Building an Effective Employee Lifecycle
As an employer, your relationship with every one of your employees will go through the phases of a workplace lifecycle. Recruiting, maintaining, developing, and transitioning employees is a continuous process, one that requires care and attention to be effective.
The employee lifecycle can be broken down into key phases:
- Recruitment: Finding and attracting future teammates and leaders.
- Hiring: Connecting with candidates, conducting interviews and aligning on mutual goals and outcomes.
- Onboarding: Introducing new employees to the organization, and the organization to new employees. Providing the context for new team members to succeed, and opportunities for them to bring their unique skills and perspective to their work.
- Performance: Ongoing evaluation and reflection on employee contributions, their development, and opportunities for growth.
- Development & Succession Planning: Rewarding success through promotion and increased compensation. Proactively scaffolding for the future.
It’s more efficient and impactful to build inclusion and equity into the beginning of the employee lifecycle than toward the end. You can set the tone for an effective, inclusive employee experience before candidates even submit an application. This lays the foundation for a sustainable, healthy workplace where they are confident they can grow.
Benchmarking & Focus Areas
To improve workforce representation across various identities, organizations must understand their "current state" and set clear goals. We must know where we are and where we are trying to go.
We believe that committing to outcomes and affirmative hires is the surest way to improve representation on a team. Organizations must align hiring needs with strategic and business goals to establish those outcomes. To start your process:
- Clearly Define Your Business Objectives and how your recruitment/hiring goals will help you achieve those goals.
- Build Your Aspirational Future State. This is where you want to go. There is no "one size fits all" approach to benchmarking. Several key factors influence how to set focus areas.
Recruiting
With your inclusive groundwork laid, you can now begin recruiting candidates with your workplace culture in mind. Inclusive recruiting is dynamic, and will require consistent fine-tuning and adjustment - especially as your focus areas shift. Below are some points to consider while searching for candidates:
- Do Not Incentivize Internal Referral Programs. Leveraging internal referrals can speed up the recruitment process, but offering compensation for successful referrals most often reinforces the "dominant culture" within an organization.
- Cross-post job opportunities on a minimum of 4 sites/job boards, ensuring that a minimum of 2 sites/job boards are identity-specific.
- Think Critically About Practices such as the "Rooney" or "Mansfield" rules. These practices often perpetuate confirmation bias. It ‘'just so happens' that organizations continue to hire candidates with dominant identities, reinforcing unconscious biases that people with historically marginalized identities aren't as qualified. Consider this study from Harvard Business Review, which states that when there is only one woman in a hiring pool, there is statistically no chance that she will be hired.
- Consider Strategic Partnerships and Commitments. Commit to pipeline partnerships with historically significant representation. For example, committing to hiring 20% of incoming hires through a partnership with a nearby historically Black college and university (HBCU). Because HBCUs are not identity-exclusive, not every applicant will be Black. However, there is a greater chance of receiving applications from Black applicants.
Preparing to Hire
After establishing some hiring focus areas, the next step is crafting a job description. A strong job description describes the role and briefly summarizes your organization's purpose and brand. You'll need a strong employer value proposition (EVP) to attract especially thoughtful candidates.
Hiring
Through the interview process, you and your team will be able to get to know the candidates. It's also an opportunity for candidates to evaluate and get to know you.
Interviewer Best Practices
To reduce bias in the interview process:
- Ensure diverse representation among interviewers and establish clear, consistent evaluation criteria.
- Implement standardized scorecards to guide interviewers in assessing candidates based on relevant skills and qualifications.
- When including assignments in the interview process, provide clear instructions to all candidates.
- Encourage interviewers to offer objective, job-related feedback rather than relying on subjective impressions.
These practices help mitigate unconscious bias, promote fair evaluations, and support more inclusive hiring decisions.
Onboarding
Creating a thoughtful and inclusive onboarding process for new hires is crucial for their success. Consider a structured onboarding roadmap that outlines key milestones and objectives for the first 90 days, ensuring the new hire receives comprehensive, role-specific training and understands their responsibilities within the organization's landscape.
Clear and open communication is essential throughout the onboarding process. Employers should establish regular check-ins between the new hire and their managers. Providing easy access to necessary documentation and ensuring that all technological tools are set up and functioning correctly before the new hire's arrival is also critical. Integrating company values into onboarding and organizing team-building activities can help new employees feel welcomed as part of the team.
Gathering feedback regularly through onboarding surveys and continuously improving the process based on this feedback can help ensure that the onboarding experience remains effective.
Performance
Performance reviews can be emotional and stressful. Receiving feedback from others can be vulnerable, especially when that feedback is connected to compensation and/or performance.
Evaluating how employees perform their roles and aligning with your organization's values is essential. What else should be measured? A supervisor's evaluation could be helpful, but other employees may see their co-workers more accurately in a relatively flat organization. Consider new paths for assessment. For example, employees can self-select several of their co-workers to complete a performance review for them. This process allows employees to own their review process and seek feedback from peers whose opinions they value.
Development & Succession Planning
Succession planning is vital for an organization's long-term success. To make this process more inclusive, clearly define and communicate the criteria for advancement to all employees. This transparency encourages skill development. Offer comprehensive development and training programs accessible to employees at all levels, focusing on building critical leadership capabilities.
When promotions or raises are not an option, several alternative ways exist to reward and recognize employees. Provide verbal and written recognition, offer additional responsibilities or flexible work arrangements, and support professional development through training programs. Consider internal promotions within existing roles to give employees more responsibility and autonomy. Implement profit-sharing or performance-based bonuses to motivate employees and reward exceptional results. Tailor your approach to recognition based on employees' preferences, job responsibilities, and company culture. While traditional promotions and raises are important, these alternative methods can effectively recognize and appreciate employee contributions.
Building inclusive practices and protocols into your organization's employee lifecycle leads to a positive work experience. The work toward a more inclusive and equitable workplace is never done. Each step toward equity provides a better experience and healthier workplace for everyone.
