What is the Employee Lifecycle?

What is the employee lifecycle? This article will provide an overview of what the employee lifecycle is, what it entails as well as the 7 stages of the employee lifecycle along the employee journey map.

What is the Employee Lifecycle?

The employee lifecycle is an HR model which documents the different stages of the employee journey. In other words, it refers to your advancements within an organization.

It also focuses on employee engagement and it provides you with valuable insight into what you need to do, in order to reach the peak of your career.

The employee lifecycle model is based on the idea that each employment journey has distinctive stages with specific features.

The employee lifecycle model can therefore be seen as a roadmap to retaining and engaging employees. It can start with a welcome email to new staff.

The model also offers a different engagement strategy for each phase employees will undergo. It can aid companies in paying detailed attention to every phase of the employee work journey. So, companies can deduce which stage is not as effective as it should be.

For instance, an organization could have a fantastic recruitment strategy and still have high employee turnover rates. In such a scenario, an employee life cycle model will aid the management team in developing a better employee retention strategy.

The Seven Stages of the Employee Cycle

The employee lifecycle starts with recruitment and concludes with the employees offboarding process. Offboarding occurs due to resignation, termination or retirement. 

From recruitment to offboarding there are intermediary stages. In order to better understand the employee experience life-cycle, we have distinguished between seven stages of the employee life cycle. The seven sections corresponding to each of the seven stages of the employee cycle will also answer your question of which of the following of the employee lifecycle phases is considered to be an ongoing activity. 

Stage 1: Find Talent

This stage corresponds to talent attraction activities. Your company will be searching for talent, researching candidates and checking resumes and application letters. 

While at this stage, networking events or career events can provide good opportunities for seeking talent. Many employees could participate in referral programmes, thus benefiting from the recommendations from friends or family to facilitate access to the recruitment stage.

Stage 2: Recruit Talent

You will send an invitation to the second stage of the employee cycle: recruitment. Companies utilise various methods and activities during the recruitment phase.

An interview is the most classical recruitment activity that most employees have to go through prior to gaining employment in a company. There are various ways to carry the interviews depending on the scope and focus, as well as the overall structure of the recruitment cycle. Obviously, the type of job and the level of seniority will influence the structure and number of phases of recruitment.

For example, a mid-seniority IT professional might first be invited to a non-technical interview conducted by the HR manager / recruiter. The purpose will be to cross check the resume and experience the level of the candidate as well as provide the candidate with information regarding the role and the overall organization. Once this step is successfully completed, the candidate might be invited to participate in a technical test case. Here the goal is ensuring that they possess the required technical skills and knowledge required to do the job. 

A successful conclusion to the recruitment stage is signing a new employment contract. The contract will provide key information regarding the start date, the working hours and location, compensation, duties and obligations, etc.

Stage 3: Provide Engaged Pre & Onboarding Experiencies

Once the new employees sign the contract, we will begin the pre & onboarding processes. It is essential to familiarise themselves with the new workplace regardless if it’s a small company or large enterprise. The preboarding process offers them an opportunity to start building a relationship with their new team, line manager and overall organisation.

The onboarding process sets in on their first day on the job and has two main purposes: cultural-social integration and relationship-building as well as provision of all the information and skills necessary for becoming a productive member of the team.

Pre & onboarding processes are there to properly integrate a new hire into a company. When you integrate an employee successfully into a new company, they will be engaged, productive, highly performant and feel satisfied with their job. 

We recommend that you visit our blog to learn more about preboarding and onboarding. You can also learn more about the difference between Preboarding vs. Onboarding. 

Stage 4: Boost Your Employee Engagement

The talent and skills of employees will be the distinguishing factor. They will explain why an organization’s business, product or service are better than the rest of the competition. Moreover, the longer the employment relationship and the employee lifecycle, the more valuable of an asset you become for your company.

Organizations with engaged employees generate 2.5 times more revenue than organizations with low levels of employee engagement, according to management consulting firm Korn Ferry.

Stage 5: Encourage Their Development and Provide Training

Career development is an essential factor for many employees when they decide whether or not to take or stay in a job. Generally speaking, nobody wants to feel stuck in a job doing the same thing with no prospect of improvement and career advancement.

Development is achievable through participating in training courses and taking advantage of upskilling opportunities. When employees feel like they have room for growth and development, they are more prone to feel engaged with their employer. This means they will also preserve the employment relationship for longer periods of time and your company will reduce the retention rate.

Stage 6: Reduce The Talent Retention

The longer the employee lifecycle, the more valuable an asset they are for their employer. Once we acknowledge that, it becomes clear that efforts for talent retention are never too early. Thus, there is a constant need for actions to boost their motivation. Moreover, the employer has to boost their sense of belonging to the organization as well, in order to retain talent.

Some of the instruments for ensuring talent retention are regular feedback and review sessions. They create a framework for gaining a better overview of their employee journey. Additionally, employees can provide inputs into how the workplace could better accommodate their needs and desires.

Stage 7: Prepare a Good Offboarding

Offboarding starts the moment employees decide to pursue another job opportunity, or employers decide to terminate the employment contract. So regardless if the termination is voluntary or not, offboarding comprises the final activities leading up to employees’ exit from the company.

There will be many administrative activities to ensure the closure of the contract. For example, handover of equipment, final reporting on tasks and progress made in the job and eventual training of the replacement for the role. But offboarding is more than administrative work. When done right, offboarding processes ensure a cordial relationship between themselves and their now former employer. You can visit our blog to learn more about the offboarding process.

Possible Stage: Reboarding

Reboarding can occur under specific circumstances. It is especially customary in cases of leaves of absence. For example, employees could undergo a reboarding process after maternity leave, or a longer sick leave.

We are not treating reboarding as a separate stage, as it is not a mandatory stage in the lifecycle with the employer.

HR Life Cycle – the Impact that HR Professionals Can Make

By using tools such as the employee experience lifecycle, HR professionals can make a substantial effort for your employee experience. HR can impact an organisation’s overall culture, performance, employee- and customer satisfaction and overall productivity and profitability.

Employees have a basic need for safety and comfort at the workplace. When HR and management foster these feelings, companies will gain higher employee satisfaction as well as higher engagement. This can lead to an extended employee lifecycle within the organisation, and we have already established that longer employee cycles have an enormous impact on the success of the company.

We conceptualise the HR life cycle as the relevant roles the HR personnel plays in each of the HR life stages.

The Five Talent Management Life-Cycle Stages

Let’s first define talent management. It refers to “the implementation of integrated strategies or systems designed to increase workplace productivity.” This objective is achievable by developing and implementing quality processes for attracting, developing, retaining and utilizing people with the required skills and aptitudes to meet current and future business needs. 

There are five talent management lifecycle stages. We decided to also include some key strategies for each stage that we cannot overlook: 

Stage 1: Attraction

The success of a company is dependent on the quality of its human resources and human capital. Thus, selecting the right candidates that can match your company goals and culture is key.

The key strategy for this stage would be ensuring that the compensation and benefits match the geographical location of the job post. Additionally, employer branding is key for attracting talented people. Employees are more prone to choose working for an organization whose values and mission you identify with. 

Stage 2: Recruitment

Recruitment and talent attraction are closely related. Attracting the right talents creates a pool of quality choices for your company. 

A key strategy for this stage is making sure that each position’s roles and responsibilities are properly documented. This ensures that the candidates know what will be expected from them as they embark on a new employee journey.

Stage 3: Pre & Onboarding

We have earlier mentioned how the pre & onboarding stage set a framework for cultural and social acclimation, workflow induction and engagement. It is essential for employees to have a clear picture of expectations from them from the very beginning. In this way, they will have an easier time settling into the job. It will also help following their progress until achieving full productivity. 

There are cases in the industry where onboarding is absent. All they get is a single onboarding day focused on paperwork and administrative processes. We know how undesirable this would be since they will lack the connection that is so important when starting a new job. 

Thus, we identified two key strategies for this stage. Firstly, focus on culture and purpose through interactive practices and tools (quizzes or video explanations, for example). Secondly, start feeling like they belong with a framework for social human connections. For example, this can be achieved through a work buddy system. 

Stage 4: Career Development and Retention

Many times, the lack of development prospects is the factor that prompts employees towards different opportunities. This can be extremely detrimental for employers, especially in the case of long-tenured employees that are extremely valuable. When they receive a clear path within the company’s career ladder as early as the onboarding, they will be more motivated to pursue the steps required for advancing to each new stage. They will put in the efforts until they reach full job satisfaction. 

A key strategy for this phase is for companies to identify their career ambitions in the onboarding stage. Then, the next step is setting milestones for achieving those ambitions.

Moreover, whenever relevant, training and mentoring should be available to ensure optimum results. 

Stage 5: Offboarding

In cases of offboarding an employee, a cordial separation can leave windows open for future collaborations. Moreover, it will ensure positive employer branding in case the employee would recommend the company to friends or family. 

A key strategy would be conducting exit interviews. This can encourage open and honest conversations that can make a difference. If employees see changes taking place from their feedback, maybe they will consider returning to the company sometime in the future. Thus, it would leave open possibilities for reboarding.

How to Go about the Formal Separation between Employee and Company

• There should be an understanding of the reason behind their resignation.
• Get sincere feedback on their experience with the company.
• Provide positiveness throughout the entire process.
• Ensure to get every company’s asset in their custody
• If it’s necessary, ensure the employee trains their successor to avoid an operational vacuum that could arise by the departure.

What Are the Benefits of the Employee Life Cycle?

More and more voices from the business community highlight the fact that human capital assets constitute the one factor that sets your organization apart from your competitors. In fact, as highlighted by Gaurav Mehra, people are the only appreciating assets in an organization. This is especially relevant as the business world is ever evolving.

Thus, when companies have a focus on their human resources’ lifecycle, they can constantly optimize their employee experience. 

When companies establish a lifecycle management process, it provides employees with the insights to a career within the organization. Moreover, it provides the steps for guiding their employee experience.

The more comprehensive an employer’s understanding of its human capital, the better equipped they can be to create policies, benefits and working conditions that can foster and bolster employee performance. This understanding is possible through resources such as the employee life cycle.

An employee lifecycle management allows employers to collect and analyze data. The data gathered can lead to an improvement in employee experience. After all, every phase of the employee journey is a learning opportunity for their employer to improve their overall employee lifecycle. The goal is to make each stage better and more rewarding.

At Introdus, employee onboarding software enables effective pre & onboarding experiences. We firmly believe that effective pre & onboarding constitutes the preamble to a long-term and successful employee lifecycle.

In conclusion, the employee lifecycle model is a vital tool that provides workers with an overview and plan for each phase of their journey with the company. Hence, the onus is on the management team to provide the proper insight to navigate each phase of their work journey successfully for their employees.