How to create an Employee Journey Map that strengthens DEI

Employee journey maps (EJMs) can be a powerful tool for moving the needle on diversity, equity, and inclusion. You can leverage your EJM to further your DEI strategy both during development as well as implementation. 

Below, we’ll explore how the journey map development process can help you make your organization more diverse, equitable, and inclusive by helping you ensure you’re giving people equitable support across your organization. Click here to learn about how to use your Employee Journey Map to support ongoing DEI work and you can sign in to Pyn's free Employee Journey Designer here.

Developing your Employee Journey Map is powerful for DEI progress because it gives you a clear process to ensure the employee journey works for people across diverse identities. 

So how can you leverage this opportunity? Here are three ways we’ve found particularly effective.

1. Select a diverse group of stakeholders to engage in the EJM development process

Many of us have “go-to” people at work who we tend to bounce ideas off of or engage for feedback as we’re building out new projects. But when we keep going to the same people because we have pre-existing or strong relationships with them, we often miss crucial perspectives. 

In the case of developing your Employee Journey Map, this impacts whose perspectives get built in – and whose don’t. The consequences of these decisions are big: the more diverse the group of stakeholders that we involve in the process of developing our EJM, the more diverse the group of employees the EJM will work for.

To solve this, look at the list of stakeholders you’ve identified to be involved in the EJM development process (check out our post on identifying your stakeholders and getting their buy-in for more) and ask yourself what groups are and aren’t represented on the list. 

Some questions to  consider as you review your stakeholders are:

• Which functional areas are and aren’t represented on the list? Do you have representatives from across each part of your HR team, like Talent Acquisition, Learning and Development, Business Partners, etc?
• Which departments are and aren’t represented on the list? Do you have folks from Operations? IT? Finance? Sales? Product?
• What levels of seniority are and aren’t represented on your list? Do you have individual contributors? Managers? C-Suite or Executive leaders?
• What demographic identities are and aren’t represented on the list? Do you have folks across genders, races, sexual orientations, (dis)ability status, age, religious affiliation, body size, family and caretaker status, etc?

If you notice you’re missing people from key areas, look at your org chart and figure out whose input makes sense to ask for as part of the development process. This will help you make sure your Employee Journey Map – and as a result your company culture – supports as diverse a group of people as possible.

2. Engage with your stakeholders in meaningful ways 

When you ask your stakeholder group to be part of your EJM development process, it’s important to make sure you’re making good use of their time and not asking just for the sake of checking a box. 

This means asking for feedback and information that you’ll actually use and apply. This will also allow you to build stronger relationships and partnerships with these stakeholders. How you do this depends on their areas of expertise. Here are some examples for each of the five steps of the EJM creation process:

1. As you’re establishing your list of moments that matter for your first draft, make sure the stakeholders you’re working with have the information they need to contribute substantial ideas that leverage their areas of expertise. Then, ask your stakeholders to make sure the map reflects the moments that they see consistently mattering for staff on their team or in their department, or staff they’ve managed. You can add moments that they point out might be missing.
2. When you’re working to determining the right touchpoints to provide support for each moment, you might share the Pyn open source library with your stakeholder group and ask them which communications would have been most helpful to them and their teams during their journeys.
3. As you’re ensuring your touchpoints are aligned to company values and processes, you might ask your stakeholders what connections they see between the moments that have been most impactful in their personal journey at the company thus far and the company values and processes. If those moments aren’t yet reflected on the map or you haven’t made those connections yet, you can add them.
4. When you personalize communications per employee persona, the diversity you established when forming your stakeholder group really comes in handy! Make sure your stakeholders know you particularly value their expertise because of the segments they represent, and that you want to make sure you’re taking into account the ways in which the communication could be personalized for their department, office location, tenure within the company, etc. (Note, when it comes to demographic identity, to make sure that you’re never asking one person to speak on behalf of their entire identity group! That’s textbook tokenization. Instead, reach out to paid subject matter experts to ensure your communications are culturally competent.) 
5. Finally, when you’re deciding when/how the employee gets the information/support, ask your stakeholders what communication modes would be most effective for them and their teams, and build those into your customization.

3: Create and use a default employee profile

As you design, you want to make sure that what you are designing is inclusive of your whole employee population. This must be done strategically and intentionally, and can be accomplished by creating a default employee profile. 

Stacey Nordwall, Pyn’s Head of Employee Experience explains that,  “A default employee profile helps you identify the communities within your organization that may currently be underserved or unsupported.” 

You can access Pyn’s default employee profile to go through the following steps: 

1. Determine how the majority of your employees in a demographic identify (ex. most of your employees could be able-bodied). 
2. Decide if those people belong to a disadvantaged or marginalized group (ex. In your location, people who are able-bodied are not marginalized). 
3. Your default employee profile is then made up of demographics that apply to the communities within your organization that may currently be underserved or unsupported.

Once you’ve come up with your default employee profile based on demographics, you’ll answer a few questions to help you understand the challenges these groups may face. 

“Developing this profile increases the likelihood that you will build an EJM that is more supportive for more employees. When you build to support your most marginalized communities first, you will by default design an experience that is more supportive for everyone,” says Stacey. 

Using these three techniques strategically while developing your EJM can help your organization provide a more equitable employee experience, enabling you to sustainably grow a more demographically diverse team at all levels. Click here to learn about techniques for moving the needle on DEI while implementing the map you’ve created.