Employee experience is crucial to the organization as they are one of the most important brand ambassadors of your business. According to a survey by Deloitte, about 80% of executives termed employee experience as very important. Probable candidates, existing employees, and old employees become advocates for the organization regardless of the decisions made at the top level. Employee lifecycle is extremely important as each step in employee lifecycle impacts the bottom line.
Let’s have a look at some of the crucial stages of employee cycle below.
- Recruitment: Experience of people who are not yet a part of your company but have applied to be one, also go onto spread a good or bad word about the organization. Whether or not the organization is considerate of their time and schedule and how well they accommodate to ensure a smooth selection process, signifies the value of employees in the organization. Negligence during this stage can lead to potential harm to the organization’s image in the job market.
- Onboarding: Onboarding is a very crucial step in the employee cycle and organizations might underestimate its importance. It is critical to ensure that employee gets all the resources and knowledge that a new recruit needs. Giving a clear overview of the job role is of utmost importance at this stage. Providing a fair of what the employee is going to be working in the coming months might be a good idea and will help the new recruit to settle in the new job role. In order to design smooth onboarding process organizations can evaluate the employee’s experience on the first day and then after first one week to gauge whether the new recruits feel at home or not. Some of the ways to ensure a great and quick onboarding process is to start incubating the new recruits soon after the offer is made by giving them access to useful resources to understand the company, its structure, and their job role in detail.
- Development: This is one of the critical processes in the employee lifecycle that must be implemented throughout the lifecycle. Development creates a win-win situation for both the employer and the employee as the employee gets a professional value addition whereas employer gets a competitive advantage because of employee’s great potential. Also, in these times of continuous disruption development is not just an extra learning but a norm for survival. Managers and organizations can encourage everyone to take up learning programs for their development by rewarding the efforts of those who are voluntarily learning and inculcating new skills.
- Retention: Retention has become one of the most challenging tasks for organizations because of new workforce dynamics and changing employee expectations. The key to overcome these challenges is to maintain a great culture and relationship with the critical talent and sustaining an open communication environment. In order to retain the employees, it is imperative to understand what motivates them. Although monetary benefits are important, they are not always the sole determining factor. A sense of personal growth, recognition, sense of belongingness, and value for opinions and ideas go a long way in retaining employees.
- Separation: No organization or manager must never consider this stage trivial in the employee lifecycle. It might look natural to withdraw all the benefits, and other tasks as the employee will no longer be a part of the organization. But on the other hand, they are one of the strongest ambassadors out there because they have seen the organization and its people, up and close. Hence, it’s essential for organizations to make sure that the employee does not feel left out or devalued and the relieving process is smooth and hassle-free.
Employee lifecycle is very critical as each step in it affects the bottom line. Lifecycle planning can be of great help to provide a great employee experience. It has a ripple effect because if the employees are happy, they’ll provide a great consumer service and if the consumers are happy, then the business will flourish. Hence, by taking into account some of the important points for all the above lifecycle stages a great employee experience can be provided.