A Guide To Employee Journey Mapping
Paul Lopushinsky
Founder @ Playficient | Helping People & Culture Teams Cut Through The Bull And Focus On What Matters In The Employee Experience.
Let’s Dive Into Employee Journey Mapping To Tell Your Story.
Investing time into employee journey mapping will impact your employee experience.
An employee journey map can identify the shortcomings in your employee experience. You can learn how to cater to the employee experience for different employees.
Employee journey maps are a great way to lay out the story of your organization. Laying down the major plot points (or moments that matter) that employees have along the way.
There will be a basic structure to the story, and that will change depending on the employee. Think of it like those choose-your-own-adventure books from when you were a kid.
For a more in-depth guide on journey mapping, check out the guide on my website.
1. What Is An Employee Journey Map?
The Journey Map is a concept that comes from the world of User Experience Design. It’s used with the customer in mind.
When you hear someone talking about a journey map, it’s likely referring to the customer journey map.
This journey map looks at touchpoints, like awareness, sales, and retention. The image below is a good breakdown of the journey map.
?Many organizations will build out thorough user journey maps, but only for their customers, and not turn the process inward.
With a few tweaks, you can turn the user journey map inward and create an employee journey map.
Think of your journey map like actual maps.
First, let’s start with a world map. This will be the entirety of your employee journey map. The world map has changed very little – it’s when you start to zoom in that you start to see the changes.
Zooming in further, we have a country map.
Here will be the best practices for your journey map. This includes onboarding, preboarding, and ongoing learning and engagement.
We can zoom in further, and get into the province/state/country area, and even further with a city map.
Think of how much a city map changes over a period of time. Or even a google maps image of a city street view. Some buildings rise, others are torn down. Things are always changing.
This gets into the nitty gritty of your journey map, where you’ll look in-depth at a specific touchpoint. For example, for onboarding, this could be the journey map of the buddy system or pre-boarding.
Another thing to recognize with journey maps is that they’re always ongoing.
They’re not a one-and-done thing, where you’ll drop up once and never change again.
They’re more like a blog post than a book. A blog can get updated over time (like this article has been), compared to a book that stays the same years after being published. Well, until a 10/25th Anniversary edition comes out. Or they add in a new foreword. You know what I mean.
Back to the map analogy, while the world map (the big picture of your employee journey map) may not change when you zoom down to the street level, things will.
2. The Benefits of Employee Journey Mapping.
Here are a couple of academic studies on the subject of employee journey mapping.
Overview: In April 2016, two new hires began their roles in the Learning and Research Services department at MSU Library. This presented a chance to learn from new employees and improve onboarding.
They mapped out the first six months of the employee onboarding experience. They meet with the new employees once a week for the first four weeks. Afterward, once a month.
They made adjustments to the employee onboarding experience, like shortening the timeframe.
Working with the new employees, they identified shortcomings and implemented solutions. They were able to identify possible solutions to the negative experiences they experienced. By the end of the six months, they had a far greater understanding of how the onboarding should go.
Here is another I came across:?EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE JOURNEY MAPPING: A NEW APPROACH TO ATTRACTING TALENT IN THE TOURISM SECTOR IN THE SHADOWS OF COVID-19
Overview: This was a study on a 5-star hotel in Budapest. They were looking at how to improve retention in the hospitality industry in the wake of Covid.
They identified 15 touchpoints and many critical points. Upon completion, the hotel received many recommendations in regard to improvements.
Some examples include playing up the benefits of working there (good location, free meals, fun atmosphere). Other recommendations included implementing a buddy system to help with getting up to speed.
They were able to identify many complex problems that required solving. These would take longer discussions and collaboration to come up with key solutions.
3. The Steps Of The Employee Journey Map.
Now that we know what a journey map is, and the benefits of creating one, let’s look at the steps to consider when it comes to employee journey mapping.
To be clear, these ten steps below are what I call best practices…feel free to include or exclude what you want.
For this post, I'm only going to cover the first three in detail. To see the rest in full, check out my in-depth guide on employee journey mapping on my website.
1. Sourcing And Recruiting
What could their first touch point be with your organization? It can be from seeing your organization at a career fair, they have a friend that works there, or they saw an opening on LinkedIn.
Now we have the resume submission phase (or pre-interview if you will).
I’m sure we’ve all across job postings that made it super inconvenient for those applying.
Instead of attaching a resume with a PDF, they might have some bizarre system where you have to enter things the old-fashion way. Or they make the process too long or make you enter redundant information.
They’re not going to waste their time and look elsewhere. I hope your organization doesn’t have that problem.
My advice is to check with new hires, or go through the process yourself and see where it needs tweaking. You may be in for a surprise.
Moving on, is it clear what to expect next? Is it clear to candidates when they’ll hear back, on whether they’ll get an interview?
Do you leave them in the dark for 7.5 months and then send a generic rejection email? Again, think from their perspective.
I get it. You’re busy, and you may have many, many applicants for the role you are trying to fill.
Someone who may not be a fit today may be a better fit six months or a year from now. The fewer unneeded barriers you have getting in the way of the right candidates, the better.
That said, you don’t want everyone and their mother applying for your positions. Have it filtered down enough of what you’re looking for, and just as important, what you’re not looking for.
There are going to be a number of individuals for whom this is the end of their employee journey map for the time being.
A role in the future opens up that’s a better fit or they have more experience.
Depending on your touch points for sourcing and recruiting, it will lead them to consider future openings. Or they move on and never want to hear from you again.
First impressions matter.
2. Pre-Boarding
So they’ve accepted the job offer. Now what? Do you send them an email of when to come in and leave it at that? Or do you do more?
Pre-boarding is valuable in easing anxieties that we all face when starting a new role.
With the one organization where I had a good employee onboarding experience, I had a thorough yet brief guide of things to expect for my first day, week, month, and quarter. I had lunch a week before I started with a few members of my team.
That did wonders for me when I showed up on the first day.
In other situations, I would get an email saying “See you at 9 am on Monday”, and that’s all.
I didn’t have an idea of what to expect from my first day, week, or month. No information about the dress code, the parking situation, or login information.
All these little things that you need to know, but were afraid to ask.
I didn’t want to be that new person asking three million questions.
Granted, because these organizations didn’t put in the legwork, that’s what ended up being the case.
That said, pre-boarding should be done in moderation. Why?
I’ve talked with organizations who got feedback that pre-boarding expectations were too high. Too much time to put in before day one started.
Unpaid work.
Like little or no pre-boarding, too much pre-boarding can create a whole different set of anxieties with starting a new job.
This is a very, VERY rare case. I’ve never experienced it myself.
That said, I have come across a few organizations where this was the case, so I wanted to make note of it.
Like Grandma used to tell you, everything is in moderation.
3. Onboarding
The first day/week/month is an integral part of the employee journey.
Did they get there early and no one was around, and had to wait around?
Were people confused by the fact that they were starting?
Was their desk not ready, their computer not ready, and were they without email for some time?
If they’re starting remotely, is it clear what they should be doing?
Is there a video call for them to introduce themselves, or is no one the wiser?
Or are things laid out for them, meetings set up, and people welcoming them?
This kind of day one can have a noticeable impact if an employee decides to stay long-term at an organization, or decides to start looking elsewhere.
Every organization is going to tackle onboarding differently.
Every organization has a different story – from team size to industry, to history.
I recommend the following goals for your employee onboarding experience as a framework – it works across industry and organization size. Feel free to adjust as you wish.
To see the other 7 steps of the employee journey map, please read my in-depth guide on my website here.
4. Conducting Research For Your Journey Map.
While there are plenty of overlaps, employee journey mapping has notable differences from a customer journey map.
When conducting interviews with customers, it’s easier to get unfiltered feedback.
If your product or service sucks, they’ll let you know.
If you’re interviewing an employee about why your company sucks? That’s different.
They may be a bit hesitant to talk smack about the place that hires them in this kind of scenario.
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Measuring the impact of an employee journey map is vaguer than a customer journey map.
For a customer journey map, it’s far easier to tie a more positive customer experience to areas like an increase in revenue.
For the employee experience? It’s a bit more difficult.
Before we get more into those, let’s talk about starting an employee journey map.
When you begin an employee journey map, keep things simple and specific.
Don’t go thinking to yourself “hey, let’s work on the overall employee journey map for all employees”.
That’s a massive undertaking, depending on the size of your organization.
It would be like an explorer back in the day deciding to map out the entire world instead of a smaller area.
So let’s start small in your focus.
When I’ve worked with clients, the most common stages that I work on with them are:
From there, you need to decide on who you’re targeting.
Get more specific than “our entire company”. Unless you’re a small company, you’ll want to focus down further.
Here are some areas to consider in getting more specific:
This allows you to narrow down your focus. It makes it easier to see the impacts that implementing your employee journey map can have.
It also gives you momentum moving forward if you want to continue with an employee journey map.
Here are some examples of areas of the employee journey map you can focus on, and who:
Narrowing it down to something specific will do wonders. Not only in identifying problems, but measuring your implemented solutions.
The more specific you get, the better. Well, to an extent. You don’t want to make things so narrow that this only results in targeting a couple of individuals.
Conducting Interviews
One question I get all the time in regard to conducting interviews is the following:
“How can we research the employee journey considering employees might be uncomfortable sharing?”
This is a great question!
One key difference between a customer journey map and an employee journey map is that it’s easier to get unfiltered feedback from a customer.
If an employee is airing all their grievances about what’s wrong with the organization, that can come back to haunt them. Word gets up to management about their issues, and that gets used against them.
Hate to say it’s a reality, but that is the case. I’ve had friends be vocal about their issues with an organization when they needed it. This came back to bite them in the butt at various points in their time there.
There are three options here in regard to conducting interviews, each with its pros and cons.
1. Hire An Outside Party (like Playficient)
Pros:
+ Can avoid issues of employees being uncomfortable in sharing information
+ Bring in an employee journey mapping expert
+ You help me put food on the table
Cons:
– Need to find an outside party
– The outside party needs time to get accustomed to your organization (you’re going to need to get me up to speed on all your acronyms)
2. Anonymous Surveys
Pros:
+ Anonymous
+ Scalable compared to conducting 1:1 or group interviews
Cons:
– Hard to dig deeper into answers given
– Can’t pick up on body language, tone of voice, word emphasis, etc.
3. Conduct Internal Interviews
Pros:
+ Convenient
+ Strong knowledge base of your organization
Cons:
– Easier to fall to biases (the answers you want to hear instead of what you need to hear)
– Employees may feel possible consequences for their answers
Of course, I recommend #1 (hire an outside party such as Playficient) as the best option (there may or may not be some bias there).
If you DO want to go with conducting the interviews internally, there is a way to mitigate the cons that arise.
If you go with this approach,?don’t have their direct manager interview them.
Get someone from the P & C team. Or a different manager they don’t report to.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction.
What kind of questions to ask?
There are a million different questions you can ask, but to help you out, here are a list of five I like to use in interviews.
Doesn’t matter the role, the organization, or what you’re trying to accomplish.
The magic wand question is my favorite to use. So many possibilities that can lead the interview to go in interesting directions.
Here are some other important things to consider…
The last point is key. You want to dig deeper into their answer.
For example, if you asked the “magic wand question” and their answer was:
“I wish that upper management had a clue of what we did.”
That leads down an interesting path.
This is how I conduct my interviews, and how you should too. Have a list of questions on hand, but be ready to dig in deeper on what comes up.
If those conversations find their natural conclusion, try a different question.
How many interviews should we conduct?
This is another question I get frequently.
How many interviews do we need to conduct to be confident in our findings?
More often than not, five interviews are all you need.
That’s it.
Why so low?
Here are some excerpts on findings from Nielsen Norman Group: Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
As soon as you collect data from a single test user, your insights shoot up and you have already learned almost a third of all there is to know about the usability of the design. The difference between zero and even a little bit of data is astounding.When you test the second user, you will discover that this person does some of the same things as the first user, so there is some overlap in what you learn. People are definitely different, so there will also be something new that the second user does that you did not observe with the first user. So the second user adds some amount of new insight, but not nearly as much as the first user did.
The third user will do many things that you already observed with the first user or with the second user and even some things that you have already seen twice. Plus, of course, the third user will generate a small amount of new data, even if not as much as the first and the second user did.
As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.
After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.
More often than not, conducting five interviews with the right segment is all I need to identify common patterns and pain points.
Asking 6, 8, 10, 15 won’t lead to that many more insights.
What if you can’t find any patterns after five?
I find that it can be either the following (or a combination of the two):
You’re going to have better focus and be able to measure outcomes if you decide to focus on those who went through onboarding within the last year within a department compared to asking everyone at your organization about their onboarding experience.
When in doubt, get more specific.
As you continue to conduct interviews, use them more for confirming past findings.
If you’re on the fourth or fifth interview and a common pain point has come up in past interviews, bring up that point to confirm your past findings.
That said, you don’t want to railroad the conversation as a result. Keep things open for them to provide new insights.
Next Steps
We've covered plenty of ground in this article on employee journey mapping. That said, it's only a fraction of what I have to say on the subject.
Beyond going into more detail about the 10 steps to the employee journey map, it also covers the following:
UXPressia, a journey mapping platform, has some employee journey map templates you can play around with.
If you're interested in further services in regard to employee journey maps, check out what I offer here.
Feel free to reach out to me here or at [email protected] for any questions you have.
Please leave a comment if you enjoyed the article!