The competition for talent is extremely tough. It has never been more important than now to take care of and develop the employees once you have them on board – so they don't seek job satisfaction elsewhere. We let Linda Tesell from Flex Applications provide us with the critical factors for succeeding with the employee journey.
The interviews with your favorite candidate are completed, the employment contract is signed, and after a well-planned introduction, your new colleague starts to get into the swing of things. Managers and HR can now check off the first two critical steps in the employee journey, but this is just the beginning. Now, you face the next big challenge: nurturing your new talent and creating good conditions for them to thrive and develop with you.
– Many employers know the importance of investing in their employees, being attentive to their needs, and encouraging them to continuously grow so that they choose to stay with the company. However, time is scarce for many managers and HR departments today. Suppose the company also lacks good tools, or the existing tools aren’t working optimally. In that case, it can be challenging to establish a good structure and efficient workflows, says Linda Tesell, Product Manager at Flex Applications, who has many years of experience in HR systems and processes.
But what critical elements do managers and HR need to know about once the employees are onboard? And how do you maximize your chances of succeeding? We’ll take a closer look at this below.
Check List – 6 Important Processes During the Employee Journey
-
Examine the Employee’s Wants and Needs
How do you like it here? What do you need from me as a manager? Are we on the right track toward our shared goals? What are your wishes for the future? As a manager, continuously checking in with your co-workers with regular staff appraisals, follow-ups, career goal conversations, and anonymous employee surveys are essential for ensuring that your employees enjoy working with your company and reach their full potential. It will also be easier to spot signals of unwellness, work environment problems, and other areas of improvement so that the proper measures can be taken.
Linda Tesell:
– As a manager, you need to ask your employees how they are doing – over and over and over again. Offering several arenas for feedback and making sure that they cover the whole organization is an integral part of the work for retaining and developing your staff.
-
Keep Track of Competencies
Having the right competencies in place is crucial for the business's success and competitiveness. At the same time, good development opportunities are essential to retain and motivate your employees – while at the same time reducing the risk of them seeking new challenges elsewhere.
– Competency management is a process with several different parts. First, it’s about keeping track of the individual employees’ competencies, various courses – both completed and planned – and the goals for competence development that you’ve agreed upon. You’ll also have to secure your competence supply throughout the organization to have a strategic advantage. Where are our competence gaps and vulnerabilities, and how do we best fill them? Do we need to recruit, or do we have a co-worker that already has the right competence or who can be further trained? This requires efficient digital system support, not manual solutions and spreadsheets, Linda explains.
-
Fair Pay for the Effort
Do your employees feel that they are getting paid enough for the work that they do? Do they experience that they can influence their salary development – and how? How does the company work to prevent unfair gender differences in pay?
– Order and clarity in the salary processes are obviously important to motivate and reward competent employees so they aren’t tempted to seek employment elsewhere. But that's not all; it is also a requirement according to the Swedish Discrimination Act that the employer should conduct an annual pay equity analysis as part of the work against wage discrimination, says Linda Tesell.
-
When an Employee Gets Sick
In an ideal world, no employees should have to get sick and be prevented from working. But yet, absences and sick leaves still occur, in some cases with the need for rehabilitation so that the employee can safely return to work. How does the employer ensure a functioning work process in this part of the employee journey?
– Here, it’s crucial to work preventively as far as possible and actively follow up on even shorter periods of absence – before they risk turning into long-term sick leave. If sick leave still becomes relevant, a good structure is necessary for the different parts of the rehabilitation chain. One of the challenges is to establish a clear division of responsibilities, so it is apparent who is expected to do what, including keeping a dialogue with employees and authorities, and developing a rehabilitation plan.
-
Key Figures – from Data to Insights to Action
Few HR professionals are likely to have missed the terms 'data analytics' and 'HR analytics' or the idea of working in a 'data-driven' way. But what do these terms actually mean when it comes to retaining and developing employees?
Linda Tesell explains:
– By compiling and packaging different types of employee data, for example, in a key figures dashboard, you can get concrete figures on how sick leave and staff turnover are, how they differ between different departments, and how they have developed over time. By analyzing why it looks the way it does, you have good conditions for implementing the right initiatives – also here with the overall goal of retaining and developing your personnel.
-
A Professional Offboarding as a Proper Goodbye
Most employers know the importance of a good first impression for new hires through well-planned pre-boarding and onboarding. But you shouldn't underestimate the importance of a positive ending – the offboarding process. Apart from returning equipment, closing user accounts, and other practical details, other boxes must be checked.
– Conducting exit interviews with the employee leaving is a good way of collecting valuable feedback about what could improve. You'll also need to ensure a smooth handover of tasks and transfer of knowledge to any potential replacements well in advance. A clear division of responsibilities among all parties involved is essential to prevent anything from falling through the cracks.
This Is Why Your Company Should Also Digitize the Employee Journey
Is your company struggling to gain control over all employee data that is scattered across different interfaces or perhaps in various papers and binders? Are you spending an unreasonable amount of time on manual input and double work between managers and HR? The good news is that there is smart technology to rely on – user-friendly HR systems that automate and simplify all processes from start to finish.
Here are a few examples:
-
With a digital tool for pay equity analysis and wage revision, you avoid manual inputs in spreadsheets, close the risk of manual mistakes, and can effortlessly coordinate the work between everyone involved. After this, you export the new wages to the payroll system with a button click.
-
Reduce administrative time around employee conversations by using ready-made templates that can be filled out directly in the interface and collect all relevant and historical documentation in a digital and searchable archive.
-
Ensure a seamless collaboration with the help of digital checklists and automatic notifications sent to all concerned parties when there is a task to perform or an event to act upon.
-
Optimize the overview and avoid chasing papers and binders by gathering all information about the employees in one registry – from competencies and courses to contracts and forms, wages and benefits, as well as possible documentation regarding sick leave and rehabilitation.
To summarize: For every small part of the HR work you can digitize and automate, you save valuable time. Time that can be spent where it makes the most difference – listening to your employees, ensuring the quality of the employee journey, and making sure that you reach your shared goals – instead of manually entering data. As a bonus, you'll get higher quality data and processes, reduce the risk of manual errors, and enhance GDPR security.
But not only that: your organization also needs a safe and secure way to handle tasks required by law in a structured manner. This includes, for example, conducting a pay equity analysis according to the Discrimination Act and fulfilling your rehabilitation responsibility in case of sickness absence. In other words: if your company hasn’t digitalized the (entire) employee journey yet, there are several good reasons to do it now!
Where Do You Begin?
Do digitalization and choosing the proper system support feel like a big and complex project? Here are our best tips to get going:
-
Map out the different stages of the employee journey (feel free to use our checklist above). What do your processes and tools look like today, what works well and what doesn’t? What are your most significant challenges when it comes to retaining and developing your staff? Do you need to improve continuity and quality in your staff appraisals? Then that’s an excellent place to start. Or, is your biggest challenge that your talents are leaving due to a lack of development opportunities? In that case, competency management is the process you should focus on digitizing first.
-
Create an order of prioritization where you weigh factors related to what is easiest to start with against what you assess will significantly benefit your organization.
-
Compare different tools and find out which ones best match your needs.
-
Try to keep a holistic perspective when choosing a solution. How do you get the different parts to fit together with each other and any other tools in your system landscape – without unnecessary complications with transfers and systems that don’t sync?
Does your company also want to digitalize the employee journey? We are happy to help!
Flex HRM Employee is the HR system that offers you a complete and user-friendly toolbox for all parts of the employee journey – from employment to termination. If you should choose Flex HRM Employee as part of our comprehensive HRM platform you can also benefit from all the advantages of gathering all parts of the company’s personnel administration in one place – in a single interface and a single database. Smart, isn’t it?
