What is Employee Experience Journey Mapping?

Lately, I have been getting a lot of questions about employee experience journey mapping. So, I thought I’d write a quick primer.

Employee Experience Journey Mapping is a visual thinking tool we use during the discovery stage of the design thinking process to analyze the employee experience. The idea behind it is simple: you look at the journey employees take throughout their time at your organization and break it down into stages. Then you examine each stage from different angles to get the complete picture of what the experience of the employee may look like and how employees feel along the way. From there, you can celebrate the high points and work to change the low points.

Which journeys should we map?

There are many employee experience journeys you can map. To make things less overwhelming and to help with prioritization, we tend to cluster journeys where the most relevant experiences happen. In their book Employee Experience by Design, authors Emma Bridger and Belinda Gannaway suggest the following employee journey groupings:

1. Join: Journeys related to joining the organization
2. Work: Journeys related to an employee’s current role and responsibilities
3. Live: Journeys related to personal life events, employee and family wellbeing
4. Grow: Journeys related to an employee’s learning and development
5. Leave: Journeys related to leaving
6. Sustain: Journeys related to the alumni experience
7. Rejoin: Journeys related to rejoining the organization (including after leaving or a period of absence such a parental leave)

From here, you want to look at your business strategy, people data, and any other relevant insights to prioritize which journey you might map first. For example, you uncover that you don’t have the right tech talent to scale the business. Consequently, you might prioritize the hiring journey for this talent segment. Or your employee engagement survey reveals that women experience challenges after returning from maternity leave. So, you might decide to examine the maternity leave experience.

How is journey mapping different from process mapping?

While at first glance a journey map looks like a process map, the key difference is that it chronicles step by step activities and associated thoughts and feelings from the employee’s perspective.

Also, the context of the entire journey matters when we want to identify relevant improvement opportunities. That’s why we usually divide the journey into three phases:

1.??????how someone enters the experience,

2.??????what’s it like as they are in it,

3.??????and how to they exit the experience.

It’s like your morning trip to the coffee shop: The entire experience depends on what happened before you got your coffee, as you get your coffee, and after you receive your coffee.

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Who needs to be involved in journey mapping?

Journey mapping is a powerful way to align every stakeholder who is involved in bringing a specific journey come to live for the employee. For example, when mapping the onboarding journey, you might include key representatives from Talent Acquisition, Shared Services, IT, HRIS, and L&D.

Journey mapping participants often tell me that this was the first time they all were together and saw the experience end-to-end from the employee’s point of view. They were able to visualize how their piece of the puzzle fit into the whole. In essence, the side benefit of a journey mapping exercise is that you can create greater cohesion and empathy among your HR team while also fostering an employee-focused perspective.

As one journey mapping participant sums it up: “Seeing from an HR lens all the impact we can make to our employees activates me to do more.”

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What other questions might you have about journey mapping? Please drop them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

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Want to learn more?

Based on the interest in this topic, I have decided to offer another session of my popular virtual Employee Experience Journey Mapping Workshop. It teaches you my proven 3-step process, how to virtually facilitate journey mapping, and provides you with templates for future use. You can learn more and register here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Design Thinking for HR is a biweekly LinkedIn newsletter that aims to inspire HR professionals to experiment with the human-centered design framework. The newsletter is curated by?Nicole Dessain who is an employee experience consultant, design thinking workshop facilitator, and Northwestern University instructor. Nicole is currently writing her first book about Design Thinking for HR. Join the Early Readers’ Community here.