Employee Experience Journey Mapping

A great tool to use for any HR or People & Culture department when understanding how to optimize Employee Experience is Employee Journey Mapping. Having a more profound understanding of your employees' needs and struggles can help you support them to perform better and be happier, which is HRs top priority.

It resembles Customer Journey Mapping, where you identify the touchpoints for a potential customer in each step, from awareness to satisfied customers, who recommend you and buy again. These customers are your most incredible supporters and pave the way to a prosperous organization that can spend more on employee well-being and happiness and potentially reaches their goals.

The customers for HR are employees and managers, so HR professionals need to think about how to optimize every step of their journey to make it as productive, happy, and fruitful (for both parties) as possible. Optimizing the experience for employees will lead to more intrinsic motivation and a win-win situation for the employee and the company.

How do you do it?

The starting point is to understand who your employee is, and here you can, for example, work with Personas. A persona is a typical employee of yours. You can identify the different interaction points your person has with the organization in various stages of the employee life cycle.

But you start by describing your persona as vivid and alive as possible. This is not a real person, but it COULD be. You give your persona a name, age, gender, a place to live, family, relationships, concerns, and needs, both from a personal and professional perspective. What role(s) does this person have in your company? What are thoughts that this person may have in his/her daily life? Describe your person AS IF it was a natural person working in your organization.

After that, you can describe a typical day in your persona's life: What happens in the morning, how does he/she commute to work, what are daily struggles and pains and signs of happiness? Go through the day and describe meetings, projects, where he/she eat lunch, and what feelings appear in the interaction with other employees and managers. What happens when they get home, and what does your persona tell their family about their day. What do they think about you as their employer, and where does he/she see that you can improve?

Step three is to use a template to map out the interaction points with the company. I have chosen eight areas (from Attract to Exit) in an employee's life cycle to be analyzed from five different perspectives: Goals and needs, Touchpoints, Organization Actions, Barriers, and Enablers. Ask the following questions:

• Goals and Needs: What is this persona trying to achieve and why? What are the needs behind their goals?
• Touchpoints: What people, things, or organizations does this persona come in contact with
• Organization Actions: What does the organization do at this step?
• Barriers: What barriers come in the way of achieving persona’s goals
• Enablers: What helps the persona achieve goals?

Work in a cross-functional workshop with different people from the company who hold different positions. For example, this is a great exercise to do in a Buddy team that consists of people from various functions/departments.

Good Luck with Employee Journey Mapping, and if you want to know more, sign up for one of our courses on agilepeople.com :)

/piamia