Phases of employee experience

Priorities and concerns of employees are constantly evolving throughout their time at your company.

Taking a one-size-fits-all approach to employee experience will often mean you aren’t able to correctly identify, or effectively address, the issues that matter most to your people – which puts employee engagement, productivity, and retention at risk.

Why you should split employee experience into phases

The employee experience involves so many different interactions and touch points across your business. When you start to visualize the journey an employee takes from the day they join, right through to the day they leave, it is easier to appreciate how their needs evolve.

When you break down the employee journey into clear stages, it becomes much simpler to identify the processes that need improving, and who is responsible for them within your organization.

As a result, you can assign specific actions to different people, which allows you to improve multiple aspects of the employee experience at the same time.

We can take onboarding as an example. While the HR team would be responsible for the overall structure, IT would also play a part in ensuring that new employees have the right equipment on the first day, and the Learning and Development team would provide onboarding-related training to new line managers.

This granular understanding of the employee journey – and the ability to align those responsible for each of the phases – creates more accountability and allows you to take effective action.

What are the phases of employee experience?

You cand divide it in four distinct stages, each demonstrating the shifting needs of employees from onboarding to exit.

The four phases are Onboarding, Initial Development, Ongoing Development and Retention, and Separation.

Onboarding: ~0-3 months

Most employees are uncertain of their surroundings at the beginning. They want to establish their place in the organization, make a meaningful contribution and build relationships with colleagues.

From the welcome someone receives on their first day, through to their development plan for the first few months, onboarding is the foundation of employee experience.

Understanding the experience at this early stage is especially important as low levels of engagement early on have been shown to significantly increase the risk of attrition.

Initial Development: ~3-24 months

After a few months in the company, people are often looking for ways to improve their existing skills and make sure they can have an impact on their team’s output.

For employees, Initial Development is all about mastering their role by developing specific skills, building relationships across the business, and coming to terms with internal processes that affect how they do their job.

Most people will do this with an eye on future opportunities, so it’s important to start having initial conversations about growth and development. When you support employees that want to develop within the company, it becomes an investment in the next generation of leaders and knowledge experts.

Ongoing Development and Retention: ~24+ months

Employees that have been in an organization for a few years have already started to advance in their career, and are looking to do so further.

By this point they have accumulated enough knowledge and experience that they are some of the most valuable members of your team.

They will be keen to know what progression opportunities are available, whether that’s a move into management or another role.

The Ongoing Development and Retention phase is crucial.

A lack of opportunity could result in employees leaving the business in search of the next challenge. Not everyone in your organization will want to become a manager, so it’s important to create opportunities for employees that want to move into other roles too.

Separation: 0-3 months before leaving the organization

No matter how good your employee experience is, there will always be people that decide to move on.

Some employees will leave even though they’ve had a very positive experience with your organization, but there will also be people that leave because of underlying engagement issues.

The separation phase is an opportunity to learn more about the reasons people are leaving your organization.

In particular, it’s about identifying the direct causes of attrition and the organizational changes you need to make to reduce turnover and retain your top talent.