Improve the Employee Experience by Measuring the Journey

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According to Gallup, while employee engagement is on the rise, the majority (51.9%) of U.S. employees are still “not engaged”, and 13% were “actively disengaged” meaning a miserable job experience. Driving a satisfying employee journey is vital for reduced turnover, higher job satisfaction, and much more.

But how do you measure the employee’s path? What metrics do you need to look at in order to understand if the employee’s journey is what you want it to be?

Mapping the Journey

What does your current journey look like?

Where and how do employees interact with your company?

Just as customer journey mapping is about every experience your customers have with you throughout multiple touchpoints, so too is the employee journey mapping concerned about employee’s multiple interactions with your company. Mapping out this journey can provide insight into how employees grow and learn and contribute within your organization.

Below, you’ll see a number of stages in the typical employee journey and their associated metrics.

The Candidate

If you want to make sure that you are hiring great employees then you need to measure the employee journey well before their first day on the job.

What was their experience like as a candidate? Did they enjoy the process or would they shudder at the thought of recommending a friend to go through the same thing?

Some metrics to take a look at are:

• Overall satisfaction with the process: Do you send employees or candidates a questionnaire to evaluate their experience?
• Career Site Registration: Track registration, referral and invite behaviors.
• How long does it take for a candidate to hear back from your organization? How long does it take to hire a new employee, from initial application to start or offer date?

Onboarding

Once a new employee begins, it’s vital to measure onboarding.

Is the new employee able to access what they need? Do they feel welcome?

These qualitative questions can be a challenge, but there are a number of metrics available in order to gain insight into the onboarding process.

Some metrics for onboarding are:

• Where do new employees go for information? Is there a knowledge base, training portal, fact sheet, or some other form of information to welcome new hires? What activities are being done by new employees? What content are they looking at?
• The return rate for new employees: Are they coming back to your training site or intranet after their first week? If new employees are falling off, that means that they’re not seeing value or aren’t sure what to look for.
• The course completion rate for new employees: What courses are necessary for success and what is the completion rate? How long does it take for these courses to be completed?

Performance

Throughout their time with the company, it's important to determine employee performance which can be done with an employee evaluation form as well as looking at data from your company's various learning and development initiatives. This segment can be the most varied, and will contain an immense amount of data.

You could also look at metrics around the measuring performance, such as:

• What percentage of employees received their annual review on time?
• What percentage of employees had specific metrics and goals they needed to reach?
• What percentage of employees had access to relevant learning and development materials?

Within learning and development, there are numerous metrics to understand if employees are learning or not.

• How long does it take for employees to complete courses?
• How do completed courses correlate to other employee success metrics?
• Where are employees struggling?

Collaboration

One aspect of the employee journey is how they interact with colleagues.

Do employees get along? Are they able to help each other? If your company has an intranet or some form of internal community, is it getting used? How are employees using it?

Within the internal community, there are a number of metrics that can help you understand engagement:

• Daily return rate: Are employees visiting every day?
• Monthly active users over daily active users: Out of the active users that month, how many logged in on a particular day? This is a popular metric used by many social networking sites to understand how engaged users are.
• Community Engagement / Involvement metrics: Identify key community behaviors, such as commenting, liking, posting, etc. How often are employees performing these actions? Which employees are the most active? Which are the most helpful? You can also track the aggregate of community interactions per active user per day.
• Improved Teamwork: Are users marking content as helpful or valuable? Are questions being answered? Look at these numbers to see if employees are helping each other.

Referring & Word of Mouth

Employee referrals are highly valuable, with a much lower turnover rate than the general employee population.

How are employees speaking about your company in public?

By looking at social media, you can find out more about how employees view and talk about the company.

Some metrics to review are:

• What percentage of employees refer candidates to open positions?
• Number of employees speaking about the organization on social media, such as Facebook and Twitter
• Number of tweets and shares related to your company

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