Your employees are among the top factors that determine whether your business thrives or fails. To ensure you’re serving them well and maintaining an effective, highly productive team, you need to understand their experience as employees. We aren’t talking about interning in each department as an undercover-type operation. We’re talking about employee journey mapping.

So what is employee journey mapping and how do you complete this beneficial process? Allow our experts to explain.

What Is Employee Journey Mapping?

Employee journey mapping is the practice of creating a timeline for your employee journey. Obviously every employee’s experience is unique, but they each go through a process of similar stages in their journey from hiring to eventual exit.

Employee journey mapping is an adaptation of a common practice in business development, customer journey mapping. In a similar way, it helps you guide employees through the pipeline in the most positive, productive way.

A thorough employee journey map should also include a matrix of details for each step. These details can include factors like employee goals and expectations, the process involved, employees’ experiences or feelings, challenges, and necessary steps for progress, with all of this information recorded at every stage.

Benefits of Employee Journey Mapping

If you do it well, employee journey mapping can be a valuable way to improve your employee experience and set up your business for a better balance sheet. There are several ways employee journey mapping can benefit you.

Organizing and Managing the Employee Journey

As a business leader, it’s easy to lose sight of your employees’ experiences and have no idea whether you have a labor issue on your hands. An employee journey map gives you a firmer handle on the employee experience.

Identifying Ways to Improve the Employee Experience

Understanding more about your employee experience is a first step toward making that employee experience better. When you have a thorough map of the employee journey, you can take a closer look at every stage and identify ways to be a better employer. This can lead to higher revenue from a more productive staff, better ability to hire strong talent, improved employee retention – the domino effect goes on and on.

Unifying the Leadership Approach

While you want every manager in your organization to use their individual talents, you want some level of consistency in your leadership too. When you have a well-organized employee journey map, you can share this with your leadership team at every level so everyone is on the same page about how to guide employees toward advancement and leaders can be held accountable to that plan.

Steps to Employee Journey Mapping

The benefits of employee journey mapping sound great, so how do you take advantage of this strategy? We’re taking you through the six steps to do just that

1. Create Employee Segments or Personas

Your employee journey can look very different for people in different roles and departments. A member of your sales team will have a very different experience and progression compared to a member of your warehouse staff, for example, or an IT professional. Start your employee journey mapping by dividing your employees into segments that follow similar journeys.

2. List the Stages of Your Employee Journey for Each Segment

Now that you have your segments, create a list of the basic stages of the employee experience journey for each segment. These don’t have to include specific promotions or positions. You can keep it fairly general, such as:

• Recruitment and hiring
• Onboarding
• Learning and development
• Engagement
• Advancement
• Offboarding and exit

This will provide the initial structure for your employee journey map.

3. Create Your Matrix Template

Now that you have a general map, turn it into a matrix with a set of details you want to know about each stage. This can vary, but some of the details could include:

• Employee goals and expectations
• Employee’s experiences and feelings
• Challenges the employee faces
• What is needed for the employee to progress to the next stage
• Ways your organization can improve the experience at this stage

This matrix will be your guide as you go on a fact-finding mission to discover what your employees experience during each stage of their journey.

4. Conduct Employee Experience Research

Now it’s time for the real work: getting a view of the employee journey from your employees’ perspective so you can fill in all those details in your matrix properly. The best way to do this is with a strategic employee experience survey.

Create a survey that asks employees about their experiences within each stage of the employee journey. Make sure that the survey can be segmented by the groups you planned in step 1.

To ensure you’re getting as useful and thorough insights as possible, choose a survey tool that’s able to take in, process, and analyze open-ended responses too. GroupSolver, for example, can process and analyze open-ended answers automatically and uses AI to build the survey as it goes, allowing other respondents to evaluate popular answers. Put together, that means you get a comprehensive report of practical takeaways and quantifiable data.

5. Map Results of Employee Survey to the Employee Journey

Once you have your survey results, it’s time to break them out based on the stage of the employee journey they reflect. This allows you to get a better understanding of your employee engagement journey, what employees experience, and what challenges they face either because of your organization or because of inevitable factors in that stage.

6. Use Research to Fill In Your Matrix

Finally, it’s time to put it all together. Now that you’ve separated your survey insights into the stages of your employee journey, you can look at each stage as a whole to answer the questions in your matrix. When this is done, you’ll have a thorough, authentic view of your team’s employee journey and how you can improve their experience and secure better retention, better talent, and a more promising future for your organization.

Beginning Your Employee Journey Mapping

If you feel a disconnect between your upper leadership and your employees or if you want to find out how to improve your retention and help employees reach their potential, now is the time to take action with employee journey mapping. Get started today with the steps above and with a GroupSolver demo to see how we can help you get the insights you need