Today’s customers are changing but so are your employees. According to Professor Nick Kemsley, co-director of the Henley Business School Centre for HR Excellence, we should view today’s employees as consumers. Here’s why:
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A rise in portfolio thinking. Employees think long-term and build a portfolio for future positions. Very few employees are joining companies for life.
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Low barriers to switching. LinkedIn’s advent of socially recruiting passive candidates has made it easier for employees and employers to find each other.
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War for talent. Employers are getting more aggressive at poaching your employees.
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Personal brand equity. People wear brand-name clothing and drive cars as a status symbol. The employee résumé or current logo beside their profile is important for their personal brands, and landing that next gig.
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Changing attitudes to work and needs. For some consumers, the product they associate themselves with is more than the product, it’s an aligned purpose or belief of the brand. Employees want more than a job, they want a calling that aligns with organisational purpose.
In light of these changes, and the emergence of a new type of employee, the question arises: “Are we engaging with the needs of the new employee?” Let’s not forget, that employee engagement is as critical to business performance as customer engagement.
To better understand your employees and identify the best way to engage them, we suggest using Employee Experience Journey Mapping. Employee Experience Journey Mapping is a methodology based upon the very successful Customer Experience Journey Mapping methodology. Employee Experience Journey Mapping can be used to better understand specific employee journeys and craft better employee experiences.
According to experts employee journey mapping is every bit as important as customer journey mapping and needs to be focused on before organisations can get the customer journey right.
By understanding and mapping the experiences employees have with the organisation, people, processes and technology, you can better understand their behaviour and the eventual business outcomes.
Get to know your employees better.
Just as all customers are unique, employees are all different. Their needs vary based on their role, department and work style. Particularly in larger companies, it can be difficult to know each process a group uses and how different teams interact with one another. An employee journey map can help expose the areas in which different teams are having success, where they may be wasting time and resources, and where they’re experiencing unnecessary gaps or bottlenecks.
Discover what motivates your workers and what’s standing in their way.
Companies that are experiencing disengaged employees, low productivity, or poor customer service can likely attribute some of that to a mismatch between demands and expectations put on employees and the resources they are provided with. It’s not that companies don’t care about their employees (at least, we hope not); it’s that many organisations lack insight into the daily experiences of their workers, a problem that an employee journey map can help solve.
Personas can also be a helpful tool when mapping the employee journey. Equally to buyer personas on the customer side, employee personas involve researching the characteristics and personalities of real people and identifying their key behaviours, aspirations and goals. The use of personas in the journey map process makes it easier to spot:
- opportunities and gaps in personnel,
- barriers within the processes and applications employees use that may be keeping them from doing their jobs effectively.
