You’ve probably heard that repetitive slogan the real estate industry uses to highlight what they value most: Location, location, location! In many other business sectors the mantra to rally around is: Metrics, metrics, metrics! We recently discussed the value of employee journey mapping, and the logical next step is to figure out which metrics to map.

A lot of the conversation about employee experience (EX) is inspired by customer experience (CX). After all, when in a people management or HR role, employees are our core customers. Just as customers are offered opportunities to rate that meal or customer service encounter, we’re moving to measuring interactions within an organization as well.

By assigning metrics to stages of the employee journey, you give your people the opportunity to say, “Here’s how this was for me.” You can gain useful insights into key trends and drivers, segmented to each stage of the journey, to see what might be missing or identify areas of improvement for employee engagement.

Adding value to the employee journey

We’ve already come through the “Great Resignation” and endured “quiet quitting.” But that doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels. Knowing the high costs of hiring and/or replacing employees who leave, retention must remain a priority. By adding metrics to the employee journey map process, we can better identify and understand friction points. This can help your organization to avoid misunderstandings and provide a more seamless employee experience.

Different organizations will map the employee journey in various ways. Some might start at the hiring process. Others begin with onboarding. Maybe you have just five main touchpoints on your map, while a competitor has segmented the journey with 15 key markers. How your particular map looks will inform the appropriate metrics.

Your metrics will also reflect your priorities. Productivity is an important gauge for many organizations. Your expectations for this will change throughout the employee’s journey. After all, you typically wouldn’t expect a brand-new hire to be able to knock out 12 pieces of in-depth content in just the first week. Yet, at 30 days, you could expect a better level of understanding of your pillar messaging and how your content management system works. Thus, if the employee at 30 days isn’t meeting the productivity metric you have for content writers, you might touch base to determine what support is needed.

Looking at absenteeism rates against the employee journey can also be illuminating. By overlaying the employee journey map with the data on someone’s time off requests, you might see a marked uptick in absences right around the time you’d expect them to be in line for promotion. This could flag someone who is frustrated about their current role and looking elsewhere. Seeing someone is out a lot immediately after getting a new role might indicate a need to provide more skills development opportunities to confidently handle their new role.

Consistent communication across the journey

You can’t ask people every day, “How are you feeling about our business now?” That’s why it makes sense to calibrate your employee engagement data against the journey maps.

Since many factors play a role in employee engagement, you have many different questions you can ask along the way. Employee satisfaction, or effectively “Are you satisfied with your job?” can be gauged throughout the journey. But, an employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)  in the first 30 days could say less than one gathered after 30 months of service.

If a priority is excellent communication, journey mapping could shape the questions asked. For example:

• Day one you might ask about communication during the hiring process
• Day seven you could ask about communication with team members or HR
• Day 30 you might solicit input into communication with a supervisor
• Day 90 you could gauge how the employee feels about company-wide communication
• At one year, gauge communication around career path, professional development, and promotion opportunities

Look for trends among employees at different stages. Perhaps all your new hires score high for engagement in their first 30 days. That bodes well for your onboarding and early engagement efforts. But if engagement consistently slumps at the one-year mark, your business would do well to make some adjustments.

Turning data into action

You’ve made the effort to use metrics and reach out to employees to learn their experience, but you’re not done yet. Feeling heard, respected, and supported drive employee engagement. If you ask an employee’s opinion, get their input, then do nothing about it, you’ll turn that employee off. Next time you ask for their feedback, you are less likely to get responses. And they’ll be questioning whether your company really does care. Therefore, it is critical that you show you are listening to the feedback you get from your metrics.

Keeping the conversation continuous will help. You can do that with:

• Employee pulse surveys: You ask a quick question or two on an informal basis.
• One-on-ones: Maybe you meet in person weekly or quarterly or more or less often, depending on your work culture and environment.
• Questionnaires, SMS and QR code prompts
• Annual reviews: This might be a 360 or other tool supporting reflection and goal setting.
• Onboarding and exit surveys

To support turning data into action, try to learn from trends and follow-up in real time. You might set alerts to notify you of changing trends. Then, you can quickly say, “We’ve noticed this is happening” and communicate to people how you will be taking action. This helps employees know that you’re paying attention and paying heed whether the feedback is negative or positive.

The employee Net Promoter Score we already mentioned comes right out of the CX playbook. Another useful metric for employee engagement is a variation on the customer effort score. Instead of measuring how hard the customer has to work get service or return a defective product, you’ll gauge how easy your organization makes for people to get the job done. Think about this in the context of onboarding: You want people to have access to all the documents they need and know who to ask for help.

Learning from employee journeys

Ultimately, it pays to measure metrics mapped against the employee journey. Always consider when you will get the most useful information from your metrics. Some metrics you gauge pretty consistently throughout the journey. However, evaluating employee satisfaction with the time-off request system on their first day is pointless. Remember GIGO? Garbage In, Garbage Out reminds us that asking people the wrong questions results in the collection of useless data.

Automating your employee experience program can help simplify mapping and metrics. You can set up triggers to automatically send feedback requests when an employee hits a certain milestone. You can program alerts to identify when trends shift dramatically. Talk with a Sogolytics consultant today about how to learn from  your employee journey to uncover effective insights to improve your organization.

Want to explore this topic more? Check out our webinar on EX metrics!