Enhancing the employee lifecycle: strategies & insights for EX success
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.
Understanding the employee lifecycle
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.
How does improving the employee lifecycle impact the employee experience (EX)?
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:
- Increase employee productivity
- Decrease employee churn rates
- Reduce spending on new employee hiring
- Boost employee satisfaction and loyalty
- Foster a better and more inclusive workplace culture
As the heads and leaders of employee experience programs, HR teams are directly responsible for managing the employee lifecycle.
The five employee lifecycle phases
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.
Recruitment
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:
- Time-to-fill
- Cost-per-hire
- Time-to-productivity
Related: The recruiting manager toolkit
Onboarding
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:
- Time-to-complete
- Time-to-productivity
- New hire employee turnover
Growth
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:
- Training participation rates
- Training completion rates
- Promotion rates
Retention
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:
- Employee churn rate
- Engagement rate
- Job satisfaction
Offboarding
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:
- Average employee lifespan
- Employee satisfaction
- Time-to-complete-offboarding
How to improve each stage of the employee lifecycle model
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:
Recruitment
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:
- Candidate experience surveys: A candidate experience survey asks new hires how satisfied they are with their recruitment process. It aims to gather insight into how you structure, organize, and implement your recruitment process. This approach illuminates areas you can improve upon in the future.
- Recruitment satisfaction surveys: The employee recruitment survey explores the touchpoint between new employees and the recruiter who contacted them. It will ask questions about how knowledgeable and valuable the recruiter was. This survey will help improve your external recruitment process.
Onboarding
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:
- Onboarding experience survey: A new hire onboarding survey will determine how satisfied your employees are with their onboarding process. It mixed open-ended and close-ended questions to produce both quantitative and qualitative data. You can use these data streams to make your onboarding process as effective as possible.
- Knowledge check survey: A knowledge check survey, like a week 1 onboarding check-in survey, helps measure whether the employee is on track in their onboarding process. These surveys will ask employees how they feel during onboarding and what they’ve learned. You can check responses against the employee’s perceived position to determine if they’re progressing well.
Growth
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:
- Training quizzes: A training course evaluation survey will give employees space to express their opinions on recent training opportunities they have engaged with. These surveys will help prove the value of employee development programs and point to areas you could improve upon.
- GIG reviews: Growth, Impact, and Goals (GIG) surveys help employees to measure their impact and progress within a company. Running these each quarter will benefit your business in managing its employees more effectively. SurveyMonkey research shows that GIG conversations can help to align managers and employees further, boosting engagement and happiness at work.
- Career development: A career development survey will determine if employees feel satisfied with their current growth opportunities. This survey will help your business shape its career progression plans, boosting employee engagement.
Retention
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:
- Employee engagement surveys: These surveys ask various questions that aim to determine general levels of engagement and job satisfaction at work. Businesses can use these surveys to understand their workplace culture better and find points to improve upon for the future.
- Stay interview surveys: To improve employee retention, HR teams should prioritize understanding why employees want to stay. Stay interviews effectively gauge employee satisfaction and commitment levels and identify burnout or resentment towards aspects of the job.
- Remote/hybrid surveys: A return-to-the-office survey can help determine whether or not employees like working from home or the office. This survey will quantify satisfaction in each atmosphere and point your company toward the best solution for your workplace structure.
- Compensation and benefits satisfaction surveys: An employee benefits survey or employee benefits planning survey will show how your workforce feels about the compensation you currently offer. It can pinpoint benefits you’re lacking that your employees would be happier to have.
- Recognition and awards survey: An employee recognition survey allows coworkers or managers to nominate and recognize employees' hard work. Creating a culture of recognition can help boost job satisfaction and decrease employee churn.
- DE&I surveys: DE&I surveys, like a wage gap evaluation, the impact of racism, employee check-in, and employee diversity, will help create an equal and equitable workforce for all. Employees at a company prioritizing diversity and inclusion are happier and more productive.
Offboarding
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:
- Employee exit surveys: An employee exit survey allows a departing employee to explain their reasons for leaving your company. It reflects their satisfaction, fulfillment, and opinion of your workplace culture. This survey is vital for improving your workplace, as departing employees will likely give insightful and specific feedback.
- Exit interview survey: An exit interview survey will be the last point of contact in an employee’s lifecycle. This will dive into compensation-related questions, workplace skills use, and final thoughts on satisfaction. Its final question asks what your company can do to create a better business going forward, helping to gain a last point of insight from your employees.
Get better insight into your employee lifecycle
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.
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