The Employee Life Cycle Is Dead, And HR Killed It

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What stage are you in?

Sounds like a weird question to ask right?

And before you’re wondering if I hit my head, I want you to consider that every single one of you reading this right now who are working for a company, are in a “stage.”

You might not know it, but you are. You didn’t ask to be in it and you probably have no idea what I’m talking about, but your HR team does.

What stage am I talking about? The employee life cycle. This is how your company views you and how all companies out there view their employees. They are tracked, monitored, and identified as they go through different stages while they are working for a company.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the life cycle was created or who even created it but it emerged in the late 70’s, and then really took off in the 80’s, and 90’s as a general framework.

Granted, this model, was once vital for understanding and managing the employee experience, it’s now obsolete. This made sense in a linear world where everyone had one career path, one ladder, one employer, one path to success, and where employees were viewed like expendable cogs who could easily be transitioned and replaced when need. It’s no wonder they call it “human resources.”

So if the employee life cycle is obsolete, then what should we be using instead? Let me answer that question by asking you another question.

How are things going for you at your company right now?

If you had to answer this question in a few sentences you might respond something like:

“I just got promoted into a new role and I’m a little bit nervous.

“I’m struggling with there I am and am looking for some guidance and development from my leader.”

“I’m really finding my stride and crushing everything that comes my way, I’m engaged and excited for my next challenge.”

“There’s a lot going on, my wife and I just bought our first house and we have a baby on the way so I feel overwhelmed'.”

What do all of these things have in comment? They aren’t about a life cycle but about Moments That Matter. The employee life cycle is how HR teams view their people but if you ask employees how they view their time with an organization their response will always come back describing moments and experiences that they are in or going through.

The beauty of this approach is that not only does it allow HR teams to be more flexible but it also gives more accountability and responsibility to leaders to create better experiences for their direct reports. The leaders are ultimately the ones who have the greatest impact on the experience of their people.

Employee Experience is the #1 battleground and priority for organizations around the world right now and all of this starts with Moments That Matter.

Paid subscribers can keep reading below to see some examples of what companies are doing, frameworks, and how to get started with Moments That Matter.

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Identify The Moments that Matter

Ask your people what they care about and value. Have conversations with them to identify the most common Moments That Matter. This will be an ongoing and growing effort for you which makes it fun and engaging and also forces leaders to get to know their employees as human beings and not just as workers. I can tell you for a fact that there’s not greater moment that matters that’s wasted then an employee’s first day on the job. When employees start working for you, what do you do to create an amazing experience for them on day one? What about the first time they get promoted, close a big deal, deliver their first client presentation, have their first kid, or get married? Moments That Matter aren’t just work related they are person as well.

Some elements of the employee life cycle can also live in these moments that matter. For example how employees are recruited or onboarded.

Broadly speaking I like to think of three types of moments that matter

Specific moments are exactly what they sound like, moments in time such a first day on the job of the birth of a child. Ongoing moments are about the continued and ongoing relationship that employees have with their leaders and with the organization. Then we have created moments which are specific events that the organization might create such as hackathons or innovation challenges.

There are lots of ways to think about Moments That Matter which are specific to your organization.

Here is the framework that ServiceNow uses. Again, similar approach but they think of their moments as Know, Do, Learn, or Take Care Of moments. I really like this approach as well

Here’s another framework I really like from Cisco. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Francine Katsoudas over the years who is the Executive Vice President and Chief People, Policy & Purpose Officer at Cisco. I saw her and her team develop this process from the ground up which was done with lots of employee feedback.

Their approach is based around broader buckets of moments that matter and each one of these broader buckers have specific moments around them. For example under “my first impression” you might see things like a first day on the job whereas under “my making a difference” you might see things like various volunteering opportunities.

Regardless of the approach you take, it’s critical that you start by thinking through the moments that matter for your team and your company. You can take any of the examples above and adapt them or create your own. But stop thinking about a traditional employee life cycle.

Start with a few moments or buckets and then expand over time, you don’t have to tackle everything all at once.

Design Experiences

After you identify these Moments That Matter. The next step is to design experiences around them. Here’s another example from ServiceNow which was a few years old. At the time, Moments That Matter were still being more widely adopted by HR teams so you can see how they took the traditional concept of the employee life cycle and overlayed it with Moments That Matter.

My understanding is that this approach has since been adapted but I’m sharing it here not to focus on the life cycle portion but to specifically call out the pieces in the middle. I love how ServiceNow broke down everything into 6 key components which are employee actions, employee questions, the desired emotional state of the employee, manager tasks, process, policies, and tech, and then insights.

This is actually one of the best and most comprehensive approaches I have seen to designing experiences around Moments That Matter. You can take your own moments like an employee’s first day on the job, first promotion, birth of a child, etc. and overlay these 6 components with all of the moments.

The two most critical aspects of this breakdown are the desired emotional state of the employee and the leader tasks!

I hope you found this approach and framework helpful.

May we all work for an organization that invests in our employee experience!

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