Hope you’ve come across the Employee Lifecycle Roadmap for Employee Engagement by The Social Workplace. If not, definitely take a look at this slideshare presentation. Here’s the abridged version of the roadmap.
The Employee Lifecycle Stages
To summarize, there are 6 stages in the employee lifecycle.
- Attraction: How employees talk about your company to others. The more engaged they are, the more talented candidates they attract.
- Recruitment: Most jobs today are filled through employee referrals, so naturally, engaged employees are likely to recommend friends and family to apply for an open position.
- Onboarding: Engagement benefits both the new employees and existing employees. New employees are excited to join your company, and existing employees are eager to help newcomers succeed.
- Development: Engaged employees feel empowered to think of new ideas and seek new learning opportunities.
- Retention: Employees are more engaged when they feel recognized by their employers for their work and are given opportunities to interact and socialize with their peers.
- Separation: Engaged employees stay in touch with their peers and may provide feedback for future improvements.
Firstly, I’ll just say that Employee engagement is important in ALL stages, but there are 2 that many companies should be more focused on when trying to implement this roadmap to increase employee engagement. The ones to focus on are Onboarding and Retention. I’ll explain why I think you should tackle these first.
Employee Onboarding
The reason you should be tackling engagement in the Onboarding stage prior to the Attraction and Recruitment stages is that you need engaged employees to attract good candidates, and the best way to inspire engagement in your new employees is through onboarding. It might seem obvious now, but injecting engagement into your employees is going to take a long time and a lot of effort as you might have to embed it into your company culture. Best to start with fresh meat!
There are too many ways to increase engagement to go into here, but keep in mind that the most important thing is creating a good first impression. Employees should feel welcomed and supported. They need to start building relationships with peers as soon as possible, as they are the best people to help get a new employee up to speed. Managers don’t always have the time.
A good way to jumpstart this engagement process is with fun interactive activities on Orientation Day. A scavenger hunt, for example, can help break the ice and connect employees with new hires.
Employee Retention
You’re catching on, right? Retention is as important as Onboarding because you want to keep employees around who are engaged and are recommending the company to others.
Other than continuous feedback and the freedom to innovate, corporate retreats, strategy games, and, of course, happy hours are great ways to keep employees engaged.
We mentioned strategy games in an earlier post. Strategy games are a good way to develop valuable team skills that make collaborative work run smoothly before bad behaviors are carried over to the real world. Strayboots scavenger hunts and trivia games allow you to create custom challenges to drill home facts about your company to your employees.
Let’s Get Started!
There you have it! When focusing on improving employee engagement, you should start with the Onboarding and Retention stages of the Employee Lifecycle because these will start to create a feedback loop that spreads throughout the entire lifecycle.
There are many ways to improve engagement, but a good way to start is with interactive, fun activities. To show new hires that your company values teamwork and positivity, use a Strayboots scavenger hunt. Break up a day of training and paperwork with some light exercise and friendly competition.
Strayboots also provide games and activities to groups through our planning services and comprehensive activity app. This app allows us to gamify almost any event, including conferences, orientation days, and staff training days. Enhance team building with Strayboots’ fun mobile-guided games and discover the company engagement that it sparks.
Our fun events have been used by many big companies, like Wix.com, to introduce employees to a new office environment and to increase engagement. Contact us today so we can plan an orientation day that gets the ball rolling for successful onboarding.
