Where’s Your Employee’s Head?

Whether your traditional HR programs need a simple revitalization based on modern best practices or because you’d like to revolutionize them by applying a social layer, your FIRST step in transforming your existing HR programs is understanding where  an employee’s head is: what they’re thinking, what they need, where they want to go, and who they want to be.

If you follow this blog, you know that I believe the employee lifecycle is the foundation for balancing business needs with the needs of your employees. By integrating them into the employee lifecycle, you turn every day HR transactions into interactions that become tools relevant to how employees live and work, resulting in higher adoption and sustainability. To that end, you will not know where your employees’ heads are unless you break down the employee lifecycle.

In a recent post, Boxer Property identifies its own version of the employee lifecycle and provides some information on each stage. I especially like what they say about onboarding, learning and development:

More compelling is that their infographic illustrates that the current expected tenure for junior roles is 18 months to 3 years. For intermediate roles the average tenure is 3-5 years, and for VP or C-Level executives the average tenure is only 3 years. An average employee may complete this loop more than 15 times in their career. This message is further strengthened by the infographic presented by Rasmussen College which illustrates the current landscape of employee tenure based on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Armed with this information, it’s clear that employee needs are different based on where they are within the employee lifecycle and your HR programs must be customized to those needs. For example, engagement and productivity levels are high when an employee is onboarding versus an employee who is separating where levels are extremely low. It’s also important to understand the needs of those employees in between — the ones who you want to maintain a healthy level of engagement — not too much to prevent burnout but enough that they don’t start becoming disengaged.

How you define the employee lifecycle can vary based on your own culture, values and mission. How I would define the employee lifecycle differs slightly from that of Boxer Property. In fact, if you haven’t seen it already, you should take a look at our own infographic: “Putting Social HR in it’s Place: The Employee Lifecycle” which not only defines an employee lifecycle, but also identifies opportunities within the lifecycle to interact with employees socially.

Have you created an employee lifecycle for your organization? If so, tell me! I’d love to see it!!

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