Using an Employee Journey Map to support ongoing DEI work

Creating an Employee Journey Map (EJM) is a powerful step for any organization to take. But to see the full benefits, it’s critical to keep your EJM alive and active over time. Doing so not only ensures your hard work doesn’t all disappear, but can also bolster your ongoing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work. 

Below, we’ll outline how the EJM implementation process can help you make your organization become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive by giving you a framework for providing more equitable support across your organization. We also have an article on how to create an Employee Journey Map that strengthens DEI and you can sign in to Pyn's free Employee Journey Designer here.

Ongoing use of the EJM provides a toolkit for crafting an employee journey that furthers DEI by working equitably for people across diverse identities.

Here are three ways to use your Employee Journey map to support ongoing DEI work.

1. Diversify your leadership pipeline 

It turns out that, across all demographic groups, we’re more likely to naturally provide support to people with whom we feel stronger connections – and because of evolutionary biology, we tend to feel stronger connections with people who we perceive as being similar to us.

This is part of why organizations become homogeneous and people in overrepresented groups are more likely to be promoted into leadership roles and stay in organizations longer. It’s also why so many organizations have difficulty meeting their DEI goals. 

Your Employee Journey Map is a great tool to help avoid this problem because it gives you an equitable process to use to provide support to each person on your team. Managers in particular can benefit from this process. As you work with managers to support their teams, guide them towards relying on the EJM to determine when they reach out to their team members and how. When they do so, a few things will happen:

• First, if there are times we want to reach out to someone because we know it would be helpful, but that moment isn’t in the EJM, that’s a great flag! It could be useful to add it to the journey map so that we don’t forget to also reach out to other team members when they’re going through a similar situation.
• Conversely, if a manager isn’t as close with someone on their team, the EJM (and other automated communications that you can send to managers through Pyn) can be an excellent reminder for them that it’s time to reach out to that person so they get the support they need. This is a common need when a staff person is part of a marginalized group and they don’t share that identity with their direct manager. 

In these ways, the EJM is an excellent tool for helping us mitigate the negative impacts of unconscious bias. It helps us interrupt the patterns that contribute to organizations becoming homogeneous in the first place. 

Without an EJM – and other equitable systems and structures like it, including performance evaluation systems, salary bands and pay equity reviews, feedback routines, etc – people in overrepresented groups are more likely to be promoted into leadership roles and stay in organizations longer because they’re receiving stronger support than folks in marginalized groups. 

With an EJM, we can make sure people are receiving strong support across demographic identities so that we’re promoting a more diverse group into leadership roles. 

2. Proactively address areas of concern related to DEI

As you start using your Employee Journey Map more, you can pull data to notice what departments or types of employees are getting more or less support during their journeys, and intervening proactively. 

If you see that certain departments, roles, levels of staff, or staff with specific demographic identities are sending or receiving more communications, and that those communications are causing lower turnover rates, higher performance ratings, and stronger achievement of OKRs, lift those up! You can share those as best practices across the organization so that everyone can better leverage your Employee Journey Map. 

If you see that other departments, roles, levels of staff, or staff with specific demographic identities are sending or receiving fewer communications, you can intervene proactively so that they don’t start to see higher turnover and lower performance ratings as a result. So much better than waiting until you notice higher turnover and lower performance.

3. Get buy-in for DEI projects

As Stacey Nordwall, Head of Employee Experience at Pyn, points out, “There are two challenges most People Team Leaders will find themselves facing again and again: getting buy-in and getting budget.” As anyone who has tried to get buy-in and budget approved for DEI work knows, it’s no exception. The good news is, your Employee Journey Map can help. 

Once you have your map built out, you can point to each moment that matters and talk about how DEI work is going to impact it. To figure out which moments are impacted by DEI in your company (hint: it’s probably most of them), you can work with a DEI subject matter expert (I’m happy to help!), or ask yourself questions like:

• Have we done any recent surveying to identify areas where demographic identity is negatively impacting staff experiences of equity and inclusion? If so, what moments are tied to those areas? What systems structures could we invest in building to ensure a more equitable and inclusive experience through those moments?
• Have we been getting feedback from any of our Affinity/Employe/Business Resource Groups or our DEI Council about areas where they’d like to see us make changes? If so, what moments are impacted by those areas?
• Have we made a statement or commitment related to DEI that we haven’t really followed through on? If we were to match our actions with our words to operationalize our commitment, what moments would be impacted?

Examples you might come up with include:

• Perhaps your Employee Resource Groups have given you feedback that they’d like more transparent insight into how performance evaluations impact promotion decisions. Three ERGs have noted that some staff have insight into that and others don't’ – and that demographic identity seems to be a big factor in determining who is in which group. When making the case for implementing the ERGs’ recommendations, you can point to moments that matter within the EJM to show that investing in building out your performance evaluation and promotion frameworks to be more equitable would help you send clearer communications around these topics, and that would help you in specific moments within moments like onboarding, cyclical events, and exit.
• Let’s say your DEI Council asks you for a clear job leveling ladder and explanations of the differences in expectations between each level of responsibility in the company. Their feedback is that the org structure seems to be more traversable for white men than for white women and women of color, and that it would help these groups to have a more transparent understanding of your leveling system. You can point to the EJM to show that if you get approval to invest time into this project, it will help you send clearer communications and have more productive conversations during specific moments that matter in onboarding, cyclical events, life events, wellbeing, and more.

This can be especially powerful for leaders who think of DEI as something that happens exclusively during recruiting, or exclusively during workshops. When working to secure their buy-in for more proactive, sustainable investment in DEI strategy work, the EJM provides a clear way to show how your DEI work impacts every stage of the employee lifecycle – and the moments with it. 

Using these tools to thoughtfully and effectively implement your EJM can help your organization provide a more equitable employee experience, which makes it much easier to hire, engage, and retain diverse teams.