Moving along and retaining
talent

Finding talent is one thing. Retaining talent is a second. The market is changing rapidly and attracting the right people remains a challenge. A strong employee journey helps you retain new talent and strengthens the quality of your organization. Here’s how to do it.

The employee’s journey

The employee journey encompasses everything your employee sees, learns, does and feels during an employment relationship. From the first moment someone encounters a job opening with your organization to the moment they leave. When you design the employee journey strongly, productivity increases and the organization’s innovative capacity grows. This ultimately leads to better results for the entire organization, such as increased sales and profits.

A strong employee experience is constantly evolving. By actively soliciting feedback, you sharpen the journey and keep engagement high. The employee journey consists of several phases:

Attention and recruitment

A potential employee comes into contact with your organization through LinkedIn, for example. This is followed by contacting HR and going through the application process.

Pre-boarding

From the moment someone signs on to the first day of work, you can do a lot to make someone feel welcome. A card, invitation to drinks or small welcome package makes all the difference. It’s all about the signal that someone belongs.

Onboarding and development

Your new employee learns the processes and gets clarity on expectations. A good induction process ensures that initial enthusiasm turns into commitment. After that, your employee continues to develop at his or her own pace.

Retention and offboarding

This stage ranges from being fully integrated to leaving. It remains important to stay connected. What does someone need to continue to grow? Sometimes leaving makes sense because there are more opportunities elsewhere. Engage in conversation about this to gain insight into the motivations. This information helps to improve the journey for others.

Create an employee persona

An employee persona is a fictional but accurate profile of an employee type. e uses it to provide insight into the experience and needs of a specific group. It is based on research and provides clarity on expectations, challenges, motivation, communication preferences and moments of contact. When creating a persona, you gather as much detail as possible. Consider:

• Age group, education and years of service.
• Career development and career goals.
• How many times a person changed jobs before.
• The challenges a person experiences in the workplace.

Then test the personas by soliciting feedback. Keeping them up-to-date keeps them useful for improving the employee journey.

Journey mapping

After developing the personas, you use them to further improve the employee experience. With Journey mapping, you break down the entire program into separate, recognizable moments. This helps you to:

• Making unseen experiences visible. You explore the less visible parts of the employee journey.
• To see where things are already going well. You can leverage those successes at other points in the journey.
• Improve less positive experiences. By identifying where expectations don’t match, you can see what needs to be tightened.

Result: satisfied employees

The effect of a strong employee journey can be seen immediately. Employees feel involved, develop faster and stay longer. The organization benefits because satisfied employees produce better results. A satisfied employee counts for two. Wondering what happens when you keep investing in the employee journey? This video illustrates the consequences of satisfied employees.