I am about to hire a new starter. What do I need to know.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• 1.Introduction
• 2.Phase one: Onboarding
• 3.Phase two: Initial Development
• 4.Phase three: Ongoing Development and Retention

What are the phases of employee experience?

Our Peakon dataset contains more than 144 million data points of employee feedback from 1000+ companies in 160 countries. This empowers us to identify universal trends in how the concerns of employees change throughout their tenure.

We discovered four distinct stages in the employee journey, each demonstrating the shifting needs of employees from onboarding to exit.

The four phases are Onboarding, Initial Development, Ongoing Development and Retention, and Separation.

Onboarding: ~0-3 months

Most employees are uncertain of their surroundings at the beginning. They want to establish their place in the organisation, make a meaningful contribution and build relationships with colleagues.

From the welcome someone receives on their first day, through to their development plan for the first few months, onboarding is the foundation of employee experience. Understanding the experience at this early stage is especially important as low levels of engagement early on have been shown to significantly increase the risk of attrition.

It might be tempting to assume that onboarding “just happens”, but 30% of job seekers have left a job within the first 90 days.

Initial Development: ~3-24 months

After a few months in the company, people are often looking for ways to improve their existing skills and make sure they can have an impact on their team’s output.

For employees, Initial Development is all about mastering their role by developing specific skills, building relationships across the business, and coming to terms with internal processes that affect how they do their job. Most people will do this with an eye on future opportunities, so it’s important to start having initial conversations about growth and development. When you support employees that want to develop within the company, it becomes an investment in the next generation of leaders and knowledge experts.

Ongoing Development and Retention: ~24+ months

Employees that have been in your organisation for a few years have already started to advance in their career, and are looking to do so further. By this point they have accumulated enough knowledge and experience that they are some of the most valuable members of your team. They will be keen to know what progression opportunities are available, whether that’s a move into management or another role.

The Ongoing Development and Retention phase is crucial. A lack of opportunity could result in employees leaving the business in search of the next challenge. Not everyone in your organisation will want to become a manager, so it’s important to create opportunities for employees that want to move into other roles too.