Mapping the Employee Journey

In this:

* Understanding the employee experience from the perspective of the employee journey

* Measuring the influence of key touchpoints on the employee experience

* Creating a measurement framework to produce insight and continuous improvement in the employee experience

If you were to conduct a careful review of the options available for measuring how well your company attracts, manages and retains talent, you would come up with a list of more than 200 potential database metrics and just as many survey questions. I know because I've worked with both. If you ever completed this task, it would still be a confusing result: Among all these measures, how would you know the good or the bad of it, and where would you focus? Rather than attempt to measure all things that are possible, or arbitrarily choose a focus, it's better to have aligned the measures to a broader objective or problem focus area. To guide this effort, I propose the "Triple-A framework," attraction, activation, and attrition, as shown in Figure 8-1.

Figure 8-1: The triple-A framework

The triple-A framework provides some clarity by narrowing the range of possible focus to three broad opportunities or problem areas:

*    Attraction represents a set of metrics and analyses intended to provide feedback on the attractive force of the company to acquire the quality of talent it wants. In other words, how are you doing on getting talent into the company? See my post Attraction: Quantifying Talent Acquisition

* Activation represents a set of metrics and analysis intended to provide feedback on the proportion of people and teams who have all the necessary requirements to produce high performance. In other words, how are we doing at creating the conditions that make for productive teams? See my post Activating Employee Value

* Attrition represents a set of metrics and analysis intended to provide feedback on the degree of control the company has over the quality of the talent it’s able to retain versus the quality of talent it allows or encourages to exit. In other words, how are you doing keeping our highest performers, while letting others go on to the next step in their career? See my post: Analyzing Employee Attrition

In my book, People Analytics For Dummies, I give each component of the triple-A framework (attraction, activation, and attrition) a chapter to provide a more in-depth exploration of the opportunity area and to provide a sampling of simple measures you can use to get started.

For the time being, I elevate the triple-A framework to your attention because of its foundational role in refining your focus from among many measures and connecting the many measures. The three A’s – attraction, activation, and attrition – describe the three primary talent management related problems each company must solve and they can also be used to organize the main phases of each individual's journey as well. All employees walk through a period of attraction, activation, and attrition on their journey with the company. This post is about what you can learn about how the company is doing from the perspective of this employee journey, as opposed to from the perspective of areas of HR specialty or the standpoint of HR systems and processes.

The survey-based measurement system I describe in a high level in this post, and detail in another (Survey Questions To Collect Analyzable Data For Your Employee Journey Map) provide a way to measure how well you’re doing at different stages of the employee journey through the perspective of people, not systems.

Looking At The Employment Relationship Like a Customer Journey Map

An employee journey map is a visualization of the significant stages and touchpoints that employees experience from the time they become aware of an opportunity at the company, during interviews, throughout their first day of employment, into their first year and later tenures, and then ending when they leave the company.

The idea of an employee journey map has roots in the customer journey map — a visual document that charts the customer experience as it progresses through the stages of a company’s sales-and-marketing funnel into a buyer/seller relationship to achieve goals for the customers.

The customer journey map for service design was first introduced by the international design-and-marketing firm IDEO, back in 1999. (Back then they were up-and-coming.) The company had come up with the concept of an emotional map of the customer experience and applied it to the Acela high-speed rail project, where it was used to visualize the customer experience for interactions with — and feelings for — the rail system. The customer journey map, now widely used in marketing, is particularly useful as a tool for visualizing, analyzing, communicating, and improving intangible services.

The goal of the customer journey map is first to define the path that key customer types take to the product or service and then break down the elements of that path to understand better how these types find their way to (and experience) the product or service. This map brings together significant interactions, known as touchpoints, that the customer has with the company and documents the changing feelings, motivations, and questions that crucial customer groups have at the touchpoints. The customer journey map is used to compare customers' perceived interactions with the company's vision of the experience. Understanding the customer's point of view throughout the journey makes it possible to solve problems and design a better experience that meets or exceeds the expectations to produce advantages versus competitors.

The success of the customer journey map led many to ask whether its principles can be applied to the employee experience. I'm happy to say that the answer to this question is an emphatical yes. Below I will show you how to create an employee journey map for yourself.

When complete, the map visually shows the stages that employees go through, details specific company touchpoints, specifies feedback tools that are used to quantify the candidate or employee experience at each step, and even includes a summary of what the data shows all in one view.

We will build this together. Figure 8-2 below shows three different ways of categorizing the stages that all employees go through in their relationship with a company.

Figure 8-2: Employee journey map: the first step is to identify the stages.

In figure 8-2, the first row is included so you can see how the detailed employee journey stages found below fit into the over-arching triple-A framework. The second row expresses the cognitive stages that an employee goes through, borrowing from how a marketer thinks about a customer moving from no awareness of a product to having a relationship with the product, until eventual decline. The third-row lines it all up with the activities that occur in the recruiting process. The arrow below shows that the map works left to right, showing how a person moves from no awareness of the company to becoming a productive member of the company to eventual decline.

As figure 8-2 provides an example of, the employee journey map should accommodate the entire journey that people make as employees — from their first contact with the company during the recruiting process, to new-hire orientation to onboarding, to the first 30, 90, and 180 days, to the first anniversary and on to future anniversaries until the point of exit. 

<Tip> Your recruiting process or way of framing the employee experience in stages may be a little different than mine, and that is fine. You can draw your map how you want to – the one I have included is just a generic example.

Figure 8-3 builds on this foundation by citing the critical company touchpoints that align with each stage.

Figure 8-3: Employee journey map: the second step is to add the company touchpoints.

As I have sampled in figure 8-3, your next step is to brainstorm all of the points of contact between the company and the person to clarify the opportunities you have to influence the opinion of the candidate or employee about the company. By connecting touchpoints to the employee journey map, you can figure out where your best opportunities are to apply resources to make the most impact on opinion at a given phase of the employee journey.

The next step is to indicate how you are going to measure company performance at each stage. Surveys help you see the journey map beyond merely aspiration and anecdote. With survey data, you can measure each step of the employee journey in such a way you can see the average, see the range, trend over time, compare by segment, and by stage. Survey data will allow you to record incidents and attitudes along the way to see how events and views that you find at prior stages correlate to what you find at later stages. With this information, you can focus on improving the experiences at earlier stages that you know are important because of the long-term consequences for the company. Well-designed surveys, when used together with other data, can help you see many things that you otherwise would be unable to see.

Figure 8-4 adds the names of the surveys you can use to obtain a quantitative measure of the attitude or opinion of people at each stage.  

Figure 8-4: Employee journey map: the third step is to decide how you are going to measure each stage.

Figure 8-4 provides a generic title for a series of surveys you can use to obtain feedback on each stage. Some sample surveys are provided in a corresponding post: Employee Journey Surveys. You may name your surveys what you like and modify your surveys as you wish – again, what I provide is merely an example to show how it all fits together.

The data you can use in conjunction with your employee journey map is not limited to survey data only. The data blueprint shown in figure 8-5 below is a conceptual diagram of what is happening in the employee journey, which with a little work, can be expressed as metrics, using data that you can obtain from systems. Unlike the data described above that is collected through surveys, this type of data is derived from the applicant tracking system (ATS) or human resource information system (HRIS). Once detailed data has been extracted from systems, counts of the number of people at each stage, the number of people entering and exiting each step, and the movement of people between phases can be expressed in many different useful ways.

Figure 8-5: Employee journey map: you can also use data from systems.

Figure 8-5 above illustrates how people move from one stage to the next (or exit out entirely) and provides the names of the base measures that can be used to count and measure the volume of movement. You may use these base measures alone or together with other data to paint a picture of what is happening overall, which cannot be seen in the world of personal experience and anecdotes. 

Figure 8-6 brings everything we have done so far together in one place.

Figure 8-6: Sample employee journey map: you should determine the right amount of detail for each audience.

As you can see in figure 8-6, the employee journey map allows you to see in one place how a lot of different concepts fit together as one – this is, in fact, the entire point! The example I have included works left to right and has rows that allow you to see how the triple-A framework, customer journey stages, employee journey stages, company touchpoints, survey feedback tools, and system feedback tools all fit together.

Detailed employee journey maps, much like I have illustrated in figure 8-6, should be available for use by anyone on the HR team and should be reviewed together from time-to-time but are admittedly a little overwhelming to look at if you were not the one involved in creating it. It only provides too much detail for those who don’t participate in creating it. This does not mean you should not do an employee journey map – don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. It is not a problem – you can put the detail away for use by those people who need it when they need it, and just provide a summary to the casual audience.

Figure 8-7 is an example of what the employee journey map could look like with less detail on the internal operations of it all, but including summary data, which can be obtained from survey and system sources.

Figure 8-7: Employee journey map: the fourth stage is to populate the employee journey map with data.

Figure 8-7 shows some basic sketches of an employee journey map with graphs.

In the example I have provided, on the survey data summary row, you can review the height of any bar all the way across to compare stages to each other. There are four bars for each step, which represent a quarterly view so you can also see if you are getting better over time. Because this is just illustrative, my labeling is not specific (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4), but in your case, you could be more specific: for example, Q1-2018, Q2-2018, Q3-2018, Q4-2018. You also could report it by intervals other than quarters – bi-annually or annually. The point of the design I have suggested here is that at the same time, you can compare stages to each other and how each step is changing over time in a single glance.

The bottom row, labeled system data summary, is just there to illustrate that you can also include system data facts and leverage graphs of a different design, as necessary for your situation. In the example I have illustrated here, the focus of the charts is not on the absolute volume of activity by stage (difficult to interpret), but rather a metric that compares the amount of activity to what was planned in advance, therefore the metric expressed is a percentage of plan achieved for key stages. These bars can range between 0 and 100, with 100 being perfect, and the line indicates how close the company got to plan. Again, I have added bars labeled by quarter so you if this were real data, you could see how the company is improving over time, or not. You could also see how missing the plan in earlier stages can add up to cause you to miss your plan target in later stages. This design will allow you to trace the problem back to where it started quickly.

The graphs in the far right of the bottom row are different from the ones to the left. The charts to the far right represent the percentage of employees retained (the ones that didn’t leave the company) over a 12-month period by job tenure group. If this were real data, these graphs would show you at what point or points in the employee’s job tenure, you begin to see high percentages of employees exit the company. Viewing retention in 1-year job tenure intervals allows you to find the right time frames to move employees into new jobs, address whatever the problems are common among each tenure interval, which may be different from exits among other tenure intervals, and plan for inevitable departures.

The intent of the graphs I have included in this post is not to convey a real data insight or to explain how to create them. These are sketchy examples using fake data. My intent in including the sketches in this post is to show you that with a handful of graphs, you can create a powerful dashboard that can be easily understood in the context of the employee journey with a glance. In essence, this does not occur by accident, this happens by design.

Though you can find many sketches of employee journey maps on the Internet, and they imply the use of data, they usually don't provide the details of how they achieved this. In chapters 8, 9 and 10 of People Analytics For Dummies I share how to get the data you need to assess what is happening at each stage. 

I encourage you to use the sample employee journey map I have provided as grist for your imagination, but you should feel no obligation to do it the way I have done it. How you express the journey is a creative exercise, as are the specific insights you will glean that will be unique to your company.

Why an Employee Journey Map?

The goal of recruiting people into a company isn’t to produce a hire and then simply congratulate yourself on a job well done — the point is to have that hire become a productive, contributing member of the company for as long as possible. It isn’t a one-time or sporadic relationship — it’s a high-cost, high-value relationship that must be renewed by employees and employers every working day.

<Tip> Consider the entire journey that the employee makes with the company and how the actions (or inactions) taken by the company affect the motivation and productivity of employees over time.

The goal of an employee journey map is to identify those areas or transition points where people tend to encounter problems — whether those problems occur at the initial interview stage or while working for your company — and identify opportunities for improvement.

A closer look at the various metrics available to human resources departments not only reveals a bewildering array of possibilities but also shows that some options have different ways of measuring progress. It also shows that some of those ways come in conflict with one another because they highlight different priorities.

An employee journey map can also help unify often disparate and competing efforts within the same company, by providing everyone with a single framework that maps the activities of human resources with the employee experience.

Everyone has blind spots. Everyone has a lot to do, and — left unchecked — everyone gets caught up in what they’re trying to accomplish individually, sometimes at the expense of people who do other jobs or of the company as a whole. The employee journey map allows you to take a bird’s-eye view of actions by different stakeholders who work together to impact the employee experience.

<Remember> Unless you work in a small company, human resources isn’t a single person, a single knowledge area, or a single job. The contribution to the company from people who work under the umbrella of HR fits into multiple categories. HR centers of excellence (COEs) are centralized units within the function of human resources that have specialized expertise and job focus. Examples of HR COEs are Talent Acquisition (Recruiting), Compensation, Benefits, Employee Relations, Learning and Development, and Organization Design (OD). Someone who works in Compensation doesn’t do Recruiting’s job, and someone in Recruiting doesn’t do Compensation’s job, and so on. Sometimes, the policies, programs, processes, and other efforts of people in different COEs pull in different directions. What you want to do with data is help these specialized members of HR connect what they do to an overarching objective.

Creating Your Own Employee Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map can sound like its own ambiguous and arduous journey, but it need not be. Though it’s crucial to align your map to data, it doesn’t have to be overly complicated. It only needs to contain the necessary detail to communicate the stages, touchpoints, influences, and emotional reactions to help you understand what is going on and drive action.

Mapping your map

The initial spadework for mapping isn’t that onerous. Here's what you need to do first:

1. Pick a key job group or another employee segment at your company.

2. Define the stages or steps of your recruiting process for candidates in this job group. For example, outreach, resume review, phone screen, on-site interview 1, on-site interview 2, offer, hire, onboard, etc.

3. Define the critical touchpoints for candidates in this job group. For example, recruiter's first email to candidate, recruiter's first phone conversation, recruiters follow-up phone conversation, greeting at the company, interview, employee orientation, welcoming on the first day, greeting with the team, etc. Some of these touchpoints may be described the same as a stage name, but you may have other touchpoints not represented as a stage name, or stages where actions are taken at the company, but where there is no contact with the candidate, therefore there is no touchpoint.

4. Identify the critical information needs and questions that a typical person experiences at each touchpoint. Also, consider the information needs that the company has at each touchpoint.

5. Define measurement instruments and metrics for each stage.

6. Collect quantitative and qualitative data.

7. Identify the problems and opportunities. For example: in the Offer stage, candidates can’t differentiate the job opportunity, except by level of pay.

8. Identify who is accountable to act for each problem or opportunity identified. Many efforts can be combined, but one person must be responsible for directing those efforts.

9. Monitor continuously to see whether the actions that are taken address the problems and opportunities in the manner expected and to uncover new issues and opportunities.

10. Repeat the process for each important employee segment at your company.

That's the framework. The success (or failure) of your employee journey map depends on how you fill in that framework. And the most crucial element you'll use to fill in that framework is, of course, data. So it's time to tackle the data question, and that means reading the next section.

Getting data

The employee journey map should be based on data that describes the reality of candidates and employees, not on your idea of what that reality should be. Here are some ways you can get reliable information to fill in the gaps on the employee journey map:

 * Get out of your office: An important first step to increasing your perspective about the employee experience is to walk away from your desk and observe people working where the work is being done. You can often spot issues that nobody else would have thought to tell you about or that you wouldn’t have noticed in data you already have. Evaluate what actually is happening rather than what people say or what arbitrary information has incidentally accumulated in systems or in previous surveys.

* Walk in someone else’s shoes: In some companies, you can shadow someone, do a ride-along, or work in a role for a day. Though this process may be anecdotal and produce too much detail for a journey map, it can stimulate your understanding of, and empathy with, the type of people you employ. It can also help you understand what good work looks like and the types of people who do it.

<Tip> Getting close to the action produces the opportunity to ask questions in a face-to-face environment in a context where people are already comfortable — and where you can understand the things you’re being told.

* Conduct stakeholder interviews: Interview employees in the vital job families for which you want to create a journey map. Interview managers, recruiters, and other support staff. Interview candidates — not for jobs but rather to ask them questions regarding their experience in applying for a job at your company. Interview former employees — many people will take your phone call and will be happy to talk to you about what went right and what went wrong.

<Warning>When you do as I suggest in this list — get out of your office, walk in someone’s shoes, and do stakeholder interviews — go ahead and capture anecdotes; do not, however, rely totally on them as an ultimate source of information. (I realize that it can be tempting to get caught up in a good story and run with it.) Eventually, it’s important to validate anecdotal inspirations with data collected from a larger sample; the three tasks I just mentioned can be useful creative thinking devices to help you express those patterns to other people in a way that is compelling after you have confirmed these observations. Look first to confirm that the stories do exist as consistent patterns in systematically collected data, and then, only when this is confirmed, use anecdotes to help you express those patterns to other people.

* Conduct surveys: In my career, I have designed many employee surveys. In my experience, focusing on a collective perspective of people through surveys always a) makes a profound contribution to whatever question I am trying to answer b) helps to identify compelling stories and c) is less complicated to deploy and explain than most other analytical methods.

Go here for complete survey examples covering the entire Employee Journey Map framework that I suggest.

Link to my Employee Journey Map Survey Examples

 * Looking at data in systems: You can use lots of data on your employee journey map in the operational data systems — like the applicant tracking system (ATS), human resources information system (HRIS), enterprise resource planning system (ERP), or any other systems that contain information about candidates and employees.

Making the Employee Journey Map More Useful

You may use my journeyman example if you like, but you need not be confined by my survey examples. I encourage you to find your own for how to make your employee journey map come alive for your company. Below are some suggestions for you as you do so:

* Apply creativity to make the employee journey map relevant and interesting. You don’t have to use a boring flowchart or copy the artistic design of another company’s journey map. Take inspiration from the world around you, but make it your own. For example, if you’re at a transportation company, consider making it transportation-themed. If you’re at a manufacturing company, consider making it manufacturing-themed. The possibilities are endless.

<Tip>The uptake of the employee journey map may well depend on the degree to which it captures the imagination of the leaders, managers, and employees of your company, so it’s worth taking a little time to think about it.

* Make it simpler (more straightforward), but not simple (dumb). As you add more steps or layers of insight, you make the employee journey map more complex. Try to get it just right, but if you have extra data, you can create versions that summarize, followed by versions that contain the additional data or places where you can drill down into detail as necessary.

 * Make the employee journey map interactive. Consider having a hyperlinked version of your employee journey map that allows navigation between different journey maps for various job families and also allows you to drill down, as needed, into more graphs and data details if you have a lot of data.

 * Capture problems and opportunities and assign an owner. The employee journey map is a pointless exercise if you don't identify challenges and opportunities and designate someone to take ownership of investigating and correcting them.

Using the Feedback, You Get to Increase Employee Lifetime Value

In Chapter 6 of People Analytics for Dummies, Estimating Lifetime Value, I spend some time discussing the purpose and calculation of employee lifetime value (ELV). As a refresher, ELV is the estimated value that an individual employee will generate for your business over his or her lifetime.

You are mapping the employee journey to improve the employee experience, not just to make people happy for its own sake, but also to increase ELV.

ELV can be increased in one of these three ways:

* Extend the tenure of an employee (individually or on average by segment) by addressing employee goals and needs. In the Triple-A framework, this is addressed by focusing on the attrition problem.

* Increase the value that an employee (individual or on average by segment) produces by increasing performance or increasing the nature of key talent’s job contributions over time. In the Triple-A framework, this is addressed by focusing on the activation problem.

* Retain higher-value producing employees while replacing lower-value-producing employees with higher-value-producing employees over time. In the Triple-A framework, this is addressed by focusing on the attrition problem.

All these objectives can be enhanced by learning from the employee journey and then applying focused effort where it will have the most impact. Given that different segments of employees will have different experiences as well as various employee lifetime value (ELV) potential than others, start working on the employee journey map from the perspective of key job and key talent segments, and then work to others as time permits.

This is an excerpt from the book People Analytics for Dummies, published by Wiley, written by me.

Don't judge a book by its cover. More on People Analytics For Dummies here

I have moved the growing list of pre-publication writing samples here: Index of People Analytics for Dummies sample chapters on PeopleAnalyst.com

You will find many differences between these samples and the physical copy in the book - notably my posts lack the excellent editing, finish, and binding applied by the print publisher. If you find these samples interesting, you think the book sounds useful; please buy a copy, or two, or twenty-four.

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