How to Build an Employee Experience Roadmap

Today’s post is by guest author Grace Lau, the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad.

Employee engagement means a lot to a business. Happy, engaged employees are more creative and up to 13% more productive. Companies with high engagement scores report better outcomes, including increased customer loyalty, reduced employee turnover, and fewer safety incidents. So, how can you boost engagement levels and achieve similar success?

According to McKinsey research, it’s all about the experience — employees are 16 times more engaged if they reported having a positive employee experience. Learning opportunities, career paths, and other long-term objectives make it easier to recruit and retain talent, and it also facilitates positive customer interactions and increased customer loyalty.

With this being the case, you’d think that every company would plan an engagement-driving employee experience. However, we often see businesses that develop a workplace culture without considering the entire employee journey. 

Find out how your HR team can build an employee experience roadmap that keeps your employees engaged through their entire journey at your company, from application to exit interview.

What is an employee experience roadmap?

First, let’s talk about employee experience and employee journeys. The employee experience is how employees perceive your organization during their employee journey, which is the time from the beginning of the recruitment process and their onboarding experience to the end of employment. Their interactions with your business impact their feelings toward it and make up their employee experience.

For example, an employee’s experience was positively affected by the thorough training they attended before starting their role. But it was negatively affected when they learned there was little room for growth in the department.

When you look at it this way, you can see that employee experience and the employee journey go hand-in-hand. Designing a roadmap keeps your organization focused on delivering a positive work experience throughout the employee journey. 

Now let’s explore the stages of the employee journey in more detail.

The 6 stages of the employee journey

The employee journey is a constant process. From the moment a candidate responds to a recruitment ad, their experience is already being shaped. 

To improve your employee experience, you first need to create an employee journey map.

1. Attraction

The journey begins with your recruitment material. How you brand your company and how you convey your culture in job listings is vital. Consistency across channels will help you to maintain a positive image. 

A straightforward application process is also a key factor. Software options such as applicant tracking systems can help recruiters to streamline the application process.

2. Recruitment

Being open and communicative during your recruitment process promotes a positive image, even with unsuccessful applicants. Collecting feedback from candidates can help you refine the process for the future.

3. Onboarding

Once the hiring process is complete, onboarding is your chance to make a new hire’s first experience a positive one. Training is important, but so is welcoming new employees into your company culture. 

Again, collecting feedback during and after the onboarding process will help you improve the experience. Creating a training proposal template can help you make incremental changes to improve onboarding over time. 

4. Retention

Retention of employees comes down to whether or not they’re satisfied in their role. You can facilitate this by empowering them to succeed. Having regular progress meetings with managers and setting achievable goals helps keep employees engaged.

There are other factors that affect employee satisfaction, of course. The first thing that comes to most people’s minds is compensation. However, personal factors such as work-life balance and employee wellbeing are becoming bigger determining factors as far as employee retention is concerned.

5. Career development

Giving your employees the chance to develop helps both employees and employers. If you want employees to stay engaged with your business, you need to give them the opportunity to learn new skills. 

Recognizing achievements, skill development, and promotion from within will help you build a core of highly-engaged staff.

6. Separation

Regardless of how great your company is to work for, employees sometimes leave. Take the opportunity to conduct exit interviews. These can provide you with valuable insights into how employees view your business from an internal perspective.

Look to identify both the reasons that employees have stayed at your company and the reasons they’ve chosen to leave. Both sides will give you an idea of how to improve the experience of current and future employees.

How to build an employee experience roadmap

An employee experience roadmap will give you a clear plan for consistently engaging your employees. 

Here are the key steps you need to take in order to start the mapping process at your organization:

1. Launch surveys to identify your starting point

To start out, you’ll want to discover how your business is perceived by your current staff. You want to know how your employees feel about your business. Surveying your employees or conducting informal chats can be a good starting point. Your HR team can also conduct stay interviews to find out what it is that keeps employees at your company long-term.

Ask questions like, “Do you feel you get the support needed to succeed in your current role?” More detailed and subjective questions like this can yield open and insightful responses. You can assess this along with more concrete figures such as turnover rates for a complete picture.

2. Define your objectives

The data from these surveys will give you an idea of your current standing. It’s down to you to determine where you want to go from there. Whether you’re looking to boost recruitment numbers or increase your Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), you’ll need to set your objectives.

Define what you want to achieve from improving your employee experience. You’ll need a clear idea of your goals so that you can measure your progress.

3. Determine your metrics

Your objectives will help you determine the best metrics to measure the success of your roadmap. You can think of employee satisfaction much like customer satisfaction and measure it in similar ways. 

Remember that your employee’s own opinions are central to the process. Therefore, collecting direct feedback should be an integral part of your roadmap, whether you opt for a data-driven or more holistic approach.

4. Determine your course of action

Your roadmap should include a plan of action and the steps to implement it. That could be new employee well-being programs or plans for a healthier office space. It could be more regular employee feedback sessions. Whatever your goal, a roadmap will help you visualize it.

You might choose to focus on new hires and onboarding or on your employee retention, but it’s likely that you’ll be combining several of these steps into one plan. 

Plan your actions the same way you would if you changed your business cloud phone system, for example. Making several changes to your business at the same time can be a huge challenge. As a result, you should use your roadmap to avoid spreading your resources too thin.

5. Launch your plan

Once the planning phase is over, it’s time to put it into action. Refer back to your roadmap as you go to keep your goals in focus. Collecting feedback during and after implementation will help you smooth out any areas that need improvement.

6. Evaluate and improve

Using the metrics you determined earlier, evaluate the overall success of your changes. This may take time and the collation of a lot of data. Give your changes time to take effect. Learn from any mistakes and refine your process for continuous improvement. 

Engage and Retain with a Roadmap

In the rush toward a data-driven business, employee satisfaction can often get overlooked. Plenty of businesses are aware of the value of customer satisfaction, but not as many consider employee experience to be of the same importance. 

However, disengaged staff will cause an increase in employee turnover. This will bring down your ROI on training and recruitment. In addition to that, staff members who are less engaged won’t provide the same level of customer experience. The knock-on effect of this will damage your business’s revenue in the long run. 

On the other hand, a good employee experience promotes positive customer experiences. Happy and motivated staff promote the kind of positive and proactive environment that customers enjoy, so it’s vital that each business utilizes an employee experience roadmap.