Insights from Debra Ward on Mapping Employee Experience

Unlocking the Path to Exceptional Employee Experiences: Insights from Debra Ward on Mapping the Journey

Recently we had Debra Ward and Chris Britton on our webinar “How to Map Employee Experience”. 

The purpose of this webinar was to delve into the intricacies of employee experience mapping, comprehending the employee lifecycle, and harnessing data to drive transformative improvements within organisations. It was a remarkable session, with insightful discussions about effective strategies and proven best practices for mapping employee experiences, covering everything from onboarding to retention and beyond.

From the session, Debra Ward, Strategist and Director, generously shared her expertise and unique approach to journey mapping at her company, Live Love Learn. 

Here are Debra's valuable insights:

1. Define the purpose: Clearly define the objective of experience mapping exercise. Perhaps it is to identify pain points, improve engagement, enhance satisfaction, or drive productivity. Having a clear understanding of why will better enable us to understand. 

2. Identify key stages: Breaking the journey into different stages throughout employment life cycle - such as recruitment, onboarding, daily work, development, and offboarding. This helps us to organise and analyse the various touchpoints. 

3. Gather team member insights: Collect data and feedback through surveys, interviews, focus groups, or even anonymous suggestion boxes. This helps in understanding their experiences, needs, expectations, and challenges at each stage. Posing open questions and really listening without bias is key to gaining rich insights. 

4. Mapping touchpoints: Identify and document the touchpoints or interactions team members have with the company at every stage. These touchpoints may include recruitment processes, communication channels, technology systems, performance evaluations, training programs, processes, procedures and more. 

5. Assess team member emotions: Determine the emotions employees may experience during each touchpoint. This could include feelings of excitement, frustration, satisfaction, or stress. Understanding these emotions helps in evaluating the impact of different touchpoints on overall experience. 

6. Analyse pain points and opportunities: Identify pain points, bottlenecks, or areas where team member experience falls short. Also, look for opportunities to enhance the experience by focusing on areas that can have the greatest positive impact. 

7. Prioritise and plan improvements: Prioritise the identified pain points and opportunities based on their impact and feasibility. Develop action plans to address them, involving relevant stakeholders and considering available resources and timelines. 

8. Implement and monitor: Execute the planned improvements, continuously monitor the impact, and gather feedback from employees. Regularly assess the effectiveness of the changes made and make necessary adjustments as needed. 

9. Measure success: Define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of the team member experience initiatives. This could include metrics like engagement scores, retention rates, productivity levels, or team member satisfaction surveys. 

Remember this is not a won-and-done exercise as the world of work is constantly evolving and your team member set may also change over time. Regularly reassess and refine the mapping to ensure a positive and engaging experience throughout the team member journey. 

Watch the webinar on-demand here

Connect with Debra on LinkedIn here