Creating a Dynamic Employee Experience Roadmap: 5 Practices for Success

In this guest post, Grace Lau of Dialpad looks at the five best tactics for building a well-defined employee experience roadmap, outlining its impact on employee engagement levels and overall productivity.

The employment landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. With some 58% of American workers able to work remotely at least one day per week, employers need to rethink many aspects of how they interact with their workers, from communication to training. With new technology and new processes, it is essential that any interaction works as well as it did with an office-based role. 

That changing landscape has also changed expectations and redefined the worker-management relationship. You may expect your remote workers to maintain a certain level of productivity while your workers expect support in terms of communication tools and any specialized training. A big part of that can be creating an employee experience roadmap that can guide both parties and highlight relevant touchpoints that need to be focused on. 

What Is an Employee Experience Roadmap? 

An employee experience roadmap is a way for businesses to improve the experience of their workforce and make continuous improvements, both to relationships with their staff and overall organizational efficiency. A large part of it is to ensure that your employees are happy with their work, and it’s worth noting that 77% of Americans saw remote working options as conducive to their happiness. 

A good roadmap should consider every touchpoint existing between every employee and your organization and focus on the most important ones, thus enabling improvement in those areas and improving the overall employee experience. It should also cover every step in the employee’s journey, from their initial interest in you to their eventual departure from your employment. 

This is crucial, as it can not only improve their experience as part of your organization, but can also help in the following areas:

Creating an Employee Experience Roadmap: 5 Best Practices

In order to create an efficient roadmap, there are some key practices or elements that you need to include. Let’s take a look at what those practices are.

Set Out Your Mission and Vision

You don’t want your staff to work in a vacuum, especially when they are working remotely or in a hybrid model. That means you want every employee to have a clear understanding of your mission and vision. Any employee roadmap should contain these two crucial aspects of your company culture so that employees have a clear idea of what they are working towards. 

Having a Good Work-Life Balance 

Creating work-life balance is one of the primary reasons people prefer remote or hybrid working. The last thing you want is your employees burning out and seeing satisfaction and productivity levels dropping. Set a schedule that recognizes the flexibility of remote working and that allows them to include family and leisure activities in their personal daily schedule. It’s also worth thinking about how long a working week is, as many companies now offer shorter weeks for remote workers. 

Relationships With Management 

Managing a remote workforce can be a major challenge in remote working, and if there is a feeling of ‘distance’ between employees and management, productivity can suffer. With good communication tools such as free video conferencing platforms, staff can feel more confident in providing feedback and letting their opinions be heard. What’s more, regular informal chats (either team-based or one-to-one) make it easier to build a solid relationship rooted in trust.

Furthermore, managing your workforce is not about micromanaging, especially when your employees are working remotely. You need to have a mechanism where you monitor performance on individual tasks and projects and can highlight areas for improvement. This should be a two-way street so that they can give feedback on any issues they see. You should also praise positive efforts and think more about enabling than managing. 

Collaboration 

It doesn’t matter how geographically scattered your workforce is, you should still be fostering a culture of collaboration and teamwork. Creating a cohesive team that recognizes inclusivity is a major part of working towards positive outcomes and improved productivity. This is another area where good communication and collaborative tools are essential; it means people feel part of a team no matter where they are. 

Training 

Training and improving skills is another crucial factor to any roadmap. With new technologies and systems, and a desire for self-improvement, staff want to be constantly looking at career opportunities. You can consider combining training programs at your physical location with online programs such as webinars. Ensuring your staff can upskill with ease means your retention rates will be better. 

Putting It All Together

Once you have defined how the above elements fit in with your business model and workforce, you can move to creating the actual employee roadmap itself. It’s crucial for this to be done not just by management alone but also include input from relevant departments such as HR and the employees themselves. 

Make sure to look over each of the key elements, as this can highlight any problematic areas that may need extra thought and effort. At the foundation of creating your roadmap lies good communication between all parties. For a remote workforce, communication abilities, such as being able to make calls from a browser are an integral part of a good employee experience. 

The Takeaway 

It’s important to remember that there is no ‘one size fits all’ employee experience roadmap. While the practices listed are crucial to any roadmap, how each will look when applied to your business and employee needs may differ greatly. What you need to set as a goal is a roadmap that can boost employee experience while at the same time setting out clear goals and expectations for that workforce. 

Another essential thing to remember is this is not a one-off exercise. You should not only be considering monitoring relevant metrics that measure employee experience and the effectiveness of any roadmap, you should also revisit the roadmap at least once per year and seek feedback from everyone involved as to how to improve in the future. 

Author Bio

Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, a cross-team collaboration software that has been helping remote and hybrid workers across the globe. She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies, partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content. Grace has also written for other domains such as Jostle and TRAFFIT.