How HR can transform the employee journey by thinking like travel agents

If there's one word that’s come to define the world we live in, it's experience. 

It's everywhere. In everything. A few years back, “experience” was brand new as a business concept and way of looking at the world, but now everyone's talking about it. Why? Because business leaders across all industries have realized that we are, if you think about it, consumers in everything we do, every choice we make. And as consumers, we have become very, very demanding, expecting great experiences – frictionless Netflix, for example, or next-day Amazon delivery – in all our points of contact.

The companies making a massive difference in experience are winning against the competition thanks not only to the experience they are providing consumers, but also in the experience they provide their employees. They know that consumers of their brand are not just the people who consume or would consume their products, but also the people who are experiencing the brand as employees as well.

So, what does that mean for HR? It means that experience imperative that shook the consumer world must come into the world of work. As HR, you must put yourself in the shoes of your employees. 

Ask yourself, how is the employee experience at my company? How is the onboarding journey? How is the retention journey? It’s about imagining yourself on all those journeys and thinking about the experience you're offering as HR and saying, okay, where are the friction points where I am losing people and not thinking of their experience?

HR as travel agent for the employee journey

The evolution of the role of HR in the employee experience is not unlike the evolution of the role of the travel agent in vacation planning.

Are you old enough to remember travel agents? Back in the day, if you wanted to take a vacation, you would go to a physical travel agency and someone would help you pick out and book a vacation based on what packages they could offer.

Similarly, back in the day, if you wanted to go somewhere professionally (learn new skills, get a promotion, change fields), you went to a different kind of travel agent, a.k.a. your HR representative. You asked them, okay, what do you have to offer me?

For HR, this is still how it works at a lot of companies, but the travel world looks drastically different. Our first stop is not a travel agency when we want to go traveling. And that’s because of digital transformation.

Digital opened up the world and empowered travelers to chart their own course. That means when we want to travel, we go online, we turn to apps, we seek out recommendations. In short, we become an informed consumer before we start any conversation.

You may still go to a travel agent – having a true partner to manage and guide you through the logistics of travel has been on the rise since the pandemic – but before going to the travel agent, about 85% of your research will have been done digitally. 

Now apply that back to the talent experience. The employee journey at your company is a journey like any other.

Are you offering an HR experience that mirrors the modern travel agent, leveraging digital tools and employee-empowered research to better design journeys, or are you a brick-and-mortar shop offering rigid pre-set packages? Most likely you may fall somewhere in the middle:

Digital doesn't replace travel agents, it merely unleashes their power when used effectively.

Packing for the employee journey: Maslow’s pyramid of HR needs

If the employee journey is a travel experience, where are you going? What do you pack?

When you're a HR professional, you know there are certain essential needs that are covered by your core HR tools, like pay systems. These are the nuts and bolts of talent management. Your socks and underwear.

Next, you have talent management (not to be confused with talent experience!). Talent management is big picture HR planning and processes like hiring, performance management, compensation and succession planning. Incredibly important touch points, but something that happens only a few times over the journey. Think of your swimsuit, or hiking boots.

Then comes the employee experience. The employee experience is largely defined by the day-to-day ways HR supports the employee: benefits, help desk, job change execution. Your daily walking shoes, your pajamas. 

Finally, you have what we call talent experience. These are the moments HR engages with your talent to really foster gratifying career growth and deliver business impact. It is your passport, or better yet your sense of adventure – it is what opens doors and makes your vacation memorable, transformative and uniquely yours. 

The marketing flywheel: 3 tips to become a better HR travel agent

While the talent experience of awareness, interest and consideration can look linear, for those managing it (HR, travel agents, marketers) it is often seen as a flywheel. 

The attract-engage-delight flywheel is, originally, a marketing theory, but it applies well to HR because you need to attract talent (externally and internally) to fill roles, engage them with opportunities, training and open internal positions and delight them with the employee experience of your company to retain them.

1. Awareness = Attract

Meet your people where they are to grab attention

Be where your talents are. You need to make it easy and frictionless for your people to become aware of relevant opportunities. This could mean push notifications within Teams or the collaboration app of choice at your company, because just posting on the company job board won’t do the trick.

2. Interest = Engage

Gather insights to offer personalization 

It’s also crucial that the notifications and opportunities you’re pushing are relevant for them because personalization means people will engage better. 

If you think back to the travel agent example, you know that the more you know your audience, the better you can offer them personalized offers and the more they'll be interested. 

Still, there is the challenge of engaging them on yet another tool. So the tool has to be super easy and understandable. And it needs to give value straight away. 

So you nudge them in Teams, telling them about an opportunity, you nudge them within the platform to discover whether they’re keen, you nudge them with tips on upskilling or training they would need to achieve the mobility 

All those nudges along the journey where you have those touch points that inspire and keep your talent engaged. So thinking about the journey is thinking about the touch points, and that is so important.

3. Consideration + Delight

Measure your impact

Consideration is usually measured as the moment when people are looking at your offer and saying, okay, I should apply just before they apply. So how do you measure that?

The measurement of consideration is actually one of the most valuable things a good talent experience platform can offer.

There are obviously employee surveys where people will say, I've got great opportunities within my company, I'm happy with my company. But then you have loads of other KPIs you can monitor within a talent experience platform, that can help you show the impact you have on employees in the boardroom and and throughout your HR teams. 

Bonus =  Automate

Concentrate on the work where you add more value

Finally, the last thing to take from the marketing flywheel model is to automate anything that is low value for you. Writing job descriptions for jobs you don't know well. Anything involving formatting spreadsheet filters. That's not why anyone chose HR. 

With clever automation, you can reduce the time you are spending on Excel and increase the time you spend designing creative, personalized journeys – and that will help you sell management on a tool that also allows you to offer a great experience.

Talent experience is the icing on the cake – if icing was also the differentiator that gives you an edge on your competition, the thing that makes you stand out as an employer and the thing that really makes your talent retention strategies work.

To learn more about how a talent experience solution can turn you into an HR travel agent and make a difference for your employees, book a demo with our team today.