Elevating your employee experience to match your customer experience

It’s no secret that organizations have long focused on customer journey mapping and experiences. Customer experience (CX) encompasses everything a company does to provide its customers outstanding value, growth, and satisfaction. Organizations that excel in CX often see a 3x return for shareholders.

While developing an unparalleled customer experience, what is often forgotten is the equally important employee experience. Just as a stellar customer experience positively influences the bottom line, an exceptional employee experience yields similar benefits. Studies reveal that motivating and empowering employees contributes to higher satisfaction levels and enhanced experiences for customers, with highly engaged teams demonstrating a substantial 21% greater profitability.

When employees have a great experience, this also equates to high employee engagement scores. Gallup’s latest engagement report underscores the significance of elevating the employee experience, measured by employee engagement, which is a core aspect of business strategy. Organizations prioritizing employee engagement witness 10% higher customer loyalty, 23% higher profitability, 18% increased productivity (sales), and a significant 48% reduction in turnover. The evidence is clear: Engaged employees bring passion, purpose, presence, and energy to their work every day.

The key question then becomes: How can organizations elevate employee engagement and cultivate an outstanding employee experience? The journey begins with a profound understanding of the employee journey, mirroring the meticulous approach taken in mapping the customer journey.

What is the employee journey?

The employee journey begins with hiring and onboarding and expands to promotions, life events, and, ultimately, departure from the company. Every moment, from entry to exit, makes up the employee journey. How the employee feels during this employee journey can create either a positive or negative employee experience, and ultimately their employee engagement. 

Much like sales and marketing teams craft customer journey maps and measure customer engagement scores, organizations should apply the same principles to create a robust, employee-centered employee experience strategy. 

“Very similar to the principles that apply to customer experience, you want human-centered design. And in this case, it’s employee-centered. It starts with the employee and ‘What do they need to achieve?’ And really thinking about that journey. How can we eliminate friction and continue to make it a generally positive, ideally delightful experience along the way?”

– Francesca Luthi, EVP & Chief Administrative Officer, Assurant

Getting started with employee journey mapping

An employee journey map combines the expected and unexpected moments into a visual representation and actionable framework tailored to your industry, enterprise, employees, and culture. It highlights the critical stages, key milestones, and necessary touchpoints for each stage.

The process begins by identifying key stakeholders involved at various touchpoints, including IT, HR, communications, and managers. Stakeholders collaborate to map out and identify key touchpoints and milestones in the employee journey. This involves:

• Identifying each of the employee personas with details including department, role, likes, dislikes, communication preferences, and technology usage. 
• Prioritizing the moments that matter by identifying the more common cyclical events and then focusing on business-critical gaps.
  • When mapping the employee journey, the first categories to tackle are those with the greatest impacts on your business. Typically, the cyclical moments are plotted first, such as onboarding, open enrollment, life events, and annual performance reviews. 
  • The development of your employee journey map should also focus on your costliest gaps. Do you have an issue with retention, employee burnout, or a disconnection from company culture?
• Create communications for touchpoints in each category. Once you have prioritized the moments that matter on your employee journey map, the next step is to create content and a personalized (yet scalable) distribution plan for the touchpoints in each category. Do certain onboarding communications need to go out to deskless workers in certain countries and languages? Create the content for each moment and each employee persona. 
• Ensure scalability by leveraging technology to personalize communications and touchpoints across diverse workforces. Since companies are made up of diverse workforces and every employee will have their own moments — both personal and professional — throughout their employee journey, it is important to provide a personalized experience. Yet it is incredibly challenging for a communicator or HR professional to share individual, one-off communications and resources to every employee within a global company. That’s where it is important to audit your technology and determine the platforms and channels that can be used to personalize the communications and touchpoints in the employee journey. 

Belonging drives engagement

“We are focused on making employees feel like they belong, and that they are a part of the mission. Being able to actually see who is engaging with what content, who are our most engaged employees, is big.”

Learn more 

Start your journey with Firstup

Intelligent communication and employee experience platforms like Firstup help you create a personalized experience for every employee. The Firstup platform applies modern marketing concepts to employee communications and the overall employee experience by enabling teams to automate and orchestrate parts of the employee journey. 

94% of employees who receive effective communication, information, and guidance throughout their journeys are more likely to be highly engaged.

Forrester

Traditional digital experiences, such as sending mass emails on benefits or training programs, fall short — particularly when it comes to the deskless workforce who may not have access to emails containing essential information on employee assistance programs, open enrollment details, performance deadlines, or safety training. Furthermore, even if the employee does have access to email, they still may not read the message. Consider this: A mind-boggling 347 billion emails are sent daily. How do you cut through the noise and capture your employees’ attention? 

The answer lies in embracing personalized communication, akin to the individualized experiences we encounter as customers. Think about the convenience of receiving notifications from Alexa about a delivered package or a reminder about your child’s birthday list. Now imagine implementing the same level of internal personalization with your internal communications — for instance, when an employee embarks on parental leave. This ensures they receive precisely timed, relevant information on actions like adding a dependent to their insurance, completing forms while on leave, and taking advantage of your organization’s amazing parental benefits. The employee now experiences a sense of support during this significant moment in their life.

Take a look at Firstup’s customer, AGCO. They’ve masterfully crafted a personalized onboarding journey that activates when new employees join the company. This journey shares pivotal company information, valuable resources, and essential training throughout the first 90 days. What sets it apart is its intelligence; it knows precisely how to reach each employee. Given that deskless employees make up a significant portion of AGCO’s workforce, the platform intelligently determines whether to convey communications through email or push notifications, catering to the unique preferences of these individuals. The cost of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding employees is expensive, and employees typically decide whether to stay or go within their first 90 days. Imagine the time, money, and employee morale that could be saved by creating customer-like employee onboarding journeys to guide employees through their first few months at your organization.