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In today's hyper-competitive business landscape, understanding the employee experience is as crucial as knowing your customer's journey.
Employee journey mapping offers a strategic lens to detail, review, evaluate and ultimately improve every interaction and touchpoint an employee has with your organization — from the time they first consider joining, to their very final day at work.
If you're looking to boost productivity, foster loyalty, elevate workplace culture and attract new talent, then taking this holistic approach is essential.
What Is Employee Journey Mapping?
Employee journey mapping is a visual representation of the main stages an employee goes through during their tenure with a company. It charts the entire employee journey and lifecycle, from the initial attraction and recruitment process to the moment a person either resigns or retires. The mapping process traces the touchpoints, emotions and experiences that define an individual's employee experience.
Employee journey mapping, also called employee experience journey mapping, allows brands to meet staff expectations and ensure they feel engaged and happy at work.
And those efforts have real results. According to McKinsey, workers who have a positive employee experience are 16 times more engaged than employees with negative experiences — and they’re eight times more likely to stick around.
Related Article: What Is Employee Experience? And Why It Matters
7 Stages of the Employee Journey
The employee journey, also referred to as the employee lifecycle, breaks down into seven stages.
- Attraction
- Hiring
- Onboarding
- Engagement
- Performance Management
- Development
- Departing
It’s during these employee journey stages that organizations have the most influence on how their employees perceive them. Let's take a look at them further.
Editor's Note: This article was updated on Aug. 27, 2025 to include new data and information.
Stage 1: Attraction
Business consultant Jay Greaves said companies can use journey maps to determine how to attract the right candidates and ensure positive EX starts off on the right foot. That might mean promoting company moments that matter, establishing employee personas, revising mission statements and values or rethinking offerings based on employee feedback.
Greaves added that the mapping process is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, it’s important to remember that the employee journey might look different depending on your organization and what you want to achieve.
Stage 2: Hiring
Stage two of the employee's journey is dedicated to the hiring process. Management selects the most worthy candidates and reaches out with offers.
The hiring stage of the employee journey map deals with how to face bias — even unconscious bias — among hiring teams, understanding and managing future employee expectations and what follow-up should look like for candidates, including those who didn't get the job offer.
Stage 3: Onboarding
Stage three deals with the onboarding process. Onboarding new employees is an especially critical stage of the employee journey, as it's typically during the first few months that a person establishes an opinion of company culture. It could be the stage that sets the tone for the rest of the employee experience.
Some experts recommend creating a sense of belonging during this stage, whether by giving new hires a "buddy" or mentor or by utilizing employee surveys that ask about personal likes and preferences.
Stage 4: Engagement
Stage four of the employee journey is all about employee engagement. It's a time to build on strengths and drive purpose.
Employee engagement goes beyond employee satisfaction or happiness. It looks at a person's involvement and enthusiasm for the workplace and the work they do. Engaged employees lead to reduced turnover, reduced absenteeism, higher sales, higher profits and an improved customer experience.
Stage 5: Performance Management
The stage of the employee experience journey focuses on performance management. It's a time when organizations must continually communicate expectations, offer feedback and provide the recognition employees crave.
Success here relies on leaders walking a tightrope between necessary frameworks and employee autonomy. Workers still need guidelines, policies and helpful criticism to work effectively. But they also need the freedom to make decisions and take action on their own.
Stage 6: Development
Workers don't want to stand still. They're thinking about ways they can grow and be better, starting from the moment they accept the job offer. They want opportunities within their own companies, but they're willing to look elsewhere if those opportunities don't arise.
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Some companies collect employee feedback at this employee development stage of the journey to assess if employees are content with the learning and growth options currently available and what they'd like to see in the future.
Stage 7: Departing
Employees have to leave, eventually. Maybe they've left willingly — retirement, a better opportunity, relocation, change in life circumstances. Maybe the company has to terminate their employment due to performance, company revenue predictions, relocation, etc.
Leaving might be inevitable. But it doesn't have to be a bad experience. Companies can take steps to approach the exit experience with an employee experience lens.
Related Article: Best Practices for Every Stage of Employee Experience: Stage 1, Attract
What Are the Benefits of Employee Journey Mapping?
Employee experience journey mapping is a strategic tool with tangible organizational benefits. By visualizing the employee journey, companies can identify areas of improvement and capitalize on strengths.
Some key benefits of employee experience journey mapping include:
- Enhanced Employee Engagement: Understanding all touchpoints in the employee journey allows companies to tailor experiences that resonate, helping to increase employee engagement and commitment.
- Reduced Turnover: A well-defined employee journey map can spotlight pain points or disconnects, giving management the insights needed to address issues before they lead to resignations.
- Boosted Productivity: By aligning the work environment with the desires and needs of employees, companies can encourage higher levels of efficiency and enthusiasm.
- Strengthened Branding: A positive employee journey can bolster a company’s reputation, making it a preferred employer in the eyes of talented candidates.
- Data-Driven Decisions: With a comprehensive employee journey map, decision-makers are equipped with data and insights, leading to more informed and effective strategies.
By reimagining and refining the employee's path through the organization, businesses can achieve not only a happier workforce but also a more resilient and innovative enterprise.
How to Create Employee Journey Maps in 6 Steps
Developing an effective employee journey map is a crucial part of improving employee experience. By breaking the employee journey mapping process down into detailed steps, organizations can ensure they capture the full scope of employee interactions.
Let's take a deeper dive into each step:
1. Understand Your Goals
Before diving into a journey map, it's essential to understand why you're creating one in the first place. Are you trying to improve the employee onboarding process? Increase retention? Identify pain points in specific processes? Setting clear objectives helps organizations leverage employee journey mapping to fit specific needs.
2. Identify Key Employee Personas
Before you can map the journey, it's essential to understand who's embarking on it. Segmenting employees into distinct employee personas is like creating buyer personas in marketing. Consider factors like roles, seniority, departmental functions and career aspirations. For instance, the journey of a new employee in tech will differ vastly from that of a mid-level manager in finance. By understanding these personas, you can create a tailored journey map that resonate more deeply.
3. Map the Employee Journey for Each Persona
Now that you've defined your personas, dive into detailing their unique journeys. Each employee experience journey should trace the employee's path from recruitment to exit. Note key touchpoints, emotions and milestones associated with each phase. By personalizing the employee journey for every persona, you're more likely to identify specific pain points and opportunities tailored to their experience.
4. Collect & Consider Employee Feedback
Data-driven decisions are paramount, but the subjective experiences of your employees are equally vital. Collect employee feedback regularly through surveys, interviews or informal discussions. You can also check online review boards like Indeed and Glassdoor to get thoughts from former employees. Understand the employee's perspective, and integrate these valuable insights into the map. This layer of feedback ensures your employee journey map isn't just theoretical but rooted in real experiences.
5. Analyze & Identify Opportunities
With a detailed journey map in hand, areas for improvement become evident. These aren't just pain points; they're opportunities to elevate the employee experience. Maybe the onboarding process needs enrichment, or perhaps there's a gap in continual learning for a particular persona. Pinpointing these opportunities allows you to create actionable strategies that enhance value for both the employee and the organization.
6. Update the Journey Map Regularly
An employee journey map isn't static. . As your organization evolves, so will the needs and experiences of employees. Make it a practice to revisit the map periodically, factoring in new feedback and adapting to changes within the organization.
By following these detailed steps, your employee experience journey map efforts will yield rich insights, fostering a work environment that thrives on understanding and continual growth.
Related Article: How to Map the Hybrid Work Experience
4 Tips to Get More From Your Employee Journey Maps
If you want to map employee journeys in your organization, there are a few ways you can approach it.
Don't Create an Employee Experience Journey Map for Each Role
One piece of advice from Greaves: Don't make an employee experience journey map for every role in your organization. Why? Because things continually change, and those maps will become stale quickly. Even little changes, like pay frequency, can have a big impact. And mapping out the employee experience for each position will be time-consuming and (likely) ineffective.
Instead, focus on the key employee personas you established and look to places where you can group personas together based on similarities. For instance, you might look at remote vs. in-office employees. Or customer-facing vs. back-of-house workers.
Leverage Employee Journey Mapping for Onboarding
Effective onboarding, according to Jeff Fryer, senior consultant at Epsilon and professor of business and organizational leadership at Valencia College, is a major benefit of employee experience journey mapping. All brands want to attract top talent, said Fryer, “but what are we doing to nurture that top talent once they get in the door?”
It’s more than flowers on the desk and a laptop ready to go, he said. It’s also making sure the employee has access to everything, that they know where to find things, that they can sit down and start working and feel in control immediately.
According to a Gallup report, employees with an excellent onboarding experience are 2.6 times more likely to be extremely satisfied with their place of work. Yet, only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of onboarding new employees. When the experience is mapped out, said Fryer, then employees know what the expectations of them are, so there’s never disappointment.
Use Employee Journey Maps as Diagnostic Tools
According to Greaves, employee experience mapping is most powerful when used as a diagnostic tool. He pointed to Amazon, where only one-third of the online retailer’s new hires stay with the company for more than 90 days. In this instance, the question Amazon might ask is: Why are we losing so many employees? That’s when you start drawing the map of what their experience is, said Greaves.
It all comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish. And the tighter the scope, Greaves explained, the better the results. Let’s go back to the high turnover question to illustrate this. You want to know why employees are leaving. But a better question would be: Why are we losing people in this role, at this location, with this leader? “That’s a very specific scope that’ll likely garner better results,” said Greaves.
To break it down: “Ask why, define the scope and then conduct research,” Greaves explained. From there, you identify friction points, determine which ones you want to prioritize and come up with potential interventions or improvements.
Use Journey Maps Throughout the Entire Employee Experience
Many organizations, said Greaves, stop their employee maps at onboarding. However, the further you go on the journey, the more powerful it is. He recommended taking the strategy to the extreme and looking at all key milestones in an employee’s experience.
Greaves said organizations should be able to answer questions like:
- How are employees going to have conversations with departments and management, and how often?
- How often are performance reviews, what does that meeting look like and what are the potential outcomes from it?
- If someone has been in a role for a while, are there opportunities to move into a new position, take on a bigger challenge or make more money?
Having a well-defined and validated map that you keep current helps both sides have clear expectations, and anticipate and make decisions based on that transparency, Greaves explained.
