What is an Employee Lifecycle?
To define the potential scope of your Employee Experience (EX) activities over the long term, the place to start is to define the overall Employee Lifecycle. The Employee Lifecycle encompasses every interaction between an employee and an organisation, which covers a huge number of processes, journeys and experiences.
Publishing this internally will help define the terminology used for the different stages in the lifecycle as well as helping people realise that the EX starts before an employee’s first day and goes on after they have left the organisation. After all, you want to attract talent, maintain brand loyalty, and attract sales from ex-employees. Most organisations obsess over the Customer Lifecyle, and so they should over the Employee Lifecyle.
How to define your Employee Lifecycle
Those responsible for EX and a section of senior leaders should define each stage, discuss them in-depth, and review evidence from employee surveys, Glassdoor, and other sources, to see what’s going well, and, equally important, not so well. The Employee Lifecycle is also a great tool to help prioritise where to start either based on where the biggest issues lie or where you believe you can have the biggest impact. Who doesn’t like a quick win?!
An example of an Employee Lifecycle
As you can see, the Employee Lifecycle is not completely linear, as employees can rise through the ranks of an organisation, and so the induct/support/develop stages repeat. (Well, they should do – you do want to coach your talent on how to adapt to bigger roles?)
What is important for your Employee Lifecycle is to make it bespoke for your organisation. By this we mean:
- Consider what you currently call the stages; if these terms are embedded, you may wish to consider using these.
- Consider your tone of voice; would you prefer formal or informal terms?
- Consider your terms for employees; some organisations term their employees with a special name – could this be built into the terminology?
Before you start drilling down into individual employee journeys it is important to first establish an agreed scope for the Employee Lifecycle within your organisation. The Employee Lifecycle Template provides you with a starting point that breaks the Employee Lifecycle into distinct stages.
Employee Lifecycles help to focus on the importance of the different stages of an employee’s journey at an organisation. Like your best customers, you want to surprise and delight employees regularly to maintain brand loyalty. If the focus is all about talent attraction, then employees are likely to soon become unmotivated as they may well feel they’ve simply been through a window dressing stage. And at the other end of the Lifecycle, if you cut employees off once they decide to move on, you may be missing out on future sales and colleague referrals.
For more on Employee Experience frameworks, view this page.
Nicholas helped us to kick off our employee experience work at our away day - it was invaluable to have an expert shape initial engagement with the team rather than me leading as I was just learning myself! It wasn’t just about the workshop though as there was wrap-around support to ensure we brought the team with us on what employee experience is and how to do it well and how we might move forwards on next steps, such as an initial presentation and teaser video in advance of the workshop.
As a result of the workshop and follow-up guidance, plus generously sharing some helpful excerpts from the Brand Experiences book, we worked as a team to define our employee journey, the moments that matter and our target areas for improvement. We’ve now kickstarted a piece of work to re-design onboarding and people from across the team are involved.
