Defining your 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

EX core team members 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?)

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.

At each stage you are prompted to identify the ‘Moments that Matter’ as these will be the most important experiences that should be prioritised for optimisation. More on this will come in a future article.

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.

You can download our Employee Lifecycle template and other EX tools here.