Enhance workforce management and engagement through our in-depth guide on the employee lifecycle.
Employees are the heart and soul of any organization. To keep things running smoothly, your business needs to ensure that your employees are happy, fulfilled, and satisfied throughout their entire tenure with your organization.
Businesses can track employee movements throughout their time with the company by measuring touchpoints at each stage of the employee lifecycle, leading to better employee experiences and an improved workplace.
Employee lifecycle management allows a business to observe and understand the employee experience more effectively. Sourcing data via employee lifecycle surveys will help generate continuous helpful information.
Effectively managing the employee lifecycle is pivotal in enhancing the employee experience. Collecting data and turning it into actionable insights can help improve every area of EX, from recruitment to offboarding.
Improving the employee lifecycle will radically enhance every touchpoint of an employee’s journey with your company, from recruitment to retention. Gathering your employees' insights will help you iterate upon your current processes.
According to SurveyMonkey data, around 13% of employees feel their job doesn’t satisfy them. By finding areas of the employee lifecycle with higher dissatisfaction rates, you can implement strategies to fix these issues.
By improving the employee experience, you can:
As the heads and leaders of employee experience programs, HR teams are directly responsible for managing the employee lifecycle.
The employee lifecycle consists of five stages: recruitment, onboarding, growth opportunities, retention, and offboarding. Each stage represents a different phase of the employee's journey with your company.
The recruitment stage of the employee lifecycle involves finding, attracting, and hiring suitable candidates for a role. Employee touchpoints in this stage range from job advertisements to your employee value proposition.
Companies want to make the recruitment process as easy as possible. Collecting data at this stage will help to streamline recruitment.
Here are the most common metrics you can use to measure the recruitment phase of the employee lifecycle:
Related: The recruiting manager toolkit
Once you’ve found the ideal candidate for a job, it’s time for them to move through your onboarding process. Employee onboarding teaches employees everything they need to know about their new role and your company culture.
Reviewing your onboarding process with employee feedback will help identify inconsistencies or difficulties. Alleviate these pain points to create a concise and effective employee onboarding.
Here are some common metrics to measure employee onboarding:
Employees working for your business should always have opportunities to grow and expand their skills. You can offer professional training courses, paid courses, or similar development opportunities for ongoing learning.
Collecting information about the growth stage of an employee’s lifecycle will help your business determine if it's doing enough to support the upward trajectory of its workforce.
These are the most common metrics to measure an employee's growth phase:
The retention phase is designed for experienced employees who have been with your company for a considerable time. Typically, these are valuable employees with a comprehensive understanding of the inner workings of your organization.
By offering employee engagement and job satisfaction surveys, you can increase the number of employees who stay in this stage. Boosting retention helps save your business money while developing your company into a better workplace.
Below are the most common metrics to measure the retention phase of the employee lifecycle:
Last but not least, offboarding is the final stage of the employee lifecycle, where the company bids farewell to an employee who has decided to leave the company.
As a final goodbye, this stage provides a valuable forum for discussion about how your employee felt during their career. Don’t overlook the power of offboarding or exit interview surveys!
These are the most common metrics to measure the offboarding phase of the employee lifecycle:
The best method to improve each step of the employee lifecycle is to collect data directly from your employees. An internal perspective will help you improve processes and refine your employee experience.
Surveys are an excellent method for collecting the qualitative and quantitative data you’ll need to understand your current employee lifecycle model. Let’s explore the leading methods of gathering insights to improve each stage of the employee lifecycle:
Measuring the recruitment stage will help you create a flawless candidate hiring process. As this is most people’s first point of contact with your business, you must stand out.
Here are the best ways to gather insights during the employee lifecycle recruitment stage:
Onboarding will be an individual's first set of interactions as a new employee at your company. Streamlining and enhancing this process will help your employees adapt to their new workplace as smoothly as possible.
Here are some survey templates that you can use when collecting data on the onboarding stage of the employee lifecycle:
When working at your company, the best employees will learn, improve their skills, and grow. But, it works both ways, with your business needing to provide room and opportunities for this growth. Considering only 27% of employees consider their career progression opportunities excellent, all companies could spend more time on this section.
You can send these surveys to employees when tracking engagement, performance, and growth:
While attracting top talent is vital, engaging and retaining your best candidates is the next best step. Building happier and more productive teams starts with focusing on compensation packages, feedback schemes, and employee engagement strategies.
Here are the top surveys you can use to measure employee engagement, productivity, and job satisfaction:
Offboarding is a necessary step in an employee's journey. A positive send-off that benefits both the departing employee and the business is the ideal end to an employee's tenure.
Here are some surveys you can use to improve your employee offboarding process:
A clear vision of every touchpoint an employee moves through with your business will help you assess satisfaction, fulfillment, and opinions on compensation across the employee lifecycle.
As no two employees are ever in the same space, it’s important to turn to surveys and other data collection tools to gather insight into your workforce. Turning data into actionable insights will help you create a winning workplace for everyone.
Learn more about how SurveyMonkey can transform your employee engagement.
Learn how SurveyMonkey can help you track and understand employee engagement with surveys.
HR leaders can use this toolkit to help drive exceptional employee experiences.
Encourage self-reflection and accountability with our employee self-evaluation form template.
Encourage self-reflection and accountability with our employee self-evaluation form template.
Learn the difference between employee engagement and motivation, and discover concrete ways to encourage both within your workforce.