What Is Employee Journey Mapping? +Benefits, Tips (2024)

employee_journey_mapping

Employee’s are the lifeblood of the organization.  The company’s performance and customer satisfaction directly depends upon their employees. 

 

Hence, it becomes important to lay out an employee journey that identifies the key touchpoints, learning and development, and initiate improvements and changes when needed. Organizations should work towards making the employee journeys simple and more inclusive in order to improve employee performance, retention, satisfaction and reinforce company culture. 

What Is Employee Journey?

Employee journey is described as the engagement and interactions employees have with an organization throughout their tenure. It includes everything in an employee lifecycle, from employee onboarding to offboarding. A smooth employee journey leads to increased employee retention and performance.

What Is Employee Journey Mapping?

Employee journey mapping involves documenting the experiences of an employee, starting from their entry into the organization to their exit. The goal of employee journey mapping is to analyze various ways to improve employee experience and enhance engagement, retention, and performance. 

Benefits of Employee Journey Map

Adopting an employee journey map has several benefits for both the organization and its employees. 

1. Optimizing for uncertainty

Employee journey maps help identify employee pain points and the areas causing stress and confusion among employees, making it easier for the organizations to address them and account for them within employee experience design. It also provides a holistic view of employee experience for organizations to anticipate and prepare for any future uncertainty.

2. Identifying what works

Once the employee’s journey is clearly laid out in an employee journey map, it is easier to identify all the “moments that matter” and differentiate between what works and what doesn’t in the journey. 

3. Making the experience better

After laying out the employee journey map and identifying what does not work out, an effort to fix the bad experiences can be made wherever possible. This will help in the overall improvement of the employee journey. 

4. Eliminating inequity and fostering inclusion

The employee journey map highlights areas of disparity in employee experiences and helps organizations to implement ways to deal with inequity. 

Furthermore, employee journey maps help improve communication within the organization, enabling inclusivity in the company. 

Related Resources

Stages of Employee Journey

Here are the six stages to an employee’s journey within the organization.

Employee Journey Map

1. Attract

The first step in the employee journey is to identify and attract potential employees. The goal is to produce a pool of candidates interested in the organization and the position offered. The company displays its value proposition, company culture, and benefits in this stage to attract the most qualified and eligible pool of candidates.

2. Onboarding

An employee onboarding process is the systematic and purposeful transformation of promising candidates from a new hire to a high-performing employee of an organization. Employee orientation, training, and paperwork is a part of the onboarding process. The onboarding process must equip an employee with all the necessary resources required to be successful in their role within the organization. 

By carefully crafting an employee onboarding process, companies empower new employees with the knowledge and tools they need to be comfortable, confident, and productive in their new work environment, thereby improving the overall experience.

3. Engage

It is important for organizations to keep their employees engaged, as engaged employees are likely to be more productive and motivated to do jobs in the best way possible. A clear and concise communication strategy must be laid out to keep employee engagement consistent throughout the employee journey. 

4. Develop

A well-trained, dynamic, and motivated workforce is crucial to any organization, which is why organizations must focus on developing their employees.

Investing in the continuous development of your employees helps create a culture of engagement, makes individuals feel valued and invested in their work, boosts engagement, builds confidence, and keeps employees productive.

To make the most of your employee development programs, consider implementing a digital adoption platform like Whatfix. Using DAPs as your training software empowers employees to upskill themselves on the latest tools, applications, or processes without disrupting their workflow and productivity. It’s the best resource to make your employee development plans future-ready and valuable.

5. Perform

The key elements of the performance stage include performance management, communication and feedback, recognition and rewards, collaboration and teamwork along with professional development. 

6. Exit

Employee exit is an inevitable and potentially complicated component of the HR wheelhouse. Whatever the reason, employers must take this opportunity to gather honest employee feedback to make amends in the future.

An effective offboarding process helps ensure a smooth transition for the company, shows your commitment to creating a positive employee experience, sets employees at ease, and leaves room for great employees to return.

5 Steps to Designing an Employee Journey Map

Creating an effective employee journey map is important to increase employee performance in an organization. 

The steps used to design an employee journey map include – 

designing employee journey map

1. Defining the scope and objectives

The primary step is to define the aspects of the employee journey that one wants to visualize on the employee journey map. This includes determining who the journey map is for, what the key touchpoints are, what outcomes or improvements the company wants to achieve by mapping employee journey, and what information or feedback will be used for preparing the employee journey map. 

2. Collecting quantitative and qualitative data

Once the objectives of the mapping process are laid out, start collecting qualitative and quantitative employee data through surveys, focus groups, interviews, etc. This data focuses on employee experiences, expectations, and perceptions of their journey in the organization. 

3. Analyzing Data

Once you’ve collected both quantitative and qualitative employee data, it’s time to analyze the data. Look for trends or common areas where employee engagement seems to dip. You can also try to identify any common themes or characteristics among employees who end up leaving the company.

4. Visualizing the data

After analyzing the data, you can easily identify “moments of truth” along with key touchpoints and improvements. It is best to visualize the data in a flowchart or a timeline.

5. Identifying areas of improvement and develop an action plan

Using the visual data, you can now easily identify the areas of improvement in different processes such as onboarding, performance management, training or development, etc.

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Conclusion

Employee journey mapping helps one identify the important touchpoints or the “moments that matter” in the employee’s journey. It is an essential tool for organizations to identify areas of improvement and subsequently work upon these touchpoints to make the employee journeys smoother and more effective. 

Investing in employee experience is essential to boost the performance of the employees, maintain employee relations and display the organization’s commitment towards them. While not an EX specific software, Whatfix’s in-app training and support platform that empowers organizations to create better employee experiences with contextual learning experiences.

Schedule a free demo with us today to learn more about Whatfix!

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