Retaining your deskless workforce and attracting high-quality performers is more challenging than ever, with turnover rates soaring and draining company budgets — but with employee journey mapping, you can fight back with success.
Creating an employee journey map contributes largely to a positive work experience and great company culture. It shows you’re ready to invest in their professional growth, and in return, you get a loyal fleet of workers with impeccable skills.
Today, we’ll elaborate on the employee journey concept, explain it in detail, and show you how to create an employee journey map from scratch — with an employee journey mapping example. We’ll also show you how employee journey mapping creates a shared path to success for your business and your staff.
What Is the Employee Journey?
The employee journey is a sum of everything the employee experiences with an employer, from the moment they see the job ad to their last day of employment.
It encompasses the total time spent at the company, including training and directions they’ve received, their everyday work, (un)fulfilled promises, benefits, development, treatment from all sides, and exit activities upon the contract termination.
Employee Journey Stages, From Recruitment to Departure
Here are the phases and activities comprising the employee journey from start to finish.
1. Attracting and recruiting
How you attract potential employees determines their first encounter with the company.
This includes how you describe the position you’re hiring for, what you expect and offer, company values and mission, and how you respond to interested parties before deciding who gets to proceed to the hiring process.
2. Hiring process
From the moment you start vetting the candidates to the day they accept the offer, this part of the journey includes all knowledge assessments, conversations, and pre-hiring negotiations.
Hiring efficiency and speed, how well the employee matches the employee persona, and how responsive the hiring managers contribute significantly to a good employee experience.
3. Onboarding and initial training
Skilled HR functions cover a wide range of pre-boarding, onboarding, and post-boarding activities, along with in-depth training.
Companies that take onboarding seriously retain their workforce longer and may humble-brag online about their happy and productive staff. 😏
If you’re ready to create a stellar onboarding process for your frontline staff, check out our dedicated blogs:
- Mastering Pre-Boarding for Deskless Employees: Everything You Need to Know
- Best Practices for Onboarding Deskless Workers
- Empowering the Deskless Workforce with Automated Onboarding
4. Day-to-day work
The essence and the core part of the employee journey.
Employee experience is, for the greater part, comprised of all the workdays stacked next to each other — and the factors that shape these workdays include:
- All the tasks they need to perform;
- Physical working conditions, including working premises and equipment;
- Interpersonal relationships with coworkers, subordinates, and superiors;
- Customer interactions;
- Career development and improvement opportunities.
5. Different exit and post-exit scenarios (offboarding)
Your actions when you deem your (former) employees no longer useful for your business tell a lot about your values.
Whether they quit or you decide not to extend their contract, providing a good exit experience is important.
If you part amicably, show respect, and help them transition to their next role, you will retain a company advocate and possibly a future partner. When staff member resigns, accept their letter with dignity, make sure the legal work is correct, and conduct an exit survey/ interview to learn why they’re leaving and what you could have done to avoid that.
However, pragmatism is vital in the case of terminations — nobody appreciates getting fired. To make firing less painful for both sides, notify them as early as possible, so they can start seeking new roles. In addition to administrative tasks, fulfil all your promises during their time in the company, and be clear about the reasons behind the decision.
Assess the situation; if appropriate, send parting gifts and help them secure the next job by providing letters of recommendation.
Otherwise, you may create an enemy whose impression can damage your reputation and make hiring new, high-quality staff more difficult.
What Makes the Employee Experience Good?
Employee journey can have its ups and downs, but these things can ensure staff powers through bad days as easily and quickly as possible:
- An outlet for honest feedback. -Keep the feedback loop open and allow everyone to express their needs and opinions without fear of resentment and punishment, no matter their place in the hierarchy. Performance reviews are an opportune time to voice concerns and seek solutions as a team. And, of course, apply what you’ve learned from the feedback.
- Employee recognition and appraisal - Showing that you appreciate their work and rewarding good performance makes the employee journey joyful and exciting.
- Employee engagement and development. - Keeping the levels of enthusiasm for the job high is a continuous effort. Beyond offering competitive salaries, employee engagement considers employee needs on a deeper level. Activities may range from fun to educational — you may feel the pulse and learn which ones to increase with employee engagement surveys.
Providing ongoing support for employees’ desire to learn and grow and outlining their future with employee experience journey mapping is key to employee satisfaction. ⬇️
What Is an Employee Journey Map, and Why Does It Matter?
An employee journey map is a diagram or an illustration that helps visualise all stages of an employee journey/ experience.
Mapping out an employee journey is beneficial to both new hires and companies:
- Once the employee gains an insight into their journey map, they can predict what will their future at the company look like. Knowing what they may expect and what they need to do to advance their career, their duties, and outcomes allows them a piece of mind and helps them align with company goals and values.
- Employers can make the employee experience smooth by discovering employees’ pain points, growth possibilities, and optimisation opportunities.
Most importantly, employee journey maps can help companies identify value-creation opportunities. In employee journey mapping, this means discovering what valuable thing you can offer an employee in return for providing top-quality performance. So, a small/ medium investment with a profitable outcome.
For example, if you discover that a lack of proper training for the new POS is a cause of stress for employees, creating a video instruction and making it available on their devices for unlimited access would be profitable. After learning from the instructional video, staff can process the payments faster, without bugs, and without deterring customers who hate waiting.
Employee Journey Mapping Example
Going stage by stage, as we did above, let’s create an employee journey map:
- Create an employee persona — Demographic information, formal and informal education, work experience, seniority, hard and soft skills, desired career path, ambitions, goals, values, motivations, fears, and temperament: build a detailed profile of your dream hire.
- Learn where to discover and how to attract that persona — Investigate what kind of job boards your desired hire browses for job opportunities. Then, think about what you have to offer and why they should enthusiastically accept the job. For some, it could be student loan assistance; for others, flexibility or private health insurance.
- Research employee experience for the same/similar positions -If there’s a role similar to the one you’re hiring for with a pre-established journey path, take a close look at it. The theory is good, but the practice is king: lived experience and input from existing employees will help you shape a more realistic journey map.
- Define what their job will look like — List all the tasks they’ll be in charge of; this is important so you can set the right expectations from the start and avoid them being overworked and underpaid. Cover different stages of onboarding, employment, and experience.
- Create an employee journey map — With knowledge and stats gathered from employee persona design and employee experience research, you can create a solid employee journey map.
To create a journey map:
- Start by creating a simple template you’ll fill out with employee journey stages: recruiting, hiring, onboarding & training, daily tasks and responsibilities, and offboarding;
- Add details for each step, describing what they entail;
- Explain desired outcomes of said activities;
- Add motivators that help employees move forward in their careers;
- Add paths for career growth possibilities, horizontal and vertical.
A simple employee journey map template should look something like this (with some room for your iterations and personalization):
