Mystery Minds solutions for the Employee Lifecycle

The employee lifecycle model is everywhere in HR, and for good reason!  

It’s very useful for breaking down the different aims and strategies of People & Culture teams into manageable areas. Here at Mystery Minds, we’ve identified six key areas of the Employee Lifecycle, each of which comes with its own challenges. 

For an all-encompassing guide to the Employee Lifecycle, you can check out our deep dive on maximizing the employee lifecycle. In this article, we’ll briefly examine each stage and the initiatives you can implement using Mystery Minds solutions. 

The stages of the employee lifecycle

1. Recruiting

Recruiting is the phase when a potential employee has their first contact with an employer. In all their interactions, both sides try to find out whether they can work well together.  

The main challenge is finding qualified people who fit into your organization’s internal culture. However, you shouldn’t discount candidates who were narrowly unsuccessful—it’s important to leave them with a good experience so that they will consider applying for other roles in the future. 

Mystery Minds initiatives for Recruiting:

• Culture Check. Connect potential hires with a small number of existing employees before they receive an offer. This helps them to understand the working culture and gives existing employees a chance to give their feedback to recruiters. 
• Talent Pool Connections. If your organization is constantly recruiting, it can help to keep unsuccessful final-round applicants engaged by matching them a few times a year with a recruiter. You never know; you might just meet someone who would be a great fit for an open position. 

2. Onboarding

During onboarding, you set the tone for an employee’s relationship with the organization and their colleagues. Onboarding begins with their first day at the company and continues throughout the first few months of their contract. Some organizations define onboarding as a period of a few weeks, while others take a longer-term view, with onboarding ending after nine months or a year. 

Onboarding is essential for retention—according to LinkedIn Talent Solutions, 4% of new hires quit after a terrible first-day experience, and 22% of turnover happens in the first 45 days. The central challenge here is ensuring that new hires have a great overall employee experience, feeling supported, welcome, and challenged appropriately. 

Mystery Minds initiatives for Onboarding:

• New Hire Coffee. Encourage new hires to meet people outside their immediate team. This matching solution can be adapted depending on how much you want to target their networking – you can match them across hierarchies, departments, locations, or other criteria. 
• Networking Lunches. Lunchtime can be stressful for office-based new hires. Take the uncertainty out of when and where to get lunch by matching them with a buddy or a group of people who can show them what’s available in or near the office. 

3. Learning & Development

This phase of the Employee Lifecycle is usually understood as a measure for retaining longer-term employees. During this phase, employees are engaged in educational initiatives. 

These initiatives often have specific goals and business needs in mind. This is particularly true in smaller businesses, which don’t have the same ability to hire many people with extremely specific knowledge. There, the retention and sharing of internal knowledge is an essential safeguard against employees leaving the company. 

The challenges of learning and development largely involve the time and budget that these initiatives require. Managers can resist L&D initiatives because they don’t always have an immediate payoff for the organization. However, they should be considered long-term investments in personnel and their skillsets. 

Mystery Minds initiatives for Learning & Development: 

• Skill sharing. Many organizations don’t fully take advantage of their employees' skill sets. A skill-sharing coffee or lunch is a great opportunity to match experts in certain skills with employees who want to learn them. 
• Language Coffee. Language learning initiatives are particularly popular with international employees. Whether it’s business English, a second or third language, or ASL, setting up tandem language learning meetings can add a fun element to these initiatives. It’s also a great way to make use of your native speakers! 
• Innovation Huddles. Often, employees will have great ideas for the organization but have nowhere to share them. With innovation huddles, you can match employees from different departments and allow them to debate and propose new ideas. You can task them with developing new products, features, or service ideas – or ask them to consider internal processes. 

Reading tip: Here are some more ideas for how you can use Mystery Coffee for knowledge exchange. 

4. Retention

Retention is an HR manager’s top priority throughout the employee lifecycle. You need to retain employees at every stage, whether they’re new hires, seasoned employees, or senior managers.  

The main challenges for retention are stagnation and dissatisfaction. Stagnation happens when employees feel like they have no room to grow. This suggests that they should be considered for learning and development or their promotion potential. Dissatisfaction can happen for many reasons – there can be disruption after a merger or after a change in management, or they might have had a bad personal experience and felt that the organization didn’t properly support them. 

To mitigate dissatisfaction, you can implement initiatives that recognize employees as people and support them in their broader career goals. 

Mystery Minds initiatives for retention:

• Employee Resource Group Networking. Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are vital resources for many employees, particularly those from minority groups. Mystery Coffee can be a great tool for ERGs to regularly connect their members, particularly those who work in different locations or departments, so that they can better support one another.  
• Post-Merger Coffee. Mergers and acquisitions are some of the most difficult experiences an employee can go through at work. They are times of uncertainty, and there are often many new colleagues to get to know. A post-merger coffee or lunch initiative can be a great way to unite two groups of people and encourage them to identify with a new shared corporate identity. 
• Culture Initiatives. There are many different cultural problems that you can address with Mystery Coffee. For example, if your workplace has excessive competition between departments, you can use Mystery Coffee or Lunch to encourage networking and collaboration. If senior managers lack contact with entry-level employees, you can implement cross-hierarchy networking or CEO lunches. And if you have remote or hybrid employees who are feeling disconnected, then Mystery Coffee is a great way to bring them into the fold. 

5. Progression

Progression is the stage of the employee lifecycle when an employee has gained the skills and experience necessary to be promoted. However, it’s not always easy to nurture talent to this position – or to recognize when they’re truly ready for the step up. Many employees have stories of being overlooked in favor of an external hire or of spending months doing the work of a more senior role without an official promotion. 

Organizations that want to optimize retention rates and nurture future leaders should pay particular attention to this stage of the Employee Lifecycle. You may need to be creative with the kinds of senior roles you offer your employees. After all, not everyone aspires to be a people manager, even if they do want to keep progressing. 

The main challenges in this stage are twofold: recognizing when your employees are ready for the next step and ensuring that the promotion process is clearly defined and fair. 

Mystery Minds initiatives for progression:

• Job shadowing. If your employees aren’t sure about which role appeals to them most, job shadowing is a way to give them an insight into the realities of a job. This is useful for both sides. Junior employees get an understanding of the role of a manager or senior, while managers can access valuable feedback from people with fewer preconceptions of their role. It can also be a great tool for employees who would rather move sideways into another specialism. 
• Leadership Coffee. One way to improve the number of internal hires is to identify your future leaders early in their careers. Once you know who they are, you can connect them to the current leadership and their peers in their cohort. This ensures that their progress is being seen by people across the organization and enables them to arrive at the next hierarchy level with a pre-existing network. 
• Mentoring. In addition to the social support offered by a Leadership Coffee, you can offer more targeted mentoring for future leaders. They could even spend time with mentors from a range of departments, giving them a holistic understanding of the organization and its strategic needs. 

6. Offboarding

Offboarding is the final stage of the employee lifecycle. It begins when an employee hands in their resignation (or is terminated) and starts the process of leaving the organization. However, offboarding doesn’t have to be the final point of contact with an employee. 

The best organizations have groups of alumni who are proud of their years of employment and may return one day in another position. Great offboarding processes leave both parties with no resentment and with the hope that one day, they’ll work together again. However, this isn’t always possible, especially in cases where the employee was fired or was part of layoffs.  

Mystery Minds initiatives for offboarding:

• Alumni networks. For organizations that want to invest in their alumni network and potentially mine this network for future leaders, it’s worth creating a space where former employees can keep in touch. Mystery Coffee is a great tool for this, as it allows you to match former employees by experience level or years of service. You can also allow your HR team to participate, keep in touch with former employees, and be on the lookout for people who would be happy to return to the company. 

Optimizing the employee lifecycle with Mystery Minds 

Most organizations are confident about certain stages of the employee lifecycle and don’t spend as much time thinking about others. But it’s important not to overlook any element of the lifecycle if you want to retain your employees for as long as possible. 

If your organization is planning to improve any stage of the employee lifecycle, Mystery Minds is here to help! Whether you’re looking for knowledge exchange or more engaging onboarding processes, our solution can support your employee engagement needs. 

Contact one of our experts today to discuss your plans and goals.