Employee experience begins with an employee being only a candidate for a position and continues even after they have left the company or retired from it. This continuous employee experience journey adds at least one step, if not more, each day.
Designing each employee to navigate every step of their way with a company may sound overwhelming. However, mapping the employee experience journey can ensure employees follow a path that helps them achieve a fair and equal transaction of their skills and time with the company.
Here are some checkpoints for mapping the employee experience journey:
Step 1 – Recruitment
Developing a recruitment system that makes it easy for candidates to submit their resumes and track their progress is designing a tempting starting point for employee experience with your company. A complicated system where employees must manually enter all information their resumes already contain conveys inefficiency and exploitation of candidates’ time.
On the other hand, a system that makes applying to the company quick and hassle-free keeps candidates motivated to join it too. A polite and appreciative rejection email can also keep the candidates wanting to reapply to the organization.
Step 2 – Learning and Development
Mapping employee experience for each day they work at a company is impossible or inefficient. However, compiling the entire journey into learning and development can significantly help employees and employers. Essentially, a company always trains its employees to do better daily. While the training and development are only blatant a few days a year during seminars and workshops, most days, it takes place slowly and subtly.
Considering the employee experience journey as constant improvement prevents the work from becoming monotonous for the employees, keeping them motivated and energized to further their professional careers and better their skills each day.
Step 3 – Rewards and Recognition
Training and development of employees require constant effort. Therefore, consistent external motivation is needed to make employees continue this journey. When mapping employee experience, rewards and recognition must be as impactful as the company wants its employees to make toward its growth.
However, rewards and recognition are often misunderstood by employers. They don’t mean gifting employee company merchandise or giving them lunch coupons. Instead, they include fair wages, bonuses, increments, useful employee benefits, and merit-based chances of promotion. Besides these general ones, a positive employee experience journey for each employee also requires personalized rewards and recognition.
The three main steps of employee experience are sourcing, pre-boarding, onboarding, offering benefits and compensation, employee engagement, measuring performance, planning performance, and feedback and review. It also includes employees quitting, retiring, or getting fired from the company.
No matter what point the employee experience ends, companies must always ensure a positive and successful journey. A great approach to mapping employee experience is to consider it a story. Each company employee is a protagonist in their personal story, with the company being their sidekick.
