Plotting pain points: how firms map the employee experience

The secret to great employ­ee engage­ment is under­stand­ing what work­ers want and why they might be dis­sat­is­fied. To achieve both ends, firms now track their work­ers’ expe­ri­ence far beyond the annu­al all-staff sur­vey. 

Ikea is begin­ning to map out employ­ees’ jour­neys, just like it tracks cus­tomers’ shop­ping expe­ri­ences, says Neena Poten­za, glob­al strate­gic ini­tia­tives man­ag­er for peo­ple and cul­ture at Ing­ka Group, the fur­ni­ture giant’s largest retail­er, with over 390 stores.

“Expe­ri­ence is the sum of every­thing a co-work­er expe­ri­ences through­out their con­nec­tion to us as a com­pa­ny, whether it’s HR ser­vices, the job, cul­ture and lead­er­ship, or dig­i­tal or phys­i­cal work­place,” Poten­za explains.​ “We use jour­ney map­ping to under­stand the per­spec­tive of the co-work­er.” 

Ikea is test­ing sev­er­al tech­nol­o­gy plat­forms to deter­mine which best suit its needs. It’s tak­ing a con­tin­u­ous mea­sure­ment and improve­ment approach, using ini­tia­tives like net pro­mot­er scores, or NPS. This is a way of mea­sur­ing the pro­por­tion of peo­ple who would rec­om­mend a prod­uct or ser­vice and is now being used to assess employ­ees’ atti­tudes to their work­place. The com­pa­ny fre­quent­ly gath­ers data on a vari­ety of jour­neys, from onboard­ing to devel­op­ment to leav­ing.

Thriving at work

Ikea wants to bet­ter under­stand what is most effec­tive in map­ping employ­ees’ jour­neys. For exam­ple, in assess­ing a staff member’s learn­ing and devel­op­ment jour­ney, it looks for detail on their skills assess­ment process and whether some­one was able to apply what they learnt. “All of this helps us bet­ter under­stand where we can make improve­ments for peo­ple so we can help them thrive, feel includ­ed and learn,” Poten­za states.

For mat­tress man­u­fac­tur­er Emma, switch­ing from spread­sheets to soft­ware has helped the com­pa­ny more effi­cient­ly track its work­ers’ jour­neys and iden­ti­fy pain points. The busi­ness has grown rapid­ly and now has more than 850 staff in loca­tions like Shang­hai and Mex­i­co City, as well as its Frank­furt head office.

Emma start­ed using the Cul­ture Amp employ­ee expe­ri­ence plat­form in 2019 to gath­er feed­back in an effi­cient way. It pre­vi­ous­ly took the firm’s team lead for organ­i­sa­tion­al devel­op­ment Han­nah Boern­er around three weeks to analyse the infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed by the company’s reg­u­lar staff sur­veys. 

Ques­tion­naires became eas­i­er to com­plete, mean­ing more staff respond­ed and the result­ing data is now acces­si­ble on a sin­gle page. People’s answers are con­fi­den­tial, Boern­er states. Team leads – who may be the focus of the feed­back – get tips on cre­at­ing a “pro­duc­tive and solu­tion-ori­ent­ed atmos­phere”, rather than receiv­ing ver­ba­tim com­ments. Emma now runs these all-staff sur­veys twice a year.

One area pin­point­ed for improve­ment was the 360-review and devel­op­ment process, where employ­ees at all lev­els give per­for­mance feed­back for their col­leagues. Emma now gath­ers per­for­mance feed­back over a peri­od of about a month every year, as well as pro­vid­ing devel­op­men­tal feed­back on a con­tin­u­ous, infor­mal basis. 

Career progression

One of Emma’s cur­rent focus­es is cre­at­ing career oppor­tu­ni­ties for peo­ple who have already learnt a lot with­in the busi­ness and are ready for more. “We are look­ing at devel­op­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties through project rota­tion – so how can we use [people’s] strengths in the best way for the com­pa­ny but also for the per­son to devel­op?” Boern­er states. 

Staff might be moved from their usu­al job to a spe­cial project or spend time in an over­seas office. Per­haps two lead­ers could swap roles, she adds.

As well as its twice-year­ly sur­vey, Emma also has reg­u­lar, more iter­a­tive ways to iden­ti­fy pain points and map employ­ees’ jour­neys. “If we have a feel­ing there may be an [issue], we do a quick check-up with a group of peo­ple, we go into talks and try to iden­ti­fy the root cause of a prob­lem,” Boern­er explains.

This blend of data and human input is also a key focus for Reza Mous­sa­vian, a long-time HR and trans­for­ma­tion expert who joined fash­ion retail­er Zalan­do in June as its vice pres­i­dent of peo­ple prod­ucts. Hav­ing hired 7,000 peo­ple in 2021 alone, onboard­ing is a crit­i­cal part of the ecom­merce company’s efforts to map employ­ee expe­ri­ence. 

There’s a direct cor­re­la­tion between the onboard­ing expe­ri­ence of new staff and employ­ee attri­tion, or the time when they leave the com­pa­ny, Mous­sa­vian says. 

This is a pain point for most firms. The answers they give in the first 90 days of their job when asked if they would rec­om­mend Zalan­do as an employ­er and whether they see them­selves at the firm in the next two to three years is “high­ly cor­re­lat­ed” to attri­tion lev­els, he states.

Mous­sa­vian adds that a “blend­ed onboard­ing” helps to increase loy­al­ty, an approach that might include lunch­es with col­leagues, man­age­ment train­ing and small­er touch­es like cel­e­brat­ing with the new starter’s favourite cake. 

Artificial intelligence in HR

Like Boern­er, Mous­sa­vian views devel­op­ment as anoth­er cru­cial point in a staff member’s jour­ney. In his for­mer role as a senior vice pres­i­dent of HR at Deutsche Telekom, Moussavian’s team redesigned the eval­u­a­tion process. Man­agers and employ­ees would togeth­er dis­cuss a staff member’s per­for­mance, with a devel­op­ment plan cre­at­ed for each per­son. 

The tech­nol­o­gy would then come in, with the plan read by an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence tool to rec­om­mend next steps, such as rel­e­vant jobs with­in the com­pa­ny as well as sug­ges­tions for train­ing cours­es.

This use of tech­nol­o­gy means employ­ees don’t even have to ask their man­agers about career pro­gres­sion or learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. “There is a win-win, because the [man­ag­er] saves time … and the employ­ee has imme­di­ate rec­om­men­da­tions on future career plan­ning,” Mous­sa­vian states.

Poten­za says Ikea is “just at the begin­ning” of the employ­ee map­ping process, but has already iden­ti­fied areas for improve­ment. “Where­as we thought we had the biggest prob­lem with onboard­ing, big­ger prob­lems actu­al­ly includ­ed not pro­vid­ing the right IT tools, or that man­agers don’t have enough time for co-work­ers, or that the train­ing wasn’t spe­cif­ic enough to the job at hand,” Poten­za explains. “Now that we know, we can make improve­ments in these areas.”

She says Ikea is “hyper curi­ous” about what’s work­ing or not work­ing for staff. But one thing is clear: map­ping pain points and inter­ven­ing where nec­es­sary makes for hap­pi­er employ­ees who are more like­ly to stick with their jobs.