Understanding Employee Journey Mapping for Better Engagement

In one’s professional life, certain experiences always hold a special place for the entirety of it. Some of these can be the first-ever job interview, company, a day at work, promotion, award, etc. These phases are always memorable and depict an integral part of a person’s work life.

Most importantly, these stages in professional life make up the experience of an employee. So, as employers, you must understand how to make these experiences better and portray them best. The solution to this situation is Employee Journey Mapping.

Professional experiences define the level of employee engagement for employees. It is the reason why an individual may revisit a particular scenario or leave it out for good. Therefore, it is vital to have a stronghold on providing fond recollection and projecting it.

It is because, through proper projection, a worker will resonate better with you and be reminded of how far he/she has come. This also goes a long way in bringing out a sense of fulfillment in the journey. It is for these reasons why you must understand Employee Journey Mapping.

So, let’s get you started with it.

What is Employee Journey Mapping?

Employee Journey Mapping is the representation of critical moments that matter in professional life. It pinpoints the stages that are of utmost importance for a worker. By doing so, this concept helps you understand these situations and how to improve them furthermore.

Some of these stages in the employee journey are as follows.

• First Job Interview
• Day of Joining
• First meeting with the team
• First Meeting with Manager on a one-to-one basis
• Crucial onboarding process activities
• The Individual’s Birth Day
• First Team Activity
• First Performance Review
• First Appreciation
• Crucial Company Events
• Exit Interview
• Last day at work

These are a few moments that play a crucial role in this regard. Understanding these significant career moments can help you improve them even further. This is where mapping comes in handy, and here’s why you must get to it carefully and immediately.

Importance of Employee Journey Mapping

1. Insights on Engagement

Understanding journey mapping helps you by providing valuable insights on engagement through countless feedback from employees. It is because this initiative revolves around human resource professionals knowing the employees better.

By doing this, you have a better understanding of what inspires and motivates your employees the most. Coming to terms with this uncovers numerous areas on which you may have been lacking previously. All these, adding to your level of wisdom on employee engagement.

2. Better Hiring

Journey Mapping also helps you nail that perfect hire who fits into your company culture. Most of the time, hires are mainly done on skills and not on alignment with company experience. It results in the new hires being unsatisfied and leaving within the first few months.

Most HR teams pitch a company culture and experience that tend to be different from the prevailing one in interviews. It is because they don’t know their existing workforce well enough to understand what drives them. This gap results in misinterpretation.

Understanding journey mapping can help you understand the organizational core values. By doing this, it enables you to understand who’ll fit well and thrive in the company. This results in a sound hiring of competent and happy candidates with a company’s experience.

3. Fruitful Spending

A company spends a lot of money on hiring and managing a workforce. Since you can never have enough funds, it is wise to invest them safely. So, you should handle your finances wisely in maintaining your staff.

In this respect, while companies are happy to spend money, many don’t know what makes their workforce happy. This results in pointless spending that helps neither party.

Understanding the experiences that are most valued by employees helps in better resource allocation. It will help you know when and where to invest, thereby saving you unnecessary costs.

4. Better Experience

All of the points mentioned above point to only one thing, improved employee experience. Understanding journey mapping will help you know what aspects you must focus on. These aspects contribute to happy employees, which is worth a lot.

These are a few reasons citing the importance of employee journey mapping in your company. Keeping view of this, we recommend you start with journey mapping as soon as possible.

Here is a brief look at how to get about mapping an employee journey to help you through.

How to Design Employee Journey Mapping

1. Understanding different Personas

Given that every one of us is unique, you must first segment your employees in different areas. Here, creating an employee persona goes a long way. Employee persona is a segmentation based on a semi-fictional representation of employees with similar attributes, traits, experiences. These can be based on:

• gender,
• demographic,
• career line,
• personality,
• professional experience, etc.

In this case, you’d also be better suited by dividing your employees based on their field of work as well. A person in the engineering field will have different stages of importance than a person in marketing. So, other than personas, you must consider this point as well.

2. Journey Mapping

After understanding the personas and their interactions, you must ascertain and map their journey so far. Here you must also have cross-functional team inputs as people in different departments will have different experiences in the company.

It is essential here to understand how an employee feels about his/her journey so far. This mapping process must be maintained until the exit interview to understand the entire cycle of said employees.

3. Feedback

Once the mapping is over, now comes the turn of collecting feedback. To better facilitate this, there must be a proper mechanism for feedback at each stage of the map. This will help you understand how a specific event went and how it can improve in the future.

It is important to note here that the feedback must be collected immediately for the stages/events and not wait until a year.

4. Deciding on measuring metrics

Now, to the decision on the metrics to measure acquired qualitative and quantitative data. Since this process needs the participation of numerous teams, it will have results from various groups for different employees. These teams could be Hiring, Onboarding, Training, etc.

So, there must be a unified measuring metric involved in the process. It can be a number-based or open text system wherein employees need to answer questions for their feedback.

5. Automation

Since this is a long process taking into account many stages, manually handling it can be tedious. So, it is better if the process gets automated into your system. Here, the system should automatically ask for feedback when an employee reaches a milestone or things.

6. Follow-Up

Once these steps are over, follow up on the feedback and find ways to improve upon it. Come up with innovative ideas that will resonate well with your employees. Next time around, implement those to compare results.

These are the steps necessary to carve out a perfect representation of an Employee Journey Mapping.

Conclusion

At first, the journey mapping concept was mainly with customer experience. It identified the pain points and areas to improve on customer experience. Later on, it got applied to employees for the same reason it was first established for and rightfully so.

Employee Journey Mapping can be a great asset in employee engagement if appropriately utilized. When done nicely, proper experience design can build up your workforce in ways unimaginable. Be it employee morale, retention, employee motivation, etc.

What’s even more important is that it will help you lead better as well. All that’s left for you now is to take the first step and go for it!

This article is written by Jyoti Prakash Barman. He is an in-house Content Marketer at Vantage Circle with interests in music and automobiles. For any related queries, contact editor@vantagecircle.com