The importance of a good Employee Lifecycle

Understanding the employee's life cycle is very important to improve the experiences of the employees in your organization. It is a way to describe the different stages that an employee goes through during his or her interaction with your company. The method comes from marketing, where the 'customer lifecycle' is successfully used to think and work in a more customer-oriented way.

When you look up the Employee Lifecycle Map on Google, you come across the same kind of images: the lifecycle of the employee viewed from the eyes of HR and not from the eyes of the employee. Terms such as attraction, recruitment, retention and succession are terms derived from internal HR processes. Mapping these processes or departments on a life cycle will not immediately help you to bring innovation into your HR approach and create better experiences for your employees. After all, you then start too much from existing structures and processes, instead of thinking holistically from the employee's perspective and discovering new possibilities.

The whole idea of Employee Experience Design is to get away from the process approach of HR and to put people back at the centre of policy, by thinking from the employee's perspective. Therefore, start by removing process language from your vocabulary, at least at the moment you start looking for innovation.

That's why at TRIGGS we work with an Employee Lifecycle that looks slightly different in terms of wording. We start from the perspective of the candidate or employee: instead of recruitment, we speak of 'looking for a job', 'doing research' and 'applying for a job'. By doing this, you immediately have a link to the so-called touchpoints (the moments when the candidate or employee comes into contact with your organisation). Each touch point can influence the employee's perception of the organisation.

​When you start from 'recruitment', there is a chance that you do not look further than attracting employees through various channels. In doing so, you pass over the search that a candidate does long before you are looking for a candidate. That person may end up on Glassdoor during his or her search (a site where employees can anonymously post reviews about their organisation and management). If your score as a company is disappointing, there is a real chance that a candidate will drop out before you even think about recruitment, and you usually don't know about it.

That's why looking at your HR policy from the perspective of the candidate or employee is so relevant, because it opens your eyes to those moments that influence a decision and often contains a key to improvement. By proactively working with the elements that determine the score on Glassdoor, you can step by step improve the experiences that employees have with and in your organisation and increase involvement. Not only Glassdoor is relevant in this respect, all over data that gives you insight into your employees are a good basis from which to start.

It is time to look at HR from a different perspective. The perspective of the employee. This new role of employee experience designer, who uses employee data to manage the employee's life cycle and improve experiences, is a big shift and requires new skills.

If you want to know more about Employee Experience Design and how to get started with Design Thinking within HR, then come to our fourth Masterclass (Dutch) in January 2019. More info via the link.