The Employee Experience Advantage

CHAPTER 17The Employee Life Cycle

To design employee experiences, we first have to think differently about employees and the journey that they will take with your organization.

The typical employee life cycle follows a process that looks something like Figure 17.1.

Figure 17.1 Typical Employee Life Cycle

Nobody thinks about his or her time at an organization in this way. This isn't really the employee life cycle. This is the organization's version of what it wants the employee life cycle to look like. Right now this journey is very one sided and quite frankly, inaccurate, which means whatever experiences your organization is trying to design aren't based on how things actually work. As an organization you can try to create as many neat little buckets and processes as you want, but remember that they simply reflect how you want things to be, not how they actually are. It's like looking at an organizational chart. You may want your company to function in a nice little pyramid, but anyone with a pulse who has worked for an organization knows that these charts never (and I really mean never) reflect how work gets done and how teams are structured.

Some organizations, such as LinkedIn, have been putting a bit of a modern spin on this to see things from the employee perspective. Nina McQueen is the vice president of global benefits, mobility, and employee experience. She along with ...