Improve Your Employee’s Experience With Journey Mapping

Today’s companies are continually measuring the customer’s user experience, and even devoting entire departments to ensure their brand has the most positive user impact with as little interruptions, nuances, or hiccups as possible.  But what about the employees of a company and their involvement? Here you will discover how to improve your employee’s experience with journey mapping.

Some companies are overlooking that the foundation of their businesses is their employees and by focusing on the employee experience, organizations can expect higher rates of employee engagement, productivity, job satisfaction and positivity towards the company as a whole.

According to a survey performed by Glassdoor, fewer than half of employees questioned would recommend their current employer to a friend.  With statistics such as this, it is imperative that companies focus on employee satisfaction and create a forum that encourages internal employee engagement and communications.

Just like a company can design a positive user experience for their customers they can also do it for their employees. Companies can utilize some of the same principles applied to their customer’s experience to their employees’ experiences.  By recognizing their employees’ full potential and value through open communication, special events/milestone celebrations, and journey mapping, employees can have a significant impact and bring a stronger value to the organization.

Last year Temkin Group performed a research study that looked at the difference between engaged and disengaged employees, and their findings, while not surprising, were concerning. Eighty-two percent of engaged employees would do something good for the company even if it was not expected, versus 19% of disengaged employees. That means there is a large percentage of employees that are not empowered to provide value to their company when not specifically asked.

Employee Experience Strategies

By improving the employee experience, businesses can transform their departments into a motivated and high functioning workforce. Below are some steps and actions organizations can take to improve the employee experience through journey mapping.

1.     Learn the DNA of your employees  

With the available technologies obtaining data and measuring results is more straightforward and more manageable than ever before. Organizations can utilize this type of technology in order to identify certain characteristics of their employees which gives them a solid understanding of where they need to begin to increase employee engagement. StarMeUp OS is a platform that can help identify your top potential influencers and change agents to assist them in becoming significant contributors to your company.

2.     Have meaningful conversations  

This goes far beyond quarterly progress meetings and employee reviews.  Making a point to have unscheduled, real and candid conversations with people in your departments can provide valuable insights on how they really feel regarding their jobs, co-workers, and company.  Current technologies make it even easier for employees to have honest conversations about obstacles they are facing or unresolved issues they are experiencing. Paving new ways for open communication that can increase engagement levels and remove roadblocks that can often turn into larger concerns.

3.     Map the employee journey through the organization

A traditional way, companies use to map employee experiences is via surveys. However, what becomes more important after a survey is the “how to”. How to use that survey data to transform ongoing and open conversation throughout the organization?

By giving your employees a platform to have real-time continual conversations can result in the traditional ask/survey feedback, into an actionable cultural experience.

4. Define what drives your employees

Uncovering and understanding the motivations of your employees can have a significant impact both internally and externally for your company. Focus on asking and then understanding your employee’s deep-rooted motivations. Then to utilize that feedback into actionable and measured tactics to drive your company culture forward.  

5.    Start acting

By using both quantitative and qualitative data, employers can take focused action on pinpointing what key areas need attention and delegate all levels of leadership to initiate changes in order to get to their end goal. When big changes need to be initiated, using data to identify patterns and then breaking up the task into smaller steps can help the implementation process seem not so overwhelming.

6.    Evaluate and move forward

Once an initiative has been identified via data and employee feedback, creating a measurable action plan in order to move forward with improving the employee’s workplace experience is key.

This will enable tracking and create program milestones to ensure that progress is taking place.

By listening and learning via data, creating an open forum for change, getting business leaders from all parts of your organization involved and setting clear and measurable goals for success, can all contribute in creating better employee experiences. Organizations have the power to help shape the impressions of their employees to create meaningful experiences that result in high impact changes.  After all, creating engaged customers begins with having engaged employees.