In recent years we have seen an increase in the conversations about the employee experience and how this links to the culture of an organisation. What we often miss, is the component parts of that experience. We don’t take time to look at each element of the employee life cycle and how the experience feels.
In this episode, Jenni talks through the stages of the employee life cycle and how culture plays a part in improving the overall experience.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Download: Redefining culture
Rebel Ideas – The power of thinking differently by Matthew Syed
Podcast: Chaos to Calm: Hybrid working S1 E1
Blog: Why you should improve your employee experience
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about culture and the employee life cycle. Now, in recent years, we’ve seen an increase in the conversations about the employee experience. Traditional internal communication agencies are being rebranded as employee experience agencies, and there’s lots of conversation about how this all links to culture.
What we often miss are the component parts of that experience. We don’t spend the time looking at each element of the employee life cycle and how the experience feels at every step of the way.
Now, I decided to do this episode after running a workshop with a leadership team over a few days. The workshop focused on diversity and inclusion, and at the end of the second day, we were discussing how things would change in each aspect of the life cycle. This was really important because it brought a lot of the thinking and conversation. It got into the real how when it comes to making employees feel part of something. And because this was linked to diversity and inclusion, it was really specific into the different sort of elements and aspects underneath each aspect of the employee life cycle. So, that’s why I wanted to talk about it, because I think it’s really important when we’re looking at organisational culture.
Now, I’ve popped a link in the show notes to a crowdsourced document I have on my website about the different definitions of culture. And I’ve done that because I think it’s really important to define it as a group. So, in your organisation, when you talk about culture, making sure that everyone’s kind of agreed with what that means. For me, it’s around how things get done around here, which is a bit of an age old definition. But there’s lots of examples in there from when I asked my LinkedIn community a while ago. So, I just grouped them together into a PDF for you.
But it might be helpful if you’re looking at how you might define culture as a concept, just to make sure that everyone’s agreed that’s what culture is. And it’s kind of a good starting point.
Where is the chaos when it comes to the employee life cycle?
Well, if we don’t go through the life cycle and discuss each part, then things inside the organisation won’t feel consistent for the employee. So, from start to finish, there should be a consistency in cultural approach. Where things fall short or there are big gaps between the messaging that’s used to attract people to the organisation versus the onboarding experience, then people will start to get suspicious. And this leads us into areas of distrust, which leads us to disengagement eventually. So, that kind of congruency that we’re looking for, we’re looking for things to feel very much the same all the way through that life cycle.
If it breaks at any point, it’s going to make us feel like we don’t necessarily belong. And we’ll also start to question things. And that’s the sort of trust piece that’s coming in. So that’s where the chaos can happen. It’s very similar to what we often talk about when you have a perception of a brand from the external marketing versus what it might be like when you go and work there.
And that’s often a conversation that’s had around IT infrastructure. I always think that you sort of have this perception of an organisation and you go in and the IT infrastructure isn’t maybe how you thought it would be for an innovative company or a new company or something like that. So, it’s making sure that there’s that alignment and that synergy really across every step of that life cycle of the employee.
What are the six stages of the employee life cycle?
Now, there are six stages to the employee life cycle.
- Attraction
- Recruitment
- Onboarding
- Development
- Retention
- Separation
Now, importantly, if you’re looking at really being intentional about your culture, then you have to make sure that there is intention against each of those six stages.
So, when it comes to culture, we know from the work that’s already been done by people like Matthew Saeed in his book, Rebel Ideas. He talks a lot about the need to be intentional with your culture. And it came out a lot during the pandemic where people were suddenly a bit lost as everyone was working remotely if they were working in an office, and how culture was felt, if it wasn’t felt by things like the buildings and the way it was in the office. So, therefore, there has to be real intention at every single step.
And that has to link us to purpose, values, behaviours and strategy. Now, when we’re looking at the employee life cycle and culture, the purpose, values, behaviours and strategy of the organisation are fundamental in terms of bringing that alignment together.
So, if we take the middle part of the life cycle, which is Onboarding, that’s step number three, we can explore what this should feel like for the employee. So, it’s about the experience they have, how they feel, what they do as a result of that experience and what they think about the organisation. How do you want them to feel during onboarding and what do you want them to do?
And this is where it has to be linked to your purpose and your values and your behaviours and the strategy. But you can break this down into looking at it into different component parts. At the example I gave at the start of this episode about the workshop that we did with a client, that was focused on diversity and inclusion.
How can you take into account the whole life cycle of an employee?
So, how do you go through each of the different phases of the employee life cycle with a lens around your behaviours, with a lens of your purpose, with a lens of your values and with the lens of your strategy, because all of those different parts need to map into the employee life cycle so that you can see how your culture is being brought to life at every step of the way.
Now, importantly, there’s no right or wrong here. And this is why it’s important to map the culture to your organisation. Every organisation has a different culture. What works for one person won’t work for everyone. And it’s about finding your place in an organisation that aligns to you. But if you’re leading an organisation, it’s about being very clear about what the culture is like in your organisation and what it’s going to be like to work there. To give you an example of where we’re starting to see this sort of breakdown in organisations, we’re seeing a lot of discussion since the pandemic about people working in an office rather than working from home.
And there’s been sort of outrage in certain areas when organisations say that employees should be in an office, I don’t know, maybe three days a week. But there are a lot of people out there who want to work in an office. There are lots of people who want that separation between home and work. But there’s also a lot of people that don’t work in an office. So I can get on quite a soapbox about the fact that hybrid is a bit of a myth when it comes to work because not everybody works in an office.
And I talked about this a lot in the very first episode of the very first season of this podcast around hybrid, and really what we should be focused on. So, I won’t get on the soapbox here, but if you want to have a listen, I’ll pop a link in the show notes.
So, what’s important is that you have to define your culture based on what’s right for you. Saying that you want people in the office three days a week might not be right for everybody, but it will attract the people that want to work in that sort of way.
What is the purpose and intention of looking into the life cycle?
And being very clear about your culture and being very clear about that at every step of the life cycle is really important for someone to understand what it’s like to work there, to have that sense of belonging, to feel a sense of psychological safety, all the things that play a role in culture. It has to start from that very first step of attraction and it has to run right the way through to separation. And I think separation is the one that we often miss the most.
When it comes to separation, it’s almost like the thing that nobody will talk about, but relationships end and work relationships end and that’s okay. You can’t stay in a relationship if you’re not enjoying it, if it’s not fulfilling for you, if you’re not having a good time, you would leave that relationship and work is very much the same.
But we don’t tend to talk about separation and I think that’s really interesting, especially when we end up with buzzwords and buzz phrases like quiet quitting that’s been doing the rounds over recent months, because that’s also not particularly helpful. It’s a natural stage of an employee life cycle.
I remember someone telling me once when I was teaching communicators about internal communication and they were sharing that there were conversations at the induction stage or the onboarding stage about separation in this organisation.
The person sharing was saying that they talk about how the person will want to leave as they join, so they can understand what the development needs might be, but also what their intentions are. And then it’s a very open and very easy process when the relationship does end, because people naturally will move on. So there’s lots of different ways of dealing with things, depending on your culture and depending what’s right for you.
But all of this has to link to the purpose, the values, the behaviours, the strategy, because if we don’t link back to that, we’re not going to be thinking about the employee life cycle in a way that’s right for us and our organisation and that’s what’s fundamentally important.
Thank you for listening!
Now, in the next episode, I’m going to be talking about communicating sustainability and purpose. This is another one that was requested from one of the people in my community when I asked about what topics to cover. So I’m going to share a little bit about sustainability, the chaos that comes when we’re communicating it. And I’m going to dust off a blog post from about 2019 where I talked about communicating purpose.
So thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn. And you can also join my community by subscribing to my mailing list. So, please connect, ask questions and share your thinking with me. And details are in the show notes on how you can stay in touch.
