Only 4 Employee Experience Lifecycle Stages That Matter [+ways to measure & optimise]

Understanding the employee experience life cycle, its importance, and how to effectively engage with employees at each step helps HR teams draw in and retain the best talents. It results in happy employees with higher productivity and resourcefulness.

INDEX

• What is Employee Lifecycle?
• Employee Lifecycle Management Process
• What are the Stages of the Employee Life Cycle?
• How to Optimize Employee Experience At Every Stage?
• Employee Experience Best Practices
• How Do You Measure Employee Life Cycle Experience?
• Employee Experience KPIs
• Future of Employee Experience

What is Employee Lifecycle?

The employee lifecycle or employee experience lifecycle is an HR framework that tracks the employee journey in your organization. It is an important tool for understanding how employees engage with the organization. It divides the employee journey into different stages, beginning the moment the individual joins the organization as an employee and ending on their last day at work.

Employee Lifecycle Management Process

Employee lifecycle management is a process that includes how

• The organization presents itself
• It engages with prospective employees and brings them on board
• It integrates them into the organization and supports their personal and professional growth

A competent employee management process directly impacts employee satisfaction and experience. So, organizations can build a high-performance workforce by boosting employee experience with streamlined and efficient employee lifecycle management processes.

What are the Stages of the Employee Lifecycle?

Each stage of the employee experience lifecycle model requires a unique engagement strategy. Your company must pay equal attention to its employee experience as it pays to its customer experience.

Stage 1: Recruitment and Onboarding Experience

When an attractive employer branding draws in talented people to your organization, a good recruitment strategy brings in the right talent.

An excellent recruitment strategy has vetting procedures for successfully identifying the best match for each open position in the company.

To deliver a smooth onboarding process, HR teams must immerse the new employees in the organization’s culture. It will help the incumbents know what is expected, not just in terms of performance but also in social aspects.

Your organization can make use of an employee onboarding checklist for bringing candidates onboard in a hassle-free way. 

Stage 2: Progression Experience

Employers must encourage employees and give them fair opportunities to advance in their careers. An organization should provide a clear development strategy so that its employees learn and grow. While some growth may come from an employee’s initiative, an organization should offer opportunities that ensure skill growth and development in an employee’s career.

Offering on-site professional development training, reimbursing continuing education expenses, designing a career path plan for new workers, or growth through projects and assignments are examples of opportunities for career progression.

Make Your Employee Experience Lifecycle

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Stage 3: Retention Experience

Employee retention is the stage where you can witness the impact of your work done in the previous stages. Cultivating healthy relationships with employees and understanding what prevents employees from leaving is necessary. 

Hence, your organization should spend sufficient time collecting feedback from employees on what is important to them via one-on-one meetings or questionnaires requesting feedback. Pay, perks, career possibilities, and team spirit are factors that help retain employees, along with a supportive, transparent, and respectful work environment.

Stage 4: Offboarding Experience

Every employee will have this experience with the organization at the final stage. Offboarding might occur due to retirement, new employment, or individual circumstances. So, the HR team must ensure that the employee leaves without difficulty or disruption to other employees. 

A successful offboarding occurs when the employee and the company part ways on good terms, the employee continues to speak positively of the organization and is appreciative of his employment tenure. Request for honest feedback from leaving employees; this is best done at their exit interview.

How to Optimize Employee Experience at Every Stage?

Many fast-growing organizations are unable to manage the employee experience lifecycle. You need to devise a strategy to ensure a smooth employee lifecycle and optimize it to deliver the finest employee experience as an employer.

• Establish goals for each stage
• Explicitly define what an employee should get from each stage.
• Determine the assistance the HR team requires from other team members
• Request employee feedback and evaluate their employment lifecycle

Some important considerations:

• Empathy-based leadership.
• Modify techniques based on individual employee needs and experiences
• Motivate employees to establish their own specific goals and give them full assistance to achieve 
• Acknowledge and support ideas and thoughts that bubble up from anywhere in the organization

Employee Experience Best Practices

Here are some impactful HR practices for giving employees a stellar experience:

• Strategically consider what individual employees seek, what the team expects, and how those combined experiences define your company culture
• Boost engagement to foster individual and team growth through new possibilities for collaborative efforts that impact the overall experience
• Create a workplace environment that promotes and supports employees’ involvement and wellness
• Actively promote an employee-focused and one-team work culture
• Create a culture in which employees’ ideas and opinions are heard and valued, and they feel acknowledged and respected

How Do You Measure Employee Life Cycle Experience?

You must plan the employee journey exactly like you map the consumer journey. This approach helps your organization reap two significant benefits: improved talent retention and an excellent reputation.

To improve your employees’ experience, you must be proactive and utilize an employee experience journey map that outlines the key phases and events of an employee’s professional path. A well-designed map can help HR professionals discover areas that need improvement and boost employee experience. Several KPIs are useful to check the health of the employee lifecycle.

Future of Employee Experience

There has never been a more critical time for organizations to prioritize the employee experience. Looking at the years ahead, it is apparent that decent compensation and perks will not suffice. 

Employees seek a sense of purpose and engagement; the ideal employee experience will be with an organization that serves the greater good and makes employees a part of something bigger than themselves. Organizations that can create this sort of culture will succeed, while those that cannot have to suffer.

Conclusion

Effective employee experience lifecycle management is a necessity for every organization. Your HR teams must critically visualize and prepare for each stage of the employee lifecycle. They should provide the necessary insights to make each stage as effective and pleasant for the employees as possible.

Do you want to recruit and keep a diligent and loyal workforce?

Then give your best shot at each stage of your employees’ journey and deliver a stellar and satisfying employee experience.