Understanding the everyday moments that matter to your employees and your business.
Employee engagement begins before an employee’s first day—it begins when they become a candidate—and it continues throughout the key moments at your organization. From before and during onboarding, role transitions/promotions, work anniversaries, and through their last day it’s important to understand how your employees are feeling at each of these key moments.
Lifecycle surveys help you collect real-time employee feedback at each stage of their journey. The important information gathered from lifecycle surveys helps managers and human resource professionals identify areas for improvement, enhance learning and development, and uncover hidden obstacles to productivity.
There are four key events in the employee lifecycle: as a candidate, during onboarding, after important career moments, and before they exit. Surveying employees at each of these stages helps your organization understand what’s working well and what’s not so you can implement changes to improve future experiences, engagement, and save your business time and money.
The candidate experience is the series of interactions someone has with your organization as they journey through the recruitment process. These include any communications they receive via brand messaging, software systems, management, or other employees. Clear, honest, and open communication starts the moment a candidate enters your recruiting process. Surveying candidates on their experience enables your organization to learn what’s resonating and compelling to prospects, uncover vital information about the experience and hiring process, continue to focus on areas that people see are positive and course correct any negative.
Employee onboarding is the first impression of what it’s like to work at your organization, and often, it’s the first moment of determining engagement level. It is important to remember that onboarding is not just about teaching and acclimating to the job, it is also about connecting emotionally with employees. Both aspects matter, from ensuring an employee knows where to park and what door to enter on their first day to feeling like others are truly interested in who they are personally. In the first year of employment, people are deciding if the new company is the right place for them. Surveying in the 0-1 year demographic lets you see if, and when, engagement starts to drop for new employees.
There’s a wide variety of milestones we all have in our careers—from the simple but significant work anniversaries to promotions and everything in between. These moments matter to your employees and to your organization, which is why surveying during these times to gather feedback in the moment matters. Creating surveys around these events helps managers and HR understand what they need to do, what they need to change, and what they need to keep doing.
Offboarding is too often dismissed because an employee is leaving the organization—but there’s value in surveying employees that are exiting the company. You can gain helpful feedback through a proper exit or offboarding process and leave a good or bad last impression. Through this, you can determine important information, such as what could’ve prevented them from leaving, and create a positive exit experience that could translate to a bounce back hire in the future.
At WSA, we offer employee lifecycle surveys that are tailored to each key time in the lifecycle. Our surveys are designed with expertise, based on data, analyzed against our WSAdata, and provide actionable insights. Ensure you’re gathering the right information, at the right time.
Soliciting feedback at the four critical times in the employee lifecycle alone isn’t enough. Listening and acting on employee feedback should happen outside of these unique moments. Combining the data from lifecycle surveys with feedback gathered through annual engagement surveys and pulse surveys help contribute to a more successful employee engagement strategy. The frequency, scope, and timing of each survey type contribute to the unique purpose that each survey serves.
Organizations must listen and act on the employee feedback during each point that it’s gathered which takes discipline, repetition, and time to do it successfully. By listening and acting on employee feedback, organizations can attract high-quality candidates, increase employee engagement, and prevent regrettable losses.
