended questions can’t be effectively compared to numbers (such as “on a scale from 1 to 10”), so you need a shared and compatible value system to gather data. This includes having shared definitions and terminology.
These efforts can make a powerful difference. Highly engaged teams outperform the competition by 147%, according to research. Particularly in a highly competitive job market, businesses need to step up employee engagement; and, as part of this, they need to honestly assess if they are meeting employees’ needs. Employee journey mapping can provide important answers.
