How do the six stages of the employee lifecycle impact organizations?

Employee lifecycle is a human resources model involving several stages to define an employee’s journey in the organization. It explains how an employee progresses within the company from selection to exit.

Improving the efficiency of these six employee lifecycle stages helps enhance the employee’s experience with the company, which reduces turnover and improves satisfaction. For this reason, the model is an optimum HR strategy to retain employees, reduce hiring costs, and ensure high employee morale.

This blog will discuss six stages of the employee lifecycle and best practices to improve process efficiency.

Organizations can attract top talent by engaging candidates in every stage of employee lifecycle management. Evaluate how these six stages work:

The first stage of employee lifecycle management is attraction, where the position becomes available in the organization. The HR team posts job openings on various portals to attract relevant candidates. After this, candidates evaluate the job description to decide if they want to work with this employer or look for other opportunities.

Therefore, this implies that the first impression of the organization is the critical factor in attracting skilled talent.

Once candidates have applied to an open position, hiring managers move to the recruitment stage of employee lifecycle management. It involves shortlisting relevant applications, conducting interviews, taking assessments, etc.

The orientation and onboarding stage of employee lifecycle management is crucial to define a candidate’s experience in the company. At this stage, recruiters should focus on helping new employees adjust to the culture, understand the hierarchy, and get comfortable with work patterns.

During onboarding, new employees should understand the company’s values, goals, long-term plans, and communication patterns. Understanding these key factors helps build the foundation for organizational and personal growth.

The retention stage starts when the employee is onboarded and has started working on the job role. Ideally, retention processes consistently stay alive till the employee separates from the organization. It involves keeping employees satisfied, motivated, and happy.

Once employees adjust to the company’s culture and working schedule, they look for development opportunities. The ability to develop skills, learn new things, and evolve is imperative for employees’ career growth. Therefore, HR managers should evaluate growth and learning requirements and sketch a career path for different types of employees.

Further, Training Effectiveness Assessment helps gauge the effectiveness and impact of a training model. For example, what was the employees’ reaction, were they able to learn, what was their behavior after the training, and what was the overall outcome?

The last stage is separation, where the employee is offboarded or leaves the company. There are multiple reasons why an employee might leave the company, such as retirement, personal reasons, better opportunity, lay off, etc.

Mapping your employee journey like the customer experience journey helps retain talent and improve the employer brand. Organizations can reduce hiring expenditures, boost training programs, engage teams, and increase productivity.

The benefits of employee lifecycle management are:

• Valuable experiences throughout the employee lifecycle improve corporate performance and employee efficiency. Employees are engaged and motivated to complete their work.
• Recognizing employees and providing them opportunities for growth to help achieve the businesses and employees’ personal goals.
• Streamlining employee encouragement strategies throughout the employee lifecycle helps professionals think innovatively, contributing to long-term business growth.
• Ensuring continuous involvement of business stakeholders from the attraction stage helps reduce the gap in training and employee skills.

Assessing employee lifecycle experience helps improve the efficiency of the process; start by:

• Creating a feedback pipeline throughout the lifecycle to listen to employees and understand their challenges.
• Encouraging every employee to voice their concerns and creating a feedback box or anonymous portal.
• Training managers to focus on the solution and action for every problem. Offering managers deep visibility of organizational processes and health to achieve this.
• Creating a culture of real-time action. While facing a challenge, action is taken in real-time to set the right example and encourage employees to voice their issues.

We have discussed the importance of correctly executing every stage of the employee lifecycle. However, the best experiences and employee satisfaction are provided by suitable tools. Using the right tool at every stage supports your employee lifecycle efficiency.

Some tools to use are:

1. Effective onboarding and recruitment tools with an employee portal to ensure a seamless transition from recruitment to onboarding and other stages. These tools help automate recruitment and onboarding tasks. For instance, sending initial onboarding collateral for better information to new employees.
2. Integrating an employee performance tool. This should be run in collaboration with L&D programs. The employee performance tool helps gauge the initial needs of training and assessments, and L&D tools allow acting on this requirement.
3. Utilizing a Skills Gap Analysis by Mercer | Mettl to understand your organization’s training needs. This assessment will help you identify specific skill sets for your employees, which will improve business outcomes.
4. Employing an employee recognition tool to build a positive culture. This will help managers recognize and reward high-performing employees and boost workplace morale.
5. Surveys to take feedback from peers for employees. This will aid appraisal cycles and maintain integrity in the process. For example, Mercer Mettl’s 360 Degree Feedback helps analyze the comprehensive performance of an employee. It takes ratings from multiple sources to gauge an employee’s working efficiency.
6. Lastly, based on the above feedback, organizations can use Mercer | Mettl’s Leadership Development to identify potential candidates. It assesses candidates based on their ability to lead by example, innovate, increase performance, and lead the business.

Fine-tuning different stages of employee lifecycle management helps reduce turnover and recruitment costs. It improves HR’s visibility across several areas, which allows the highlighting of loopholes and challenges. Eliminating these roadblocks optimizes performance and creates an innovation-oriented environment. It will enable employees to stay satisfied in their job roles and leave the company positively, helping create a good employer brand.