Do you remember your fifth day at work? No? Oh well. Do you remember the first day? And your first promotion? Of course you do. We all identify the key moments in our working life and today we want to talk about the importance of the company also identifying and anticipating them.
Employees who feel engaged in their work are much more productive and tend to stick around longer. Of course, it is easier for employees to stay if they are happy at work. A well-designed employee journey will help us involve each of our employees and make it easier for them to have information and resources about their roles, responsibilities and opportunities for internal promotion.
Although each organization should have its own employee journey map based on its objectives and strategies, these are the phases that any employee journey map should have:
2. Probationary Period: This formal monitoring and assessment mechanism is applied during the new employee's initial contractual months to make an informed decision about their continuity. During this time, their performance is measured by observing if they achieve initial objectives, demonstrate the required technical competencies, and the quality of their work, through milestones and periodic reviews. Their overall suitability for the position is also evaluated, considering their learning capacity, proactivity, and efficiency, as well as their adaptation to the company culture, assessing their interaction with colleagues and superiors, alignment with corporate values, and their fit within the work environment. Constant feedback is essential during this stage.
3. Performance Appraisal: This consists of a systematic and periodic measurement of each employee's individual performance and their overall contribution to the organization's objectives, applying to the entire workforce beyond the initial period. The achievement of goals, quality of work, efficiency, initiative, and demonstrated competencies in their role are analyzed, as well as the impact of their work on team and company results, their interdepartmental collaboration, and their alignment with the general strategy. This process, which usually culminates in a formal conversation with their direct manager, is key to identifying strengths, areas for improvement, and substantiating development plans, recognition, or promotions.
4. Potential: This process focuses on recognizing employees' capabilities, skills, and predisposition to assume roles of greater responsibility, complexity, or leadership in the future. Key competencies such as leadership, strategic vision, learning agility, complex problem-solving, and emotional intelligence are evaluated using tools like development assessments, assessment centers, or the 9-Box matrix. Once potential is identified, individualized development plans are designed, which may include mentoring, coaching, or assignment to strategic projects, in order to nurture internal talent for succession planning and continuous performance improvement.
5. Climate and Culture: This diagnosis allows for understanding the health of the work environment (climate) and the shared values, beliefs, and behaviors (culture) within the company. Climate analysis measures employees' perception and satisfaction regarding their environment, evaluating communication, leadership, recognition, workload, and interpersonal relationships. The study of culture delves into more ingrained elements such as fundamental values, norms, and the coherence between discourse and practice. Both analyses, conducted through surveys, interviews, or focus groups, are vital for making strategic decisions, improving satisfaction and productivity, and aligning internal dynamics with company objectives.
6. 360º Feedback: This comprehensive evaluation tool gathers perceptions about an employee's performance and competencies from multiple perspectives, including self-assessment, their direct superior, peers, subordinates (if any), and even clients. It provides a holistic and more objective view than traditional evaluations, helping to identify blind spots and strengths from different angles. Its primary utility is professional development, allowing the employee to understand how their behavior and impact are perceived, thus enabling them to develop action plans focused on improving interpersonal or leadership skills, while ensuring evaluator anonymity for honest responses.
7. eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score): eNPS is a simple yet powerful metric designed to measure employee loyalty and engagement by asking them how likely they are to recommend their company as a place to work to friends or family, usually on a scale of 0 to 10. Based on their responses, employees are classified as Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), and Detractors (0-6), with eNPS calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. This indicator provides a quick snapshot of the overall workforce sentiment, serves as a satisfaction thermometer, and helps organizations identify trends over time, evaluate the impact of HR initiatives, and take measures to improve the employee experience.
8. Development and Promotion: This strategic approach uses the 9-Box Matrix, a tool that cross-references an employee's current performance with their future growth potential, classifying them into nine distinct quadrants. This classification allows the organization to visually identify "high potentials" who should be nurtured for leadership roles, solid performers who are key in their current roles, and those who might need specific development plans, reorientation, or even separation. It facilitates objective decision-making on training investments, succession plans, and internal promotion moves, ensuring that appropriate talents are developed and retained.
9. Skills Matrix: This is a visual tool that allows for mapping existing competencies and their proficiency levels among employees in a team, department, or organization, contrasting them with the competencies required to achieve strategic objectives. It helps to clearly identify skill gaps, both at an individual and collective level, which facilitates the planning of specific and personalized training programs. Furthermore, this matrix is useful for optimizing personnel allocation to projects based on their capabilities, supporting career development processes, and making informed decisions about hiring or internal promotion.
10. Training: This is a continuous cycle that seeks to identify improvement opportunities in training processes and ensure they are aligned with both the strategic objectives of the organization and the development needs of the employees. It involves evaluating the effectiveness of existing training programs, detecting new learning needs (technical, soft, leadership) at an individual, team, or organizational level, and gathering employees' own training aspirations and preferences. The goal is to foster a culture of continuous learning and ensure that investment in training is relevant, impactful, and contributes to the growth of individuals and the company.
11. Psychosocial Risk Assessment: This process focuses on identifying, analyzing, and preventing factors present in the work environment that can cause stress, psychological distress, or negatively affect employees' mental and physical health. Aspects such as excessive workload, lack of control over tasks, deficient social support from colleagues or superiors, workplace harassment, contractual insecurity, or lack of role clarity are evaluated. Conducting this assessment provides the necessary clarity to implement preventive and corrective measures, optimize the work climate, protect the team, reduce absenteeism, increase productivity, and comply with current occupational health legal regulations.
12. Awareness (Campaigns and Evaluation): These initiatives allow the company to launch and measure the effectiveness of programs aimed at educating and sensitizing employees on crucial matters affecting the organization. Topics can vary, such as digital security, occupational risk prevention, business ethics, diversity and inclusion, new internal policies, or data protection. The objective is to verify and foster understanding of this critical information, ensuring it is received, understood, and ideally internalized, which can be measured through evaluations or questionnaires before and after campaigns to assess the increase in knowledge and the adoption of desired behaviors.
13. Mobility: This consists of identifying and facilitating opportunities for employees to change roles, departments, or even geographic locations within the same company. This practice benefits both the employee, by offering new career development paths and the acquisition of new skills and experiences, and the organization, by allowing it to retain talent, fill vacancies with personnel who already know the culture, foster knowledge transfer between areas, and increase its workforce's flexibility and adaptability. For this, a transparent process is necessary, including the communication of internal vacancies, the identification of employees with potential and interest, and support in transition processes.
14. Offboarding: This refers to the structured and professional management of an employee's departure from the company, regardless of the reason. A good offboarding process seeks to obtain valuable feedback on the employee's experience through exit interviews, which can reveal areas for improvement in internal processes, leadership, or culture. Furthermore, it ensures an effective transfer of knowledge of their responsibilities, adequately manages all administrative and legal aspects of the departure, and seeks to maintain a positive relationship with the former employee, who may become a brand ambassador or even be rehired in the future. This process is crucial for identifying patterns and causes of turnover and, consequently, implementing strategies to reduce it.