How your Employee Journey Map ties to budgeting

There are two challenges most People Team Leaders will find themselves facing again and again: getting buy-in and getting budget. 

These leaders are challenged to demonstrate the impact of the program or technology they want to implement on both the employees specifically and on the business more broadly. This challenge is made more difficult because it requires thinking about both the current state of the organization, as well as how that organization will grow over the next two to five years. 

With Pyn’s free Employee Journey Mapper, a tool that helps to operationalize the employee experience in mind, this article is all about how you can use an employee journey map when planning your budget.

Review current and previous annual costs 

As you start your budgeting process, the first step is to review the actual costs for the current and previous years to see what you can learn and where you can adjust. 

Be sure to note any factors that might have caused you to be over or under budget. It’s also a good time to review HR metrics such as turnover, engagement, or offer acceptance rate to identify where you may need to invest in the years ahead.

Additionally, reflect on how effectively your current processes, programs, and technologies are working for you. For example, if you notice low utilization of programs, numerous manual tasks that could be automated, or that the workarounds in your tech stack are no longer working for you, you may want to update your allocations in these areas. Review with your team if the current state is providing you enough value, if it is supportive of the employee experience, and if it can appropriately scale with your team. 

Gather information about changes for the next year

For the upcoming year, you’ll want to gather as much information as possible about changes you can anticipate and build into your budget, such as:

• Projected headcount (particularly executive level hires)
• Projected turnover
• Benefits cost increases 
• Salary increases
• Expansion to other locations
• Expected travel (particularly company offsites)
• Changes in laws or regulations that may impact your organization

You can bring the information you have gathered about where you are and where you’re going into your strategy and budget planning session along with your Employee Journey Map. The Employee Journey Map is a visualization of the employee experience from recruitment to becoming an alumni that helps define and prioritize the work that your team needs to do in order to better support employees and the business. 

Using all of this information in tandem with the Employee Journey Map helps you identify potential gaps in the employee experience that may need to be filled, including new benefits, programs, or policies that may need to be added. In the case of scaling companies, it also helps you plan for how you’ll need to build your team and its tech over the next 12-24 months in order to provide the necessary infrastructure to support employees. 

Tie your budget ask to improvements demonstrated on your map

Bringing the Employee Journey Map into your budgeting and planning process allows you to create context. It gives you the opportunity to tell your stakeholders a compelling story. The Employee Journey Map enables you to holistically visualize the employee experience and identify areas for improvement, while tying it to budgeting helps demonstrate the value of investing in your team and technology. 

Here are two examples from Remy Bleijendaal, Chief People Officer at data.ai: 

“Let’s say you have five AE roles open and it takes you 90 days to fill them. Each carries a revenue goal of X amount of dollars. If you speed up the hiring by one month, you have less seats open, and can immediately measure the impact on revenue. Or you could look at attrition, how much does it cost? Let's say first year attrition. First year, most of the people are not really adding that much value. How much does it cost then to ax the person? How much does it cost to hire the person? How much does it cost to ramp this person before they become effective? And you have a really important indicator of how much business results you're making.”

The Employee Journey Map 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 that the resources you’re requesting are needed to deliver that value. 

By presenting a comprehensive plan, communicating effectively, and showing the ROI, you can increase your chances of getting the support and resources you need to create a positive employee experience and drive business success. Sign in to Pyn's Employee Journey Mapper today (it's free!).