Employee journey mapping has become a critical tool for unlocking insights into hybrid workers’ experiences.
By Howard Rabinowitz, Workflow contributor
The shift to remote and hybrid work is fundamentally reshaping the workplace, making running a business more complex than ever. Fortunately, a familiar pre-pandemic tool—employee journey mapping—is coming up aces as companies adopt flexible working models.
Employee journey mapping: Employee journey mapping is a visualization of the entire employee lifecycle, from recruitment and onboarding to offboarding. Similar to customer journey mapping, it helps companies pinpoint “moments that matter” to optimize talent recruitment and retention by removing pain points in the employee experience.
Journey mapping has long been a valuable tool to gain insight into employee experience just as it is for customer experience. To create a map, human resources teams craft “personas” segmented by job roles, then collect feedback from employees in those roles during every stage of their tenure, from onboarding to exit. The goal: to pinpoint “moments that matter” in order to improve employee experience and boost talent retention.
But many of those moments used to happen in the office, where fewer and fewer employees spend their time. Pre-pandemic, 60% of employees whose jobs could be done remotely worked in-office full time; today only 22% of remote-capable workers are full time in the office, with almost 50% at home part-time and 30% fully remote. The new hybrid workforce isn’t cookie-cutter:
Employee journey mapping has become a critical tool for unlocking insights into hybrid workers’ experiences.
Any portion of the staff might work remotely for any portion of the time. All that makes it harder to suss out this new class of worker’s journey.
And it’s not just the “where” of work that has shifted as employees spend all, part, or none of their workweek at an office desk; it’s also the “how,” with technology continuously transforming our work lives. Amid these upheavals, employee journey mapping has become a critical tool for unlocking insights into hybrid workers’ experiences.
“If you look at your engagement data, you can see where different personas are thriving or falling off the track that you want them to be on,” says Emily Connery, vice president of people and talent at people analytics software firm ChartHop. “You can slice the data to see if remote workers between six and 12 months from their hiring are more unhappy compared to hybrid and in-office, and more importantly, why.”
Those learnings can make the difference between a new hire jumping ship after a month or remaining as a valued employee for years. Journey mapping is a useful tool for better understanding and supporting hybrid workers.
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