How to keep your Employee Journey Map alive and active

When getting started with a new initiative, the last thing you want is for all of your hard work to disappear in a few months….or weeks. Employee Journey Mapping is an essential practice for HR teams to proactively plan for moments that matter across the employee experience. It’s also a relatively new practice. 

Keeping your Employee Journey Map relevant on your HR team and across departments doesn’t have to be a struggle. This article provides expert advice on how to keep your Employee Journey Map alive and active. 

Collaborate on your employee journey map 

Getting buy-in on a new process like employee journey mapping is easier when you have other people on board. Collaborating on your employee journey map is the first step to keeping it an active tool. Pyn’s new Employee Journey Designer makes it easy to collaborate with your team.

John Foster, who led the People Function at brands like IDEO, Hulu, and Truecar, believes that this collaboration is essential, and it may take extra support the first time around if people haven’t been exposed to a process map before. 

His solution to this is to meet with reports and skip level reports and work together on the parts of the journey map they are responsible for. “It both helps me to really understand their work, and it creates a great coaching opportunity for them. It's a great career development process for HR people to understand the whole function better,” John explains. 

With Pyn’s new Employee Journey Mapper, collaborating with your team on your employee journey map is simple.

Use your employee journey map during HR strategy offsites 

“The HR Strategy Offsite is a meeting with members of your People Team that specifically focuses on creating your strategic plans,” says Joris Luijke, CEO and Cofounder of Pyn. It’s generally in-person and takes place outside the office with the goal of aligning the direction & priorities for the HR function. 

During your offsite, your Employee Journey Map is key to helping your team understand the gaps in your employee experience. Review your map to see where you have coverage and where there is room for improvement. 

When planning for the outcomes of your HR offsite think about how you’ll use your map to represent the work you have planned, like using a red/yellow/green status for priority on what’s next. 

Review your employee journey map in quarterly planning meetings

Joris Luijke, CEO and co-founder of Pyn says that an Employee Journey Map is an impactful addition to quarterly planning meetings. “Employee Journey Mapping helps you and your team look across the entire journey, so revisiting this on a quarterly basis makes sure you’re prioritizing what’s most important next,” he explains. 

For example, let’s say you’ve started out with improving employee onboarding, since it’s an employee’s first touchpoint with your company. You’ve mapped out what messages need to be sent, and set up an onboarding buddy program. 

Now, in the next quarter, your plan is to build in more support for first time managers. 

On your Employee Journey Map you can visualize both the progress you’ve made and what’s next for your team. This is useful both in team meetings and as a presentation tool for cross-team collaboration and reporting to management or the C-suite.

Evaluate your employee journey map with your team

You don’t have to wait until quarterly planning, however, to get use out of your Employee Journey Map. “In my staff meetings I use an evaluation of our Employee Journey Map as a monthly team building activity. We talk about what's working, what's not, and use it as a source of cross-functional interactions on the team,” explains John. 

This way, he adds, “My team knows this is a document we use on a regular basis to evaluate what we're doing.” The more you refer back to the Employee Journey Map when working and planning with your team, the more it becomes an active tool in your HR strategy. 

Display your employee journey map in-person or online 

If your company is co-located, printing a quarterly version of your Employee Journey Map and displaying it in a high-traffic area is a great way to make it an active tool within your company. John explains how this worked in his experience, “It was about a 150 person company, and we displayed it in a location where we had a lot of people. We put post-its and pens with it and made it interactive.” 

If there was feedback an employee wanted to share about the Journey Map, they could note it on the board. “Everybody started to realize, oh wow, look, we have a journey. And that was really great,” says John. 

If you’re not co-located, you could share your Employee Journey Map visualization on your company’s intranet, or even hold regular feedback sessions where employees are invited to explore the Journey Map with you and provide their input. 

Leverage your employee journey map for budgeting purposes

Pyn’s Head of Employee Experience, Stacey Nordwall, explains that the core challenge of making the case for budgeting is this, “Being able to demonstrate the impact of the program or technology you want to implement on both the employees specifically and on the business more broadly.” 

So, how can an Employee Journey Map help you show impact on individual employees and the business at large? 

“The EJM not only helps you plan your HR strategy, it helps connect the dots between what you are asking for and how you will deliver it. Using it you are able to tell the story of the employee experience you want to create, explain the value that experience unlocks for the business (through improved employee experience, engagement, retention and tenure), and demonstrate why the resources you’re requesting are needed to deliver that value,” says Stacey.