The employee experience — everything that an employee encounters and feels from when they apply to their role to when they eventually leave your company, is becoming a major area of attention for organizations that want to attract and retain top talent. Having a positive employee experience can be one of the biggest contributors to helping you develop a strong employer brand. A positive employee experience is one of those things that speaks for itself and that can help you establish a reputation as being a great company to work for, ultimately giving you free marketing through word of mouth! Let’s dive into how you can map out your employee experience so that you can start improving it sooner rather than later. 

Why should you map out the employee experience? 

According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, 85% of employees are not engaged or are actively disengaged at work. This is truly alarming since the results of a disengaged workforce can be astonishing. According to a study on workplace engagement in the U.S, disengaged employees cost organizations around $450-550 billion each year.

Where does mapping out the employee experience come in? Rather than looking at low employee engagement as one giant issue you might not know how to start tackling this. Mapping out your employee journey and assessing your employee experience helps you pinpoint the exact areas in your business that need some tweaking, be it in how you onboard staff to how you reward them. Once you can start optimizing these experiences, you’ll start to see improvements in productivity, engagement, and employee retention in your company.  

Going through the process of mapping out and evaluating your employee experience is also important because it is a means to help you provide an amazing experience in a consistent and repeatable manner. Think of it as doing the groundwork to save you time later. 

1. Map out the steps in your employee journey

The first thing you need to do to start developing a great employee experience is to sit down to map out your employee journey. This is all the touchpoints and processes your employees go through as they move through your company as well as what tools they use at the time. Here are a few examples:

RECRUITING 

• • The job postings. Your job postings might be the very first time potential talent discovers your company. How these are written, where they are listed (e.g. Linkedin, and your careers page), and how much exposure they get can make or break whether candidates choose to apply.
  
• • The application process. A lengthy and daunting application process that goes on forever can easily stress out candidates, but a smooth and well-thought-out process can really impress them. While you’re assessing candidates for fit, they too are forming an opinion of who you are as a business. 

ONBOARDING 

• • Before the first day. Does your company do anything to hype up its new recruits, get them excited for their first day, and help them address any anxieties by letting them know what to expect when they start or are they thrown into the deep end?
  
• • The first day. What does your team do to make your new hires feel welcome on the first day and help integrate them into your company culture? 

ENGAGEMENT & DEVELOPMENT 

• • Learning and support. What do you do to make sure your employees feel supported and that you are dedicated to their growth and development? Do they feel like they have to come to you to ask for the support, tools, and resources they need or are you making an active effort to deliver what they need before they anticipate it?
  
• • Recognition and reward. What are you doing to recognize and reward your staff to keep them motivated and happy while building a strong culture of connection? Do you host annual employee awards? Encourage peer recognition? Or make use of employee rewards and recognition software that helps keep this top of mind? 

EXIT 

• • Giving notice & exit interview. What does the process look like when an employee is ready to part ways with your company? Does your exit interview feel comfortable for them and help them leave on good terms?
  

2. Identify areas of improvement 

Next, go through each of these steps to evaluate what aspects need to be improved. For example, you might go through your job descriptions only to notice that they talk a lot about the responsibilities and expectations of the roles, but do little to communicate what makes your company unique and a great place to work. Improving this step of the process can mean developing a new template for writing your job descriptions. 

You might also observe that new hires feel quite lost on the first day and come to you with many repeated questions. This is an opportunity to strengthen your onboarding communications to make sure they feel more well prepared.

If you’re getting feedback that your staff aren’t satisfied with how often they’re recognized or how they’re rewarded, then it might be time to see if your company can benefit from turning to purpose-built employee recognition and reward software rather than trying to do it in-house. 

Once you start identifying your weaknesses, you’ll already start to see a plan of action for improving each stage of your employee experience.

3. Gather first-hand feedback

Observing your strengths and weaknesses is one thing, but asking for direct feedback is far more telling. Asking your employees where they feel your company is excelling and where there are areas for improvement can yield truly valuable insight. To avoid putting your staff on the spot, you can use a combination of ways to gather honest feedback like:

• • Polls
• • Surveys
• • Feedback from team leaders 
• • Anonymous comment cards
  

4. Making improvements & repeat the process 

Going through the process of mapping out and improving your employee experience isn’t something you should do only once. As you make efforts to optimize it, set a schedule for how often you think your company needs to go through the process, be it annually, semi-annually, or quarterly. Doing this will help you make sure you’re consistently learning from your shortcomings and improving your experience every chance you get.

At Bucketlist, one of the best ideas we implemented internally was through mapping out the employee experience. Click the button below to download our employee journey template.