Optimising the Employee Lifecycle with Automated Surveys 

Whereas traditional employee surveys put the emphasis on managers and leaders to take action, requiring significant stakeholder engagement, employee lifecycle surveys put People and HR teams firmly in control of the employee experience at every stage of their journey. 

The Problem with Traditional Employee Surveys 

Don’t get me wrong, we’re big fans of annual and pulse surveys, used well. But let’s be honest, it can be hard work getting from results to action when you’re not in control of either the decisions or the budgets. You might find that you’re constantly chasing managers to take action on their pulse survey results or herding executive cats when the annual survey closes. 

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do these kinds of surveys, but there is an alternative to put into the mix: One that enables HR, as the process owner, to analyse and act on the data, continuously improving the processes that affect people every day. 

Enter the Automated Employee Lifecycle Survey, or ‘Moments’ as we call them here at the People Experience Hub. 

What are Automated Employee Lifecycle Surveys? 

As the name suggests, Employee Lifecycle Surveys capture data at different touch points between the employee and employer, from joining to leaving. Historically, these would be limited to these ‘bookends’ in the journey, as alternatives new joiner and exit interviews, because they allow for a more structured and consistent approach that also results in the data being captured in a single platform rather than in word documents. 

With improvements in technology, however, there is scope to automate a variety of ‘moments’ across the employee lifecycle, ensuring process compliance and experience is consistently high and supports your people goals such as engagement and retention. 

For some companies, that might result in one standard journey where, say, people’s experiences of joining, settling in after onboarding, job changes/promotions, return from parental leave, performance management, or development are measured. 

For large enterprises, there is more of an opportunity to create multiple employee journeys for different personas or employee groups, and to optimise the lifecycle on a more personalised basis. 

Directly Intervene while Building Employee Experience Data Over Time 

The beauty of this approach is that you can intervene if someone has a bad experience, because employee lifecycle surveys are normally confidential but not anonymous, and you can also let the data build over time and compare results by department, geography or demographics. 

Get a Continuous View of Engagement Without the Survey Fatigue 

You can also include some engagement measures, so that not only do you have a continuous view of engagement in the organisation, but over time you can also measure the impact of your people processes and improvements in them. The big advantage that this approach has over continuous pulses is that it’s less likely to lead to survey fatigue, because these are ‘moments that matter’ to employees, while you’ve also got more of an idea of where to focus action. 

Hook Into Your HRIS for Easy Admin 

The benefit of automated employee lifecycle surveys is that they are driven – at least for the most part – by changes in your people data. In other words, when someone joins, leaves, gets promoted, completes a particular development programme – their data changes. Nowadays, most HR systems use OpenAPI, which makes it easy to share that data securely with a survey platform like The People Experience Hub (and you can even draw data from multiple systems, such as an LMS or recognition platform). Then, all you need to do is set the rules. 

Well, that’s true to a point, but there are some things that will make a difference in whether you get real business value from your lifecycle surveys… 

How to use Surveys Effectively to Optimise Your Employee Lifecycle 

Here are some tips for getting the most out of automated employee lifecycle surveys. 

1. Make sure that they are part of a wider listening strategy, and are not competing with other surveys or other activities. 
2. Keep your data in order. The cleaner and more complete your people data is, the more that you will get from automating employee lifecycle surveys. That may be obvious, but it’s also critical and includes having demographic data that helps identify D&I hotspots. 
3. Know what good looks like, by having clear policies and procedures for different events in the lifecycle. That’s not to say that you couldn’t use external ‘best practice’ as your guide, but the clearer you are about what you’re aiming for, the better. 
4. Embed the surveys into existing processes. You’ll get best the best participation rates when you take an integrated approach. For example, by providing a link or QR code during an onboarding check-in. If you need to rely on email, make sure that it’s timely and very clearly associated with the event or milestone to ensure relevance. 
5. Review the data regularly, including comments. Keep an eye on the data and check for anomalies often, but build a cadence for deeper review depending on how quickly the data is building. If you’re recruiting thousands of people a week, then your opportunity to review the data for joiners may be weekly – but that’s not going to be true for everyone. 
6. Keep the questions fresh and relevant. If you’re using the data to make significant improvements to you people processes, don’t be afraid to change the questions from time to time. There’s a balance to be struck between consistency and change, but each time you raise the bar significantly, your questions may need to be changed to keep up. 

Conclusion 

In short, automated lifecycle surveys are a great tool for optimising your people processes, ensuring an excellent employee experience and improving people outcomes such as engagement and retention. The technology is there to make it easy to administer and analyse your results, and you can get great value from employee lifecycle surveys without requiring big budgets or being completely reliant on other stakeholders to take action. 

By using the right tools and taking the right approach, you can optimise your employee lifecycle and deliver a first class employee experience.