Employee experience is too important for a company’s success to be ignored. No organization can operate without human resources, yet often they are forgotten in the customers’ shade and addressing business needs.
Meanwhile, employees face various challenges, may experience different pains, have certain needs, and strive to achieve some goals. And all of these affect their motivations, efficiency, retention, and work results.
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace, only 1 in 5 employees in the USA says their performance is managed the way that motivates them to do outstanding work. What is even more surprising, just 1 in 3 employees is committed to their work and workplace. In terms of productivity and company profit, that sounds like a pretty unfortunate oversight.
After all, the employee experience journey map is the key that can help a business turn motivated employees from a luxury into an everyday reality. And this key isn’t hard to obtain.
When done right, an employee journey map not only visualizes the timeline of the entire employee’s experience with your organization but also provides valuable insights into what people go through every day, and inspire actionable ideas on how to enhance the positive sides of their experience and fix the negative ones.
When mapping employee experience, there are some expert tips and tricks that you can use straight away to reap all the rewards journey mapping can offer.
Identify stakeholders correctly
Can you list the main stakeholders that interact with an employee or influence their journey indirectly? How much impact do they have at different stages of the employee journey? At what employee journey touchpoints? Via what channels?
Remarkably, many employee journey mappers can’t answer these questions and save themselves from the headache of interviewing every somehow concerned person.
So to considerably ease the process and identify the key people influencing the employee journey, make sure to learn their:
- Position in the company;
- Degree of influence on the employee;
- Degree of influence on the mapping project;
- Relation to a specific employee journey steps;
- Engagement hooks;
- And so on.
Don’t forget to define the frequency of your further communication as well.
After identifying your stakeholders, devote time to encouraging their engagement in the mapping process and discussing their ideas and points. You can also create and share a checklist with every step your stakeholders should take throughout their mission.
Keep in mind power dynamics in the team. And remember that people might be reluctant to share the truth, fearing the consequences.
Gather exhaustive and unbiased information
A sure-fire way to uncover what resonates with your employees and use this information in your employee experience map is to keep your finger on the pulse of their everyday work routine. To do so, you have to collect feedback from employees regularly.
However, formal questionnaires or reviews might weigh your employees down or simply fail in terms of frankness, as employees might be scared that their honesty will be used against them.
Here’s how you can put your employees at ease, inspire honest feedback, and get the data you need:
- Use such activities as a suggestion box, daily sharing of one positive and one negative thing everyone faces, or spread out short everyday reflection prompts.
- Keep in mind that former employees will be franker than the current ones, just as those who work long enough will more willingly talk about the onboarding process rather than newcomers;
- Practice gathering anonymous feedback.
- Ask a person from another department to help with collecting employee feedback.
- Remember that communication is not only about words. Pay attention to employees’ body language as well.
- Be an example and share the truth yourself.
Obviously, the feedback from employees at different stages of their journey will be different. And differentiating between the desires of one employee and changes that would benefit all the workers can be quite a challenge.
Look for common patterns and don’t add particular cases to the map. You have to focus on what will benefit the majority of your staff.
Scope and conquer
Building an end-to-end journey sounds overarching, impressive, and requires too much time and effort. To save both, you can always scope your employee journey, basing on:
- Stage (e.g., an employee onboarding journey map);
- Job (e.g., a customer support agent journey map;
- Location (e.g., a remote employee journey map);
- Event (e.g., a team-building journey map);
- Any other criteria that suit your particular case.
You can also go iteratively, building an end-to-end employee experience journey stage by stage, then combine them together to create a single exhaustive map.
Take the most of the onboarding stage
You can endlessly contemplate your beautifully designed map, but if you aren’t willing to lose any valuable candidates, it’s better to fix problems you found out at the onboarding stage at the quickest.
As soon as you receive the feedback from newcomers and the old-timers on the recruitment and onboarding process, use it to attract new candidates and improve their experience with your company.
Ensure that your HRs know what to emphasize in vacancies, what company features to highlight during interviews, and what to focus on during onboarding to support the hiree and make a good first impression that will last on the following employee journey stages.
Choose employees over results
Often, it’s way easier to get support from the top management and engage stakeholders when customers are involved. But when it comes to employee experience, it’s another kettle of fish.
What’s worse, sometimes employee experience is sacrificed in favor of customer’s desires and needs, as well as business KPIs. This can reasonably be considered a crime against the company’s success and profit, as employee satisfaction and efficiency are deeply interconnected with the customer experience and business metrics.
Not to mention that people who leave the company because of the bad experience can cause you loss of reputation and extra costs.
So when looking at your customer journey map and considering ways to improve their experience, keep in mind your employees and how your ideas affect them. You may reduce your staff’s lunchtime to serve a few more clients, and it may work at first. But then you’ll find out that a hungry worker provides bad service. Thus customer experience suffers even more.
When ideating on the employee journey map, focus on people who trusted you with their feedback. Make sure you act ethically and protect their interests.
