You can’t possibly think of hitting it big unless you have a reliable and skilled team. Usually, companies make the mistake of solely focusing on the customer experience and forget about the employee experience. They might optimize and fine-tune it really well. After that, their focus shits towards improving their offering. They might succeed in perfecting their product or service further.
But unless you also pay attention to employee experience alongside customer experience and product improvement – you’ll lose skilled people.
A good workplace attracts good talent. And hiring, retaining, and relishing good talent is key to a successful business.
The employee experience matters. It’s dictated by how well the employee journey is designed within the workplace. To design the journey, you need to put in work on all employee experience touchpoints.
Catering to the employee helps you build an attractive corporate culture. Attractive workplaces help in two major ways, among others:
- They help you spend less on marketing and hiring, as better talent will be attracted to you naturally.
- Attractive workplaces are reviewed in a positive light. With the interconnected nature of the world we’re living in, having good reviews (let’s say on websites such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor) is more effective to portray your corporate strength than publishing why you’re a good workplace yourself.
Let’s dive into some finer details.
What are employee experience touchpoints?
A touchpoint is a point of contact between a business and its customers. Employee experience touchpoints are the points of contact between the business and its employees.
A point of contact can be anything ranging from a pre-joining welcoming message to greetings on the first day of work. Essentially, the more “part of the company” you can make a new employee feel, the better their experience will be.
Core employee touchpoints can be divided in 4 major periods. These cover the entire employee journey, from beginning until the end.
Employee milestone touchpoints:
- Recruitment – from employer branding to how do they find out about the job
- Onboarding – first week as well as the period until the first review (usually 3 or 6 months)
- Growth – the period where employee grows within the company, whether that’s in the same or different roles
- Exit – or the offboarding experience
Each of these touchpoints have a range of micro touchpoints and are different based on the individual and organisational aspects.
Each of these large (macro) touchpoints can be categorized in one of the four main categories:
- Human – experience with all the people (colleagues, managers, customers, suppliers)
- Organisational – Processes, policies, decision making, hierarchy, engagement, etc
- Physical – In short – work environment
- Tehncology – Digital workplace, screen time, apps, simplicity, etc
The entirety of good employee experience touchpoints focus on a myriad of aspects including employer branding, but the key focus remains to be making new employees feel a part of the team, being recognized for their abilities early on, and making them feel welcome.
Employee touchpoints are also sometimes called employee journey touchpoints. These are two different things. We’ll discuss employee journey touchpoints towards the end of this piece.
It can be hard to pay attention to all employees who join. But it doesn’t have to be.
Employee touchpoints 101: Great tactics to improve your employer brand
Some time-tested tactics can help. Choose these if you wish to go more conventional:
- Perks such as a gym membership.
- Welcome kits and onboarding kits (See Facebook welcome kits and onboarding process).
- Introduction with the assigned point of contact.
- A quick tour around the workplace.
- An initial debrief on the daily tasks.
However, that’s not where you should stop.
You can leverage better people skills and tactics to have a much more significant impact on the employees.
What are these tactics?
#1 Having a detailed pre-onboarding process
The onboarding process is something you have put ample thought into. But what about the pre-onboarding process?
Pre-onboarding is the time between an official job confirmation and the first day at work.
This is a great time to get in touch with the employees to make them feel needed and appreciated.
Start with welcome messages or videos. At this point, you really don’t have to invest. However, sending corporate videos kills two birds with one stone – the employee feels attached to the company and you’re able to pass your company’s values effortlessly.
Also, provide information on any social benefits you provide during this phase.
#2 Making the first week memorable
Forget the first day. Good employees will only stick around if you’re better than the rest. And to be better you need to up your game.
Concentrate on making the first week a success. How do you do that?
Have a policy or an unofficial sentiment where everyone higher-up takes the time to stop and recognize a new employee.
This doesn’t have to be done on the same day. Spread it out over a week. Think of it as building a company sentiment. Hopefully, policy creation won’t be required.
This is something that will go on to becoming a normal company ethic – perhaps one that doesn’t need any enforcement, reminders, or supervision.
Personal introductions can go a long way in fostering great work relationships.
You can even go from thinking of it as a “stop and recognize” exercise to a “celebrate the new employee” exercise.
#3 Talking about the core values and guiding principles
It’s important to let an employee know the core values and the guiding principles of the company they are about to join. Given, a brief introduction is usually given in the advanced stages of the interview and some form of documentation or website is shared prior to the joining.
However, nothing is as personal and effective as a one-on-one lowdown on these aspects.
Make sure your employees know the values so they can condition themselves accordingly.
#4 Organizing events, meetings, gatherings
Events, meetups, gatherings, etc. are important for employee growth. New employees benefit the most. These are not work-related meetings. The general ambiance is pretty casual. You don’t need to have longer or expensive events or meetings for this.
For example, you can have a policy that there’ll be a casual get-together or an informal event every 10 new employees. This works as an introduction, gives people the time to connect, and allows employees to feel more celebrated in general.
#5 Going for conversations instead of introductions
Focus on meaningful conversations. Don’t take the employee on a trip with you around the workplace and introduce them with quick pleasantries.
Give this some time. Not everyone might be available all the time, so find time slots over the course of 4-5 days. Put the new employees in one-on-one casual conversations.
Watercooler talk, if you may. Stop for a coffee in the middle, perhaps, which would give you more time to talk openly.
Good conversations are vital to employee growth. It helps them settle down better and feel more comfortable. Consequently, they get more confidence which helps them boost their productivity and workplace efficiency in general. Not to mention this adds more value to your employee’s journey.
An important part of this conversation can be that you’re open to forgiving a few initial mishaps that might arise out of the lack of knowledge regarding the company’s working methodologies or the understanding of the chain of command.
#6 Providing briefs, training, resources
It’s critical that you provide all types of briefing, training, and resources before the employee joins. You can choose to make this a part of “#1. Pre-onboarding process” or “#2. Making the first week memorable.”
If you’re unsure of what type of training is required, it is recommended to do a Goldstein model training need analysis.
Every workplace has a different set of work paradigms. It’s only fair that any new employee has access to all that they need before they start work.
However, also note that you cannot overwhelm new employees in any way. Dumping a lot of briefing and resource material might look like the best way to train them early on but it will actually overload them.
#7 Talking about business transparency
Employees need to know that the business believes in transparency. Transparency is single-handedly the most important aspect that influences the type of outlook a person has for a business.
Employees are also people at the end of the day. If they know that your business believes in transparency then their outlook will be positive, which will seep into any reviews they write for your company.
Making this clear early on is important.
Now, saying that your business is a proponent of transparency and actually having a transparent business are two wholly different things.
#8 Forming smaller groups and teams
Smaller groups and teams are a great way to maximize efficiency. But for now, we’re not interested in that.
A smaller, tightly-knit team is a more snug work setting for a new employee. It’s more comfortable and secure. There’s a good chance that a new employee might be overly social and as such, being in a small team or not doesn’t really matter. But that’s not always the case. Especially when employees have joined a company they always wanted to, they might feel a little performance pressure in the beginning. This is also the time when they’re prone to making mistakes if unfamiliar with the company’s workings.
Keep this at bay.
Form smaller teams so a new employee only has to interact with a few people at a time initially – making them freer to ask questions. This makes the workplace much more enjoyable. It additionally fosters friendships and creates the colleague mentality way faster than the other scenario where there are so many people but no one to talk to meaningfully.
Employee journey touchpoints
An employee’s journey within a company entails a series of touchpoints. The way to retain talent is to make this journey positive, satisfactory, and fun.
Employee experience touchpoints in the journey
There are two types of touchpoints in an employee’s journey through a business (a journey through time mostly): non-task-related and task-related.
Improving both types of digital employee experience touchpoints is the duty of any organization, not to mention also a prerequisite to better company culture and increased productivity.
Non-task-related EX touchpoints can be morning greetings and evening good nights. Work-related or non-work-related topic discussions with co-workers are also touchpoints – ranging from an update on an ongoing project to discussing politics or the weather.
Task-related touchpoints include feedback, acknowledgments, project progress, performance feedback or goals, prototyping, help and guidance, and so on.
Employee journey example
An employee’s journey can start and end in various ways depending on the employee. What comes in-between is even more subject to the employee, work culture, workplace, co-workers, and so many other variables at play.
Looking at a fairly standard and ordinary example of an employee journey might guide you towards designing the perfect employee journey for your organization.
- The employee is contacted before onboarding but after a successful interview.
- The employee arrives at the office. Meets the staff, co-workers, managers, and gets to know their point of contact.
- Potential obstacle: Employees might find it hard or even impossible to start work because the prerequisites are not in place. They can be anything from raw materials to resources, staff accounts, client briefs, credentials, etc.
- The employee works at maximum efficiency for the first few weeks. They also become pretty confident around the workplace and start to pick up on the culture of the place.
- If employees don’t receive proper recognition by this time, they might start to feel as if they made a wrong decision. This will negatively impact their outlook for the company (which has its own set of implications) and inhibit their performance.
- If not, then the employee is satisfied and keeps working.
- Alternatively, if an employee is not satisfied due to any reason or reasons, they might think of leaving. A significant percentage of employees leave the job within the first six months. Most of these are skilled or talented people, who are sure that they can get a better job elsewhere. Retaining this talent is extremely important.
Focus on what works and what doesn’t in your specific situation and improvise your employee journey.
Employee journey map
An employee journey map is a topic for another day. However, it’s important to summarize it here as it’s linked to our current topic.
An employee journey map is precisely what it sounds like. It’s a (rather colorful) map that outlines the journey of an employee. The map is basically an ordered list of employee experience touchpoints.
The employee journey map starts from the “looking for a job” phase of a potential employee. There are desires, challenges, obstacles, pain points, emotions, and so on. Every pain point in an employee journey map makes things worse. For example, an interview is one of the initial steps in this map. Suppose the interview didn’t fully specify the job requirements or wasn’t clear enough. This is a pain point. Rather than following up, the potential employee might choose to go to another company altogether.
Therefore, the pain points of employee maps allow a company or business to find its shortcomings.
Don’t forget about the diversity and inclusion during the mapping process.
Given, it requires a great deal of research. However, identifying the common pain points in the employee journey is one of the most effective and reliable way of finding the right talent for your company.
