Employee lifecycle surveys tend to focus on the same somewhat standard moments in the employee journey: pre-hire, onboarding, specific anniversary milestones, and exit. Yet organizations may be missing some important milestones affecting a significant subset of employees, such as promotion or parental leave.
The question is, how do you know which moments to survey?
The answer isn't to survey every single event or even major life events, as more frequent surveying rarely produces better insights. Rather, identify the moments that are most impactful to your specific employees, and which are most likely impacting their employee experience or performance.
To understand which unique moments are important to your employees, consider these questions:
1. Is this a meaningful transition?
Employees experience work differently when their role, responsibilities, manager, or work environment changes. Any transition, whether it's internal, such as a promotion or move to a new team, could be a meaningful transition. Similarly, external factors, such as returning from parental or medical leave, could also have a big impact.
2. Can the organization take action?
As with any type of survey, it is only worth doing if the organization can take action on the feedback. Asking for feedback and then not acting on it often has a negative effect. When it comes to identifying lifecycle moments to survey, consider what feedback might inform which improvements to make. If there is little the organization can actually change, don't do the survey.
3. Does this moment potentially affect employees long-term?
Not every milestone can be surveyed, so it's important to focus on the moments that might impact employee turnover, productivity, or engagement. For example, a poor experience with a change in department or team can undermine confidence in career opportunities, while a successful return from parental leave can reinforce commitment and belonging.
Ultimately, you want to let your data guide your decision-making. Look at your census survey data. Where do you see spikes in voluntary turnover? Where are there significant gaps after specific events? If a particular milestone consistently predicts positive or negative outcomes, it may need a lifecycle touchpoint.
Slicing Your Core Employee Survey Data by Lifecycle Segments
There is a rich story when you connect employee lifecycle moments to your broader point-in-time listening data, like an annual engagement survey, and these connections can help you choose which lifecycle moments to survey.
Lifecycle moments often identify moments when an employee brings back an entirely new perspective on how the company culture fits their life now. Instead of just looking at standard demographic cuts like department or tenure, you can treat lifecycle transition surveys as their own distinct population. Here are a sample of potential transitional moments to survey:
Parental Leave
An employee doesn't stop being a parent just because they have completed their "return to work" survey after parental leave. The milestone marks a major, permanent transitional stage.
Their relationship with work, their scheduling needs, their view on psychological safety, and their long-term career goals may have completely shifted.
If we look at them through the lens of a single point in time, we lose visibility into how that population experiences the organization over the long haul.
Let's consider the insights we can gather about employee experience and culture for "working parents who transitioned within the last 12-24 months" as its own distinct cohort. By slicing your core organizational health data by this segment, you can uncover critical insights:
- Cultural Alignment: How does our current culture actually support people balancing childcare versus our overall score?
- Inclusion & Belonging: Do working parents feel the same level of support from leadership over time, or does the support drop off shortly after the formal leave period ends?
- Retention: Are there specific points where the balance between work and home life is no longer aligned?
Career Transitions
Every time employees' roles, leaders, or scopes change, they are in a transitional stage where psychological safety, trust, and alignment are often assessed with their new experiences. These milestones can include:
- manager changes
- lateral moves
- transfers
- compensation changes
- title changes
- promotions
Understanding the impact these workplace changes have on employees can help improve transitions for the entire workforce.
Education & Skill Achievements
Education and skill completion, such as finishing a degree or certification, is a notable change, as their professional identity may shift. They have new capabilities and new expectations for how the company will utilize them, as well as efficiencies or approaches that may offer a different perspective on the historical approach of the organization. Insights from this group can offer efficiencies or new approaches that are often gathered from new employees, except this group comes with a historical knowledge that is unique among current employees to their new hire counterparts.
Mapping the True Employee Journey
Ultimately, your lifecycle survey program shouldn't be just a collection of surveys. It needs to strategically map the experiences that matter most, identify where hot spots exists, and determine whether specific feedback at certain moments in time can help leaders improve those transitions. These milestones are not just moments; they are the entry points into ongoing, unique employee segments that we can listen to across a holistic listening program.
Too many lifecycle survey programs follow the predictable path, but by understanding which important life moments are impacting your workforce, you can help leaders address any issues before they grow. When organizations map their listening strategy to these real human transitions, they unlock a much deeper understanding of workforce experience.
