Lifecycle of the Employee - Engaging at Every Stage
It was just March Break in Ontario. Which means planning, organizing, traveling, day trips, activities, and adventures for some people… and absolutely nothing for others.
Other than a slight change in traffic patterns, March Break only affects adults caring for kids who will be home from school for that one week in March. For those of us with kids grown and working, March Break comes and goes without much notice. (Well… it might be the one week of winter when you DON’T try to book flights down south.)
Our lives have natural stages: childhood, leaving home, career growth, mentorship, retirement… And like these life stages, which are all-important while you live them and then quickly disappear in our rear-view mirrors, employees go through natural Employment Lifecycle Stages too.
Employers need to appreciate what stage an employee is experiencing and know that their wants and needs will be different at different stages.
It’s generally agreed that there are six distinct stages during our time with an employer:
Attraction: Whether or not there are positions available, your company gets discovered and a potential employee considers whether they want to work with you.
Recruitment: This stage represents all the intentional job search, application, and hiring processes.
Onboarding: When employees first start, you welcome them “on board” and support them while they learn and adapt to your culture and ways of working.
Development: Employees become better-versed in their roles, and ideally continue to learn new skills and take on new functions and responsibilities.
Retention: This stage may coincide with development; the focus now is securing employment and engagement with meaningful work, relevant rewards, and recognition.
Separation: For any number of reasons an employee will eventually leave your employment; what happens at this stage can add or detract from your culture and brand.
Seen as a list, the Employment Lifecycle Stages make sense. The transitions between the stages may be personal, fluid, and a little less clear. Even still, you can probably think of any employee in your company and recognize, generally, which stage they are in.
The lifecycle stage may not be top-of-mind during day-to-day interactions. Ideally, all employees are working together, towards the same goals. When companies try to institute guidelines, rules, and policies (written or unwritten) or important cultural shifts, the stages make things tricky.
Example 1: When it comes to hours at work, productivity, and autonomy, longer-tenured employees are typically better at knowing what needs to get done and how long it will take them. They can be trusted to set their own hours and still deliver the results that you need by the end of the week or the month. And it makes sense to expect new employees to show up in the office during set hours, while the resources are available to help them learn and complete their tasks. Working from home and flex-time rules will net different results at different stages.
Example 2: It’s also important to recognize the interconnection of the Development to Retention stages while noting they won’t apply to every employee at every stage. In a 2022 study, McKinsey & Company reported that “employees rated three elements of the employee experience as most and equally important reasons for recently leaving a job: not having caring leaders (35%), having sustainable work expectations (35%), and a lack of career development and advancement potential (35%).” These numbers show that to keep employees, companies need to balance meaningful advancement opportunities with reasonable work expectations. Not every employee is hustling for a promotion all the time!
Example 3: Most companies put lots of effort into onboarding, to set new employees up with success. Culture and brand will benefit when you pay similar attention to the Separation stage. It’s beneficial to have clear, frictionless hellos and goodbyes. Exit interviews help you gain insight about employee experience and opportunities for change. Recognition shapes the lasting impression. Clean, clear, constructive separations affect the culture of those who are staying and create brand ambassadors for life out of those who leave.
Missing, ignoring, or rushing any of these Lifecycle Stages will impact the employee experience individually, and the company culture as a whole, which affects productivity, wellbeing, and of course the bottom line.
Consider the stage each one of your employees is experiencing right now, when they might foreseeably move into a different stage, and how their needs and challenges will change. It’s about treating employees how they want to be treated and not how you would want to be treated.
Pegasus Evolution can help you with any and all these stages, whether it’s recruiting new talent, crafting contracts and policies, or developing your leaders. If you have any questions, book a free consultation with me.
À bientôt!