From the first time a potential candidate walks into your company’s office to five years later when you can’t remember what’s the office is like without that person, each employee registers an experience.
How you manage that experience from the recruitment process all the way to 12 months and beyond is an important part of retaining employees.
We need to remember that just like a customer, employees should leave each day feeling good about the interaction with your organisation.
Look at the journey that employees take from recruitment and candidacy to full-fledged employees.
If you do a quick Google search, you’ll find loads of information, tips and research into the candidate experience. This information even includes thinking through how people who aren’t successful in their application for a job — what kind of contact do you have beyond telling them they didn’t get the job? PS This is still a great marketing exercise for your business and brand if you get it right (and by the way the opposite applies as well).
What about once the employee starts?
Do another Google search, and you’ll find much less information on this topic.
This is where taking a hard look at your onboarding process comes into play. Did you give them plenty of information about what to expect before they even start? What is the first day like? What does the first week look like? What about four weeks in, even six or nine months down the road?
It’s vital to your business to keep the same amount of focus on the employee experience as the recruitment process, or you’ll find that the employees won’t stay.
If you keep losing people at six weeks, then you need to think about what you’re doing in your initial onboarding process or perhaps assess your recruitment process. Are you really getting the right people for the role?
However, if you’re losing them at 9 to 12 months, you need to ask yourself why? What processes do you have in your business to keep your employees experience positive including looking at what opportunities are available down the road.
Here’s where I suggest looking at what I call the employee experience wavelength. If you were to plot over each point whether your experience you provide is a positive or negative experience what would your companies look like? Contained within the wavelength is the employee’s experience put to a colour with green equaling happy, orange meaning watch out (they might be considering leaving) and red, which means they are leaving or have already left.
BespokeHR can help you create an employee experience wavelength through looking at the following and how an employee felt about each step:
Keep in mind, this mapping can be drawn out much further down the road; for example, going all the way to employee’s five-year anniversary.
According to a 2015 article on HR.com, employees who participate in a structured onboarding program are 69% more likely to stay with an organisation for 3 years.
Each of the above stops along the way in the employee experience play into whether the wavelength stays mostly in the green or dips into the orange or even red.
That’s why you need assess whether you have processes in place for each stage and then take it a step further to ask yourself the following questions.
Next, you’ll get actual results from employees to see how their wavelengths play out. Once the results are in, then you need to take the following steps.
Making changes to improve and structure your employee experiences will result in higher retention rates. A few more stats from the same HR.com might convince you:
Download my onboarding tool. Or better yet, come and chat with me about your needs by attending the one-day business owners event.
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