The employee life cycle is an amazing way to attract the right candidates and enhance the experience of their employees. By following the six stages of the employee life cycle, employers are able to design and encourage employee experience, which leads to success, retention, and excellent employee management.
What makes it different from looking at engagement efforts as a one-time action, is that it is a designed experience instilled into the course of everyone in your organization.
In this article, we will zoom in on the employment lifecycle as well as how they all fit together. This way, you can maximize the chance of success in terms of building productive teams and retaining those within them.
What is the employee life cycle?
The employee life cycle tackles the relationship between employees and the organization they belong in as a whole. It helps employers visualize an employee’s engagement with the company that they are a part of. From the attraction phase to the separation phase, it encompasses every stage of an employee’s experience within an organization.
In this way, the organization will be able to come up with different engagement strategies for their employees depending on the stage they are in. For example, a company can focus on the retention stage if it has a high recruitment strategy but poor turnover rates.
The 6 Stages of the Employee Life Cycle
This is the part where things get interesting. By understanding the life cycle of an employee, you will be able to drive employee engagement to the highest level. What’s more, you will be able to attract the right candidates and improve your employee experience.
So let’s examine each stage in greater detail.
1. Attraction
No matter how good your product or service is, your company won’t thrive if you can’t attract and retain great employees. That’s why this first stage of the employee life cycle is crucial to an organization’s growth strategy.
This phase greatly relies on your employee brand. The way you communicate about your organization is a big contribution to how candidates perceive you. Keep in mind that when you’re communicating about your organization, try not to oversell. Rather, keep it real and simple.
Don’t sell your company that offers flexible work schedules if that isn’t truly the case. In other words, employee branding means you have to walk the talk.
Another way to attract the right candidates is by ensuring that your former employees were happy working for you. Remember that their reviews about your company can help spread the word.
2. Recruitment
The recruitment phase is simply the active phase of attracting great talent to join your company. It could either be a result of an existing role vacancy or a new position.
There are some rules you need to know during the application process. For one, make sure that you keep it as short as possible. Don’t make applicants fill lengthy forms.
You can also think of alternative ways to receive applications depending on your target candidate group. If your target if on Generation Z, you can ask them to turn in a short video resume rather than the traditional paper resume.
After the application process stage, you must give them feedback and let them know if they’ll go to the next round. Be transparent. After all, nobody likes to be left in the dark about where they stand.
Review this basic guide to help you in your recruitment process.
3. Onboarding
Metaphorically, if the attraction and recruitment phase is like the dating phase, then the onboarding phase is like the workplace honeymoon period.
Onboarding is a very critical stage of getting the newly employed adjusted to their new job within your company quickly. It is the process through which the new hires will learn about the company culture, the knowledge, behaviors, and skills required to work effectively within the organization.
There are some methods you can do to ensure that the process goes smoothly as expected.
For one, you need to make sure that your job description contains all the most essential duties, experience, and skills that you are looking for in an applicant. Then, in the first few days, you must not forget to discuss your company values and vision and what they all mean as well as your expectations from them.
But of course, don’t just complete your first weeks and leave it. Make sure that you follow up regularly and that you schedule a face-to-face with the new employee to find out their experience during the first few weeks in the company.
4. Retention
This might be getting a tad bit repetitive, but retention is such an important stage of the employee lifecycle that you can write a whole book about it.
Positive company culture has a lot of good influence in this phase. While a bad company culture can result in high employee turnover. In return, it can lead to huge costs of having to replace your employees.
The good news is that employee retention doesn’t need to be hard to achieve — as long as you have common sense and a great amount of effort.
Some of the things you can do are to build great relationships with your team and seek their feedback and measure morale regularly.
Make sure to check this article to learn more strategies for employee retention.
5. Development
The development phase is somehow linked to the retention phase. Because plenty of employees will likely leave the company if they feel like they are stuck in a role with no chances for growth.
Aside from that, the development phase is an excellent way to increase your business capabilities. But for now, let’s focus on the employee side of development.
In order to structure your development, you have to focus on the results of these three analyses: organizational analysis, and personal analysis. When these three are combined, you’ll be able to input your employee’s training and development needs.
Check this blog for the complete guide about employee development.
6. Offboarding
An offboarding done well is like a divorce where the ex-couple still remain as good friends. The purpose of a good offboarding period is two-fold:
First, it is meant to help your organization become wiser regarding its hiring efforts and employee experience. On the other hand, it is used to shape the last impressions that your employees will have about the company. The goal here is for your departing employees to become happy leavers.
To create an awesome offboarding process, you must hold an awesome exit interview. This shows that you care for your employees — right until their end of the journey with you. Ask them how you can improve your employee experience and whether they’d recommend the company to their friends. Make sure to stay in touch and ask what they’re up to from time to time.
Final Thoughts on Employee Life Cycle
As you may have discovered, the employee life cycle model is a compelling method to visualize your employee-related plans for your company. By doing your best on each stage, the more likely you will attract and retain a terrific team.
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