Maximizing each stage of the Employee Lifecycle

Is the Employee Lifecycle just an HR buzzword, or does your business consider it during strategic planning? 

HR managers are a long way from the stereotype of strict administrators who only show up to recruit or fire employees. While the beginning and end of an employee’s time at a company are when they have the most direct contact with HR, People & Culture teams have a huge influence on employee satisfaction and retention throughout their time at an organization. 

To structure the different initiatives and interventions, many People & Culture teams think in terms of the employee lifecycle. In this article, we’ll get into the different phases of this model before identifying the riskiest moments and the ways that you can get the most impact out of each stage. 

What is the employee lifecycle?

The employee lifecycle, like the life cycle of a species, is a helpful metaphor. We no longer live in a world where workers get one job at 21 and work at the same organization until they retire at 65. It’s unhelpful to pretend that the employees you have now will stick around longer than five or ten years if you’re lucky. In fact, the average tenure of an employee in 2022 was only between three and five years. In today’s workplace, you can’t take it personally when they eventually leave for another company. 

That being said, retention is very important. Recruiting is expensive and time-consuming. Every time an employee leaves an organization, they also take a huge amount of knowledge with them. So, HR teams need to find a good balance: How can they retain employees as long as possible while also being able to let go when necessary? 

The employee lifecycle model helps HR and line managers spot moments of potential intervention. These opportunities can help employees transition within the company to roles and responsibilities that better suit them.   

It also helps people to understand that it’s not the end of the world when an employee leaves a company. It’s simply part of the journey. If you’ve done your job well, that same employee could be back in a few years with more experience and knowledge. 

Why does the employee lifecycle matter?

There are a few reasons to pay attention to the employee lifecycle model. 

• Improve the employee experience. By focusing on one stage at a time, People & Culture teams can identify what their organization could improve. Perhaps you’ve already optimized your onboarding process, but employees report that there’s no space for personal development. That gives you something to strive for. 
• Identify more internal opportunities. By focusing on retention and development, supervisors and HR alike can identify individuals who could be deployed in other teams or roles. Recruiting internally is faster and cheaper and means you don’t lose the specialist knowledge of a long-term employee. 
• Avoid staffing crises. By analyzing and tracking employee lifecycle metrics for each team, you can identify which employees could be eligible for more support or development. By actively helping them develop their careers internally, you can avoid sudden resignations that can destabilize a whole team. 

The stages of the employee lifecycle

1. Recruitment: hire the best new talent

Recruiting is the period in which a potential employee has their first encounter with an organization. During this phase, both sides are trying to assess whether the other is a good fit for them.  

Useful metrics: 

There are a lot of KPIs associated with the recruitment stage. Those that are most important for the employee lifecycle model are: 

• Quality of hire  
• Candidate satisfaction 
• Offer acceptance rate 
• Candidate conversion rate 

Risky moments: 

The riskiest moments during the recruitment phase are all linked to the candidate’s experience. A fantastic candidate can be put off by all kinds of things: slow response times, lack of transparency, too many interview stages, unpleasant interview experiences, and finally, an uncompetitive offer.  

However, you should also think about the unsuccessful candidates’ experiences. If they have a terrible interaction with your company, they may share it publicly, damaging your reputation. Meanwhile, those who were unsuccessful but had a good experience might apply for other jobs in the future and encourage their friends to do the same. 

"To avoid a bad recruiting experience, we recommend transparent communication before the first interview. This includes clear salary expectations and honest answers to questions. If HR does not know something, always ask the relevant department before giving out incorrect information. Our experience shows that the bounce rate of candidates increases significantly if there are more than three interviews. We therefore recommend limiting the number of interviews to a maximum of three for most processes, especially for mid-level and senior positions."

- Manuel Huhmann, Founder & CEO of BrainTalents

Supporting initiatives:  

• Develop your candidate roadmap. This will probably look different for a junior employee vs. hiring senior managers, but you should know at the outset how many interview or test stages there will be. You should also know roughly how many candidates will be involved at each stage and can share this with candidates to improve transparency and manage their expectations. 
• Stay in touch. Once a job offer has been sent and accepted, make sure that new hires don’t feel forgotten. This is especially true for hires who have a long notice period at their previous job – you could be waiting three months for them to join your company. During this time, there are several ways to engage them – set up meetings with their soon-to-be teammates, invite them to company parties, or set up a networking group so that they can get a sense of the corporate culture. 

2. Onboarding: effectively integrate new hires

Onboarding is where an employee’s long-term connection with the organization begins. It starts with their first day at the company and continues throughout the first months of their contract. Sometimes, the end of onboarding is marked by the employee passing their probation period. Other companies take a long-term view, with onboarding ending after nine months or a year. 

According to LinkedIn Talent Solutions, 4% of new hires quit after a negative first-day experience. 22% of all employee turnover happens in the first 45 days – often before onboarding is completed. This demonstrates how essential those first days and weeks are for integration and retention.  

Useful metrics: 

• New hire turnover 
• Retention threshold 
• Onboarding satisfaction 
• Time to productivity 

Risky moments: 

Again, the riskiest moments during onboarding all relate to the employee’s onboarding experience. The first day is particularly important. If a new hire arrives and nobody is prepared for them – they have no desk space, no IT equipment, and no schedule – then they’ll feel as though their presence is unimportant and that they are not valued. 

If their role in the team is undefined, and they have no short-term goals to achieve during onboarding, they may also struggle to envision their long-term place in the organization. 

New hires should also not feel isolated and lonely during their onboarding experience. In an office context, they should feel comfortable speaking to their teammates. In a hybrid or remote context, they shouldn’t be spending their first days with nobody except their manager to speak to. 

“Remote onboarding is different to the classic office-based onboarding experience, so you have to think differently. The challenge is to give the new person a sense of belonging to the team despite the physical distance. Paying particular attention to ensuring that the technical set-up runs smoothly on the first day and guaranteeing rapid support in the event of problems has proven especially valuable to us. And informal virtual coffee meetings allow our new hires to get to know the entire team better in a way that isn’t overwhelming.”   

- Isabelle Zimmer, Head of People & Culture at Mystery Minds

Supporting initiatives: 

• Focus on social connection. Encourage new employees to meet people from other teams and departments. This is an organic way for them to get to know the organization’s structure, while also being enjoyable. You can set up a networking initiative for new hires using Mystery Coffee or Mystery Lunch. 
• Build a standardized process. Don’t reinvent the wheel with each new hire. Have a standard core of workshops, presentations, and exercises that each candidate must go through. This takes a lot of work away from hiring managers, who can then simply add the training that matters most to their team. Schedule as much of this training as possible, in a cadence that makes sense, before the candidate’s start date. 
• Set realistic goals. Motivation is often tied to a sense of achievement. If new hires don’t feel as though they’re meeting expectations, they can become disheartened and anxious. Make sure that hiring managers set expectations in the first few days of the onboarding process. If possible, build tangible goals for the first days, weeks, and months of the role. These can be adjusted depending on the company’s needs and the new hire’s level of experience. 

Read more: For more information about the importance of onboarding, check out our article about designing great onboarding experiences.  

3. Learning & Development: help employees to find their path to growth

New hires are already learning and developing from day one, but this phase of the Employee Lifecycle is usually understood as a measure for retaining long-term employees. During this phase, employees can take part in educational initiatives. 

Sometimes, these initiatives have specific goals and business needs in mind. This is particularly true in small businesses, which often can’t afford to hire large numbers of people with extremely specific skill sets. Internal learning and development initiatives also help to break down information silos, ensuring that multiple people have the same skills in case of vacations, resignations, or retirement. 

Sometimes, the initiatives are developed in response to employee requests. For example, perhaps multiple members of a sales team have requested external coaching because they’ve reached the ceiling of their internal knowledge. 

And finally, these learning opportunities can be done with the express goal of employee retention. For example, you might not immediately need an employee who has an advanced accounting degree in your finance department, but the person in question is threatening to leave for another company that does sponsor the course. If it fits into the budget, well, it doesn’t do any harm and it might even come in useful later. 

Useful metrics: 

• Participation, engagement, and completion rate 
• Skill gaps and progress towards closing them 
• Learning & Development program satisfaction rate 
• Application rate in the workplace 

Risky moments: 

The riskiest moments in the learning and development phase involve a shared vision of the employee’s future. The employee may see themselves developing in a different direction that won’t be useful to the organization. Or they may want to pursue a master’s degree or MBA, which would cost too much and require too much time away from their tasks. 

The key here is compromise and an understanding of how essential learning and development is for the retention of each employee as an individual. 

Here are some risky moments to look out for: 

• Refusal of their program of choice. Sometimes, employees want to learn something that is outside their department’s expertise or doesn’t apply to the company’s business needs. Refusing their request can cause disappointment, but it doesn’t have to if handled well. Try to find an alternative solution that still excites them, but that ties back into the organization’s strategy. And sometimes, it's worth listening to how they intend to integrate their new skills into their current role – the two might not be as unrelated as you think!  
• Lack of budget. At times, an employee’s learning and development requests might be too expensive for the company to fund. Again, show support for their initiative and consider if there are other ways to help them in their learning endeavors. Maybe you can find a cheaper version of the same training. Or you can arrange for the company to loan the capital for the qualification, with the employee paying the sum back if they quit before a certain amount of time has passed. And then again, sometimes the answer is simply no, and the employee’s expectations should be managed well from the outset. 
• Lack of time allocated. Many organizations allow employees to spend a certain amount of time each week on educational initiatives, but for others, this time is poorly defined. Employees may find themselves with too much day-to-day work to really spend time learning, and this undermines the outcomes of the L&D initiatives you run. 

Supporting initiatives:

• Fixed budget and time allocation per employee. The clearest way to avoid the risky moments above is to be transparent with your organization’s learning and development strategy. Define a clear budget per employee and a protected amount of time they have each week to dedicate to learning and development. You can even offer a course catalog so that they and their supervisor can decide exactly how they want to spend their budget. 
• Internal knowledge sharing. One of the most cost-effective learning and development initiatives requires you to use what the organization already has in abundance: expert employees. Your employees already have a huge amount of know-how that should be leveraged to train others. Consider offering job shadowing, structured training, monthly or quarterly knowledge drops, and a host of other initiatives that make the most of your existing team. 
• Coaching, mentoring, and buddies. Don’t underestimate the importance of social learning. It’s one thing to bring in a trainer for a one-off session, but you can go further by giving your employees the internal network they need for their educational journey. Connect employees for targeted coaching initiatives and buddy programs. These can also be tied to the more formal training you’re running to give employees a chance to connect outside the classroom and reinforce their knowledge. 

Reading tip: Interested in how Mystery Coffee can work for your L&D needs? Our article describes 5 kinds of knowledge exchange initiatives you can run using Mystery Coffee. 

4. Retention: strengthen connections between employees and the organization

Retention is a thread that runs throughout the employee lifecycle. You want to retain your new hires, you want to retain your experienced employees, and you want to retain your future leaders.  

We’ve already discussed some ways to retain employees at earlier stages of the lifecycle, so this section will focus on retaining employees who have been onboarded but who aren’t currently on leadership trajectories. 

Useful metrics: 

• Retention rate 
• Employee satisfaction 
• Overall turnover rate – and especially voluntary turnover rate 
• Retention rate of top performers 

Risky moments:  

• Stagnation. If an employee sits in a certain role for too long, without career progression or salary increases, they will likely look elsewhere for the opportunities they aren’t currently getting. Make sure supervisors are on top of their staff’s employee lifecycle stage and have a plan for each employee’s development. 
• Major changes to the organization or department. Employee satisfaction can be impacted by large changes, such as a merger or acquisition, or smaller changes, like a new supervisor or someone being promoted over them.  
• Repeated lack of recognition. There are often phases in an organization when employees will be asked to go above and beyond. The end of the financial year is a common example for accounting teams, while sales teams might work long hours to push a major deal over the finish line. When these efforts are not recognized or rewarded, employees will feel undervalued and less connected to the organization. 
• Personal challenges. When an employee has been with an organization for many years, they are likely to face personal ups and downs. If they feel that the organization is inflexible when dealing with topics such as ill health, caring responsibilities, bereavement, or parental leave, they will look elsewhere for a better offer. 

Supporting initiatives: 

• Organizational culture. Employees feel connected to organizations that offer more than simply a salary. It’s important to have a culture that focuses on shared goals and supports teamwork rather than excessive competition. At the heart of this is connection: employees with a larger network of friends and acquaintances feel like they have a personal investment in the organization’s success, and they’re less likely to want to leave. 
• Employee Resource Groups. Some employees may find it difficult to find like-minded people organically in their organization. ERGs are a great way to allow employees to support one another and provide mentoring and coaching relevant to their peer group. LGBTQ+ networks, women’s networks, accessibility networks, and parent networks are all increasingly common. 
• Leadership training and coaching. Leaders need to know how to identify employees who are stagnating in their current roles. They also need to be proactive in giving out recognition and advocating for their employees to be rewarded. Finally, they need to be able to support employees through tough times, whether those are personal or professional. A great leader can have a huge impact on their team's retention. 
• Recognition and rewards. Financial rewards aren’t always possible, especially for small businesses, but it’s important to recognize employees for their performance or long service. Even employees who don’t close splashy deals or have public successes need to be recognized out in the open, making it clear to their colleagues that every role in the organization is an essential piece of the puzzle. 

Our tip: if you want to build an organizational culture that values its employees as humans, Mystery Coffee can be a great place to start. By connecting people across hierarchies and departments, the solution offers a place for individuals to get to know each other as people before improving their working relationship. 

5. Career progression: nurture and promote your future leaders

Career progression is one of the greatest challenges for many organizations. It’s the stage of the employee lifecycle when an employee has gained the skills and experience necessary to be promoted. 

However, many organizations struggle to nurture their talent to this position. Many employees have stories of being overlooked in favor of an external hire, or of spending stressful months doing overtime before finally being granted the official title for a role that they’re already doing. In some cases, it can be more difficult to be promoted internally than it is to find a senior role at another company. 

Organizations that want to optimize retention rates and nurture future leaders should pay particular attention to this stage of the employee lifecycle. They may even need to get creative with the kinds of senior roles they offer in order to keep their best talent. After all, not everyone aspires to be a people manager, even if they do want to keep progressing. 

Useful metrics: 

• Internal promotion rate
• Performance

Risky moments:

• Lack of opportunity for career progression. If the organization is smaller or in a niche industry, then there may be less opportunities for traditional promotions. When employees that are ready for promotion have to wait for someone else to leave or retire in order to get a role that they’ve earned, this can make them look at other employers.
• Excessive competition for internal promotion. When an employee has been identified as a potential fit for an internal promotion, it can deflate them to have to go through a lengthy internal application process. This is especially true when the role has to be advertised externally and there are several rounds of competition.
• “Dry” promotions. So-called “Dry promotions” give employees the title, responsibilities, and workload of a senior role without the additional pay and benefits that a new hire might be offered. Employees are usually aware that their pay and benefits aren’t competitive, which leads to resentment.

Supporting initiatives: 

• Multiple pathways to seniority. Not everyone wants to manage people, and the structure of your career pathways should reflect this. Where possible, create roles for subject matter experts or project managers that don’t rely on that person becoming a supervisor. 
• Options to move sideways. When there is no space to move upwards, but an employee could be interested in another team or department, offer the flexibility to move sideways. This is where career progression can be tied to your learning and development offering to ensure that employees are prepared for this option. You can also offer job shadowing before they make their decision so that they can experience their potential role.  
• Mentoring. Identify your future leaders and top performers as early as possible and give them options for mentoring. Link them with leaders in their own departments or other senior managers and connect them with other future leaders who are currently at the same level of seniority. That way, they’ll arrive at the top with a pre-existing network of support. 

Connect hierarchies: If you have trouble connecting your future leaders, a solution like Mystery Lunch can help them to build their network in a relaxed setting.  

6. Offboard: sending employees off into bright futures

Offboarding happens when an employee has reached the end of their current employment at an organization.  

Successful offboarding creates a group of alumni who are proud of their time at the company and may even go on to return one day. Great offboarding processes emphasize that the door is never closed and no bridges have been burned. That being said, it’s not always possible, especially when an employee didn’t choose to leave but was fired or was part of layoffs.  

Useful metrics: 

• Exit interview completion rate  
• Offboarding task completion 
• Offboarding score 

Risky moments: 

• Involuntary exits. Whether you are implementing layoffs or letting a single employee go, it’s often a traumatic experience for the individuals involved. Make sure that you have tactics in place that can support managers and employees as they go through the process.  
• Poor communication. Some employees feel that they are immediately cut out of some procedures after handing in their notice, while others feel that they are forced to work a lot of overtime before leaving. In both cases, expectations aren’t properly set for the offboarding period. HR should guide the process so that reasonable timelines and goals are in place from the moment an employee resigns. 
• Social exile. If an employee’s decision to leave is taken personally by their manager and colleagues, their final weeks can be an unpleasant time due to interpersonal friction. This can sour the positive experience the employee might have otherwise had at the organization. 

Supporting initiatives: 

• Structured knowledge transfer. This topic came up in the learning and development section, but if you haven’t thought about knowledge transfer yet, then this is the moment it becomes essential. Ask leaving employees to document any areas where they are the sole expert and to train the colleagues who will be taking on their responsibilities. 
• Celebrate achievements. If appropriate, celebrate an employee’s achievements and contributions when they leave. Offer a structure for this kind of recognition if some managers or teams need inspiration.  
• Alumni groups. Keep your best employees connected to the company via an alumni group. This is a great tool for employer branding and can be helpful for your former employees as well – for example, ex-Google employees who have retained their connections are very attractive in the job market. Keeping them connected means that you’ll also be able to reach out to them more easily if new, more senior positions open. You could power this network using a solution like Mystery Coffee, especially if they’re familiar with the tool from their time at the organization. 

What are the critical moments of the employee lifecycle?

The most critical moments of the employee lifecycle are naturally individual to each person.

However, there are some general rules of thumb: 

• Start strong. A successful onboarding is the key to a long, productive working relationship. Employees need to be integrated into their team and the wider organization and to feel as though they are delivering real value. This is also the time to work out the kinds of personal development they want to do and to set realistic expectations for how their career can unfold. 
• Watch out for stagnation. This is largely the role of an individual’s supervisor, but HR can put some frameworks in place to catch an employee who is stagnating in their role. In annual reviews or more regular 1:1s, managers can ask these questions: Have they used their whole training budget? Is their performance dipping? Are they absent more often, and are they engaged in new ideas? Do they have a promotion that they are working towards, and do they feel the conditions are reasonable? 
• End things amicably. When an employee eventually chooses to leave, make the leaving process as smooth as possible. Recognize their contributions and make it clear that the door is always open to them for future roles. If things haven’t ended on a great note, try not to create additional resentment. 

How can you know which stage of the employee lifecycle employees are in?

Some stages of the employee lifecycle are easier to pinpoint than others—recruiting and onboarding are well-defined and understood. However, to know whether someone is craving more learning and development, ready for promotion, or at risk of leaving, you must pay close attention to each individual. 

Certain metrics can show whether an employee is fully engaged—performance and attendance are two of them—but ultimately, it’s your soft skills that you’ll need for the final assessment. If the metrics show some issues and a manager reports a lack of engagement, it might be time to have a conversation rather than rushing to put that individual on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP).  

Your interpersonal skills and existing relationships will make an employee more likely to open up to you about their career goals and aspirations. The ability to be flexible and compromise will then enable you to find opportunities that make sense for both sides. And that will keep them happily employed and productive for longer. 

Mystery Minds supports the entire employee lifecycle

When it comes to building interpersonal relationships at work, Mystery Minds solutions can be a game changer. Through a customizable matchmaking algorithm, you can connect different groups across your organization. And thanks to our Communities feature, you can offer multiple initiatives for each stage of the employee lifecycle. 

Whether you need to add a social component to your onboarding process, develop internal learning and development initiatives, or support Employee Resource Groups, Mystery Minds has a solution for you. 

Discover our initiatives for the employee lifecycle today!