What Employee Journey Mapping Reveals — with Jeannie Walters | R@W REVISITED

(Originally Released: April 24, 2022)

In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with CEO and founder of global consulting firm Experience Investigators Jeannie Walters on the importance of employee journey mapping and its role in employee retention and engagement. 

Jeannie shares her experience and expertise on...

• The scope of an employee journey map.
• How employee personas can help and what they should include.
• When you should review your employee journey map.
• Where mapping falls down.
• How maps can help with employee engagement.
• Why organizations don't do it as frequently as they should.

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Transcript

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Russel Lolacher
Hey, look over there. I got Jeanne Walters. And here is why she’s awesome. Okay, she is the CEO and founder of Experience investigators a global, that’s a big part of the planet, customer experience consulting firm. She is a co-host with Adam Toporek on Crack the Customer Code podcast, I’m still having heavy breathing, I got a bit more to get through a TEDx speaker on meaningful micro engagements, a Forbes coaches, Council Member, a C suite, network advisor, and a LinkedIn learning instructor. If you haven’t taken any of our courses on LinkedIn, fix that. Also, I should mention, she has this all wrapped up in about 20 years of experience helping organizations including employee engagement, which is what this show is all about. So I am overly freaking thrilled to have Jeanne Walters here. Hi, Jeannie.

Jeannie Walters
Thank you so much. I’m thrilled to be here. How are you, Russ?

Russel Lolacher
I’m good and way caffeinated for this early morning. So…

Jeannie Walters
I’m still working on it. So I’ll catch up.

Russel Lolacher
Perfect, perfect. People will be listening, you’ll see the crescendo of energy as we ramp up. So before we get into our topic today, I love asking this question, because everybody, it’s so personal asking this particular question for a lot of people. And I don’t think organizations really, really realize the impacts they have on their employees, staff leadership, when they go about their day. So asking you the question, what is your worst or best employee experience?

Jeannie Walters
Yeah, I’ve got to go with the worst one here. And it was my first job out of college. And I was one of three kinds of leaders in the, in the location. And I was not having an affair with the boss out of the three of us. And so that was awkward. And eventually, it became really tough, I was getting a lot of very inappropriate questions and all sorts of things. I was very young. And part of what happened was, I kept getting the, oh, gosh, we’re gonna have to have you work on this this weekend, we’re gonna have to have you come in this weekend. And it got to a point where I worked 24 days straight, and was in the office and making less than everybody and the whole thing. And I remember talking to my dad, who’s always been a wonderful mentor. And I was sharing that and he said, you know, indentured servitude is over. And I’ve never forgotten that. Because it’s, it’s so true. But one of the things that happened was I got transferred out of state, I came back after that team had left in a “blaze of not glory”.

Russel Lolacher
Sure.

Jeannie Walters
And when I came back, I had to drive back to that office. And I still remember driving back knowing those people were gone. And I felt sick, physically, just going back to that location. And I’ve never forgotten that because I it showed kind of the trauma really, that I had been feeling personally and how I felt like I was going back into the den, you know, like, so. But the outcome of that my next boss was an amazing mentor and friend, he still is he, we had him as a reader in our wedding. So he really was incredible about helping me see like, this had nothing to do with you. And I think that message was so important at that moment, so that I could move on. So yeah, not to get too deep or personal here. But that’s that’s my story.

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Russel Lolacher
That’s pretty deep and pretty personal. It’s the ramifications, that people aren’t stupid employees aren’t dumb. They do know what’s going on. If the boss is you know, doing some some the they pay attention. The problem is, and I’m we’re hoping this is the shift eventually, which is people realizing they don’t have to put up with this. They don’t have to just be there and take it, which is such a I don’t want to say it’s a generational thing. That’s not the point of the podcast, but it is interesting to the story, the generational thing of at my age, we were kind of, um, the Gen X. Yep. And ours is sort of that between Boomers, which stayed at the same business for 20–30 years. And we’re lucky to have it versus the millennials that are just looking at their clock going. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to be at this meeting, I want to say and I’ll say something about it. And I’m sort of I’m.. I’m looking at the Boomers going that’s how I was raised and looking at the millennials going “Damn, I want to be I want to be brave enough to do that.”

Jeannie Walters
Yeah, yeah. I think the other thing was we were we had a definition of what professional looked like and you had to fit into that box.

Russel Lolacher
Oh, I still hear that bullshit. That’s not professional…. ?

Jeannie Walters
Yeah. And so we, I always felt like I couldn’t be my full self. And now I think we are learning that when you let people be their full selves, that’s when magic happens, that’s when they bring their best to you. And, you know, that’s when I think people feel most valued and appreciated and all that. So that was, that’s one of the values of our, of my company now is really humor in humanity is one of our values, because I want people to be who they are, and recognize each other as individual human beings.

Russel Lolacher
So our talk today is about the journey of that employee. I was super excited to talk about this, because there’s so much… I’m just so curious about your perspective on this, because there’s so things missed, and so many things not considered, we jump into the whole customer journey. And we were talking about this right before we started pressing record, which is customer equals money. So most organizations will focus on the customer, the customer journey, where’s the friction? How can we make this better? How can we ease this experience? Meanwhile, the employee, the one that’s doing all the work to build that relationship is like, what the fuck about me? So we don’t have those conversations enough. So maybe we should start with what is an employee journey? Maybe? Let’s define it first.

Jeannie Walters
Yeah, well, I think one of I mean, my lens is customer experience. And so what I started thinking about was that we need employees who actually deliver the customer experience. And that’s the only way to be successful. And if you apply some of the best practices of customer experience to employee experience, it… it’s magic, right? And so this is what when I think about the employee journey, I think about it, as you know, what, it’s really easy, just like it is everywhere else, to put people into boxes, into groups into segments, and kind of assume that their journey is all the same. And what I like to think about is, you know, if we know that, for instance, I mean, we know the journey starts before they start with you, right? And so if you don’t have your values on your job descriptions, and then you get people who don’t align with those values, that creates tension from the beginning. So like, really looking at the journey from how do they find you? And what are you actually projecting to them? What are you telling them about? The role, the organization, the culture? And then all the way through? What is the candidate experience? Like, even if you don’t hire them? How do you close that loop? So that they don’t walk away and tell all their friends, it’s a mess, don’t apply there. And, you know, what is what is onboarding look like? I’ve seen so many organizations who have beautiful 3d, you know, like, get everybody together, we’re gonna onboard the next class of whatever, they talk about all the big stuff, the vision and the values, all of that. And then employees never hear about those things, again, in their whole journey. And I think, you know, tenure, how long have people been with you? How can you recognize when they aren’t loyal? When they are actually really, you know, sticking with you, and all the all the talk right now about like, you know, people exiting and getting these exit interviews? I think we should be talking to employees throughout their journey and checking in with them and saying, what do you what, what would make your job easier? How could you be more effective and efficient? Where should we invest? So that you can be and, you know, we actually have a journey mapping process for employees, because you can use those same concepts and apply it to the employee journey.

Russel Lolacher
I love that you talked about the customer experience, customer service, tactics, and phrasing that can be flipped with employees. I play a game with Nate Brown on Twitter, he will hate me. I think he hates me now. I mean, I love the man. But every time he tweets, something really pithy or really smart about customers, I will retweet it but take customer out and put employee in. And it’s the exact same thing. Like, I think he’s like humoring me going, thanks. So it’s fine. But, but, but if you look at it, yeah, it’s completely the same thing. If you listen to the voice of the customer, your organization will be more healthy weight. If you listen to the employee, your customer, your organization will be more healthy. I love that. You’re talking about the the onboarding process. As a… I picture it like this. It’s like a heli-carrier people are flying in, they’re given this beautiful helipad. Take enjoy, the experience. And then as soon as they’ve landed, they push them into the water and go try to swim. Like it’s… like we’ll get you there, we’ll land you well, we’ll tell you all the pithy, beautiful things, and then you’re going to see the reality once you get in the organization. We got you and now we’re not going to care anymore. Values? Uh, they’re on a poster. But we don’t know if we actually believe and grow with them. So you’ve kind of mentioned the beginning, and you kind of mentioned the end. But I want to look at it first, before we get into more of the detail the journey, what’s the benefit of looking at it holistically?

Jeannie Walters
Yeah, great question. So I really think that if we’re, if we’re looking at an employee journey, if you think about, for instance, the story I shared in the beginning, right? Think about how crazy that journey was to get me from fresh out of college, first professional job, full of anticipation and excitement. But I’m on my own, for the first time I’m living in a new state all these things, very little thought around that right, like very little support around that, or ideas of what can we do as an organization, so I felt very on my own. And then you get me to the point where I’m saying, Well, my boss was is still one of my very dear friends mentor, you know, think about that journey. And when you look at the end to end, I think one of the things to consider is when there are bad things that happen, which there are one, what can you do in that moment to make the holistic journey complete and better, right? So that they’re not carrying that thing around? Because I think we’ve all seen this happen to where sometimes it’s like, oh, that’s not, that person’s not working in that department, let’s just move them across the hall to the other department. So it’s their problem, right. And maybe that employee has a journey that we’re not really recognizing, we’re putting all of the blame, we’re putting all of the accountability on one of the, you know, the employee, instead of really looking holistically at, okay, what’s going on here? What’s the culture? What’s the ecosystem? I mean, I, it kills me when I’m checking into a hotel, and I see they’re still using green screen computers in some of these in some of these places. And I’m like, What is going on? How can you expect people to do their jobs effectively? And I think that’s, that’s that holistic idea of, instead of just saying, like, well, sure, when somebody checks in in the hotel, you’ve got to greet them warmly, and get them checked in. Well, what does that actually mean? Like, get into the details of it? Because if you can look at the details, I mean, essentially their touch points, right? So if we’re looking at the touch points of the journey, when you look at it holistically, you start identifying, where are those obstacles and challenges that we can fix? And where is there opportunity here? And what how can we get that feedback from employees in the right moment, so that we can make those changes to make their lives better, which ultimately makes the customers lives better? So it’s, it all goes together.

Russel Lolacher
What is a typical journey, though? I know we’re generalizing here a bit. But typically, what would you say from beginning to end would be a typical employee journey just to give the listener an idea of the path they need to pay attention to?

Jeannie Walters
Well, I think this is where best practices are really important, one of them is you really have to think about, it’s not going to be the same for everybody. So I do encourage you to think about a persona. For instance, one of the things that I find fascinating is that if if I refer you to my company, you as a referred employee, are more likely to be hired, more likely to stay longer. And more likely, this is the kicker, to make the company money faster. Because we have a relationship, and we have a trusted relationship. And I’ve said to you, Russ, I think you should apply for this job, it’s a great place to work all of these things. So when you look at for instance, those referred journey, though referred employee journey, that’s going to be slightly different than somebody who finds a posting on Indeed, or monster and applies through those channels, right? So when we talk about kind of a typical journey, it’s really important to think about, who is this person and how did they find us? Now, the other thing I would say there, though, is the person who referred that candidate, we want to look at their journey to what made them refer that employee, how, you know, what was their journey, like, so that they feel so much trust and goodwill that they want to do that? That would be a great thing to journey map as well. So when when I think about the employee journey, you know, the the beginning is really, really crucial. So you want to look at how they found you. You want to look at what was their candidate experience? How was that offer made all of those things and get feedback from them along the way and ask them what was this like for you? Is there anything we could do to make this more comfortable or better? And then, once they’re in those different roles, like some organizations have really robust program to help employees kind of go from team to team and really check things out and have that kind of six months of, let’s just figure this all out other organizations. And I mean, I have a small company, everybody wears a few different hats, right? And so looking at what is that first 90 days, like, what is that first six months? What is that first year? And then actually looking at, okay, we have people who have been here five years, 10 years, 20 years? Let’s go talk to them. Let’s figure out what their journey was. Because there’s tons of opportunity to look at how can we reinforce the values of our organization? And I think if we’re not asking that question, we’re missing a huge opportunity, because your employees will tell you, Oh, yeah, I know, we talk about work life balance, but you haven’t been working 80… 80 hours a week. So I don’t think we’re living that value. How can we live that value more? And sometimes the answer is, you know what we can’t right now. But let’s talk about how we will in the future? I’m not really answering question, because I feel like there’s so much around this that isn’t typical. But I would look at the beginning very carefully, I would look at the first 90 days, first six months to a year. And then I would also think about those different kinds of personas, how do people find you? How are they starting their journey? And sometimes it’s really good to narrow the scope and say, Hey, person who’s been here 10 years, let’s talk about the last two years with our organization and figure out, you know, you’ve been here eight years, why did you stay for this long? And then start there and figure out, you know, what are they missing? Because they probably have a ton of wisdom that they can share, too. So that’s, that’s how I would approach it. But I think there are lots of different ways to slice and dice. So I’m sorry, I’m not being typical.

Russel Lolacher
No, I never want you to be typical. I liked that there’s a lot of heavy influence on the beginning of the journey, because that is setting the foundation to I guess, launch into the organization in success. But there are the end of the journey is also something I think that does not get enough attention. Certainly as we go along, there’s maybe every year there’s a survey, sort of a check in of how are we doing for you? How are you feeling supported, but then we get towards the I’m leaving, and you can leave for retirement reasons you can leave for you hate your boss, there’s lots of reasons, but it still isn’t treated as a part of the journey of people. It’s just sort of like, “Oh, it’s over. It’s done. We don’t have to care about this person anymore.” What would you say to that?

Jeannie Walters
Oh, boy. So one thing I would say is, you know, just like any journey map, one of the things that I think we have to be aware of is at any phase of the journey, you have to remember, there’s an exit chute, right at the bottom, right, like any phase, they can leave you. So consider that, because what would make them leave you in that phase and what is actually happening to the people who are leaving you. The other thing is, you know, we are in a world where we need employees like people are, are everywhere you go there help wanted signs up, right, we need help. So having people who worked for you refer other people is a really important thing. And I think that’s one of the ways, I mean to, to kind of flip that story that I told one of the things that I judge myself on is if people work for me, and then move on, do they still contact me and I have people who still I have a phone call today with somebody I worked with 10 years ago who reached out and said, I just need to mentor about something. And I wanted to talk to you about that. That’s how I judge myself in that role. Because I know that you know what, we want people who talk very well about working at our organization. So those referrals are super, super important, because I don’t know if you’ve ever I mean, I’ve been tucked out of things by people who are who either say, you know, don’t don’t use that recruiter don’t do this, whatever, because that’s how, you know if they were treated poorly that that word gets around. So I think that’s a huge part of it. And I also think that, you know, some of those annual surveys are painful for the employees. And if they say anything, they’re they’re literally punished by I mean, one of my my clients, they were a fortune 50 company, and they used to do an annual survey. And if the department got less than a five or something cumulative, they had to have these meetings and everybody here the did the meetings, and the boss that was being evaluated, didn’t really get it. And so he thought it was just a matter of explaining why they did things. So then the next year, when the survey came out, everybody was like, “let’s just…” I heard them walk around, “just give it a five, we can’t have those meetings.” So we have to be really careful with that, too. Like, what is the outcome of closing the loop on those surveys? And are we giving more than just one opportunity a year to share feedback? And what are we doing with it?

Russel Lolacher
I use this as a barometer. And it blows people’s minds because it’s so forgotten about around surveys and psychological safety. A big canary in a coal mine is if your surveys are only anonymous, you have a problem with your culture, your culture is broken. They’re only feel safety, if nobody knows it’s them. That a big problem with your organization, if that’s a thing.

Jeannie Walters
I mean, as human beings, I think one of the things we all need and crave is simply to feel heard. And if we feel heard, that makes everything else a little better. There are going to be times that as employees, we have suggestions, we have ideas. And somebody says, you know, we heard you, this is why we can’t do that. That’s okay. Right. Like, people respect that authenticity. I think the challenge is we we position those surveys, we position those, those awful meetings in a way that basically people just think, Well, I’m not heard. That’s what drives people away? Absolutely. Going back to the journey of but using personas, very familiar with using them with customers, not very frequently are they used for the employees? So I don’t see it being too much different. But what are some of the ingredients of an employee persona? Sure. Well, personas are interesting, I’m evolving a little bit with the use of personas in general, because there are some, I think demographic, things that are important, but I think a lot of personas just focus on that. And there’s a lot of assumption around that. And so one of the things that I started doing in my workshops, and everything was, instead of having a name on the persona, we use initials, and that’s because we don’t want people to immediately think, Oh, so it’s a guy, or Oh, it’s this type of person. Because I think that we are in this world, this amazing world, right? Where people are evolving, people are having more opportunities, like certain groups are getting more opportunities. There, there are all sorts of things happening. And when we looked at, you know, when the world shut down, guess what baby boomers figured out digital pretty quickly. And there was lots of talk before that of we can’t do that. Because our, you know, employees are boomers, we figured that out. And I think part of what I look at is if we want a persona, you have to think about the scenario like what are you actually mapping. So look at, you know, which part of the journey maybe or which how much tenure, whatever, and then think about what is their real life. And that’s what I try to get at with personas is, let’s just account for their real life. And so for instance, one of the employee journeys that we we talked about recently was now that people, some people are going back to the office, a lot of people aren’t, what does that journey look like? How do you make How do you help people make the right choice for them? And then how do you support that? And so how do you get the right technology into employees homes? Well, it’s a big difference, if they’re living in a if they’re, you know, a single person living in a tiny apartment in Manhattan, versus somebody who’s living on, you know, in one of the far flung suburbs here in Chicago, in a house with four kids. And so you have to think about that. And so that’s, that’s how I build personas is really thinking about what’s most important to know about this person so that we can provide them the right support, like what what do we need to know? And if you think about that, that can guide you through, you know, really figuring out what are the demographics that are important? What is the experience with the company? That’s important, what is the next role that they might have? So that you’re looking ahead and not boxing them in that way to?

Russel Lolacher
Just yeah, I’m thinking all the psychographics you can throw in there as well, to get a little bit more. I was just thinking even I did a an episode with a gentleman named William Mahon. And he was talking about how defining your employees motivation, and he broke into seven different types of motivation. And by understanding their particular type of motivation, which I think would be perfect within a persona. Yes, it helps you better motivate them at work because we are not all motivated. I don’t care what your values are. We are all motivated by different things. So absolutely, there’s a hugely beneficial ingredients to that. So whose job? Is it to map? Well ease in an organization?

Jeannie Walters
Oh, that’s a good question, isn’t it? Um, so, I am encouraged right now by what’s happening kind of in human resources in general. Because I think what’s happening is people are starting to realize, just like with so many other kinds of, you know, customer experience, or even marketing or places like that, you can’t have the one person do it all, you can’t have somebody who says, you know, what, I am really good at surveys and designing and data and, and I’m really good at the culture, and I’m really good at, you know, change management, and all those things. So I think what, what I look at is, who is best suited for that kind of within that HR, learning and development place, but just like everything else, it has to come from the top too, because, you know, I was sharing with you how I work with the customer service team. And I asked each one of them, you know, would you refer somebody to this role? And they all said, No, and part of why they said no, is because well, we keep hearing about how customer service is a cost center. And that was coming straight from the top. And so I think, while you need somebody who understands how to map it, and things like that, maybe from that HR learning and development team, the words and the, the message, you know, it has to come from the top, because just like you mentioned, your employees see stuff, we we know what’s going on. And so that’s a big part of it. So you need that support, I think from the C-suite.

Russel Lolacher
So you’ve mapped out if you, you know, personas, and before we went on as well, you were very generous to say we will offer a link to a template for yes, we would employee during that. So thank you so much the whole workbook that’s available. So I will put a link to that in the show notes on relationshipsatwork.ca. So please check that out. The question I have, though, is you’ve done this, you’ve been through the process, your HR department has done 5–10, you know, because please don’t think it’s just one or two people, please don’t think it’s just one or two journeys. There are a lot. When do you reevaluate these?

Jeannie Walters
So I have a slightly different approach here. Because I think that as much as we want to say, let’s get the end to end journey and figure it out. And then we’ve got it figured out, I really think that we have to look at specific kind of sections or scopes differently. And so for example, if you have something change, if you introduce new technology or tools, that is a great time to reevaluate the employee journey. What does that look like? How does that impact them? And in fact, it’s great to do right before you roll it out. Because then it will help you avoid some of the hiccups. Right? One of my favorite examples is where they didn’t consider the employee was a very large retailer rolled out a payment system on an app. They never told the cashiers about it. They never figured out what does this journey look like for the cashiers? So what happened was people would roll up their cart and say, No, I paid for it. And the and hold up their phone and the cashiers were like, how do we know? What did we do what you know? So that’s what can happen if you don’t consider the employee journey, while you’re kind of rolling out new things. So rolling out new things, technology tools, how many reorg czar out there, right, like anytime you have a reorg I think it’s a great time to look at the journey again. And sometimes that doesn’t mean the whole journey, right? Sometimes it means okay, we know that this is going to impact this level in our organization, and it’s going to impact them in the following ways. Let’s just look at that part of the journey. It’s totally fine to do that. I mean, the speed of business is insane, right? Like, a lot happens in 12 months. And so I think if we if we just say like, well just do this every few years, you’re gonna miss so much. So I really encourage you. You know, one of the things I say a lot is, journey. Mapping is a verb, not a noun. It’s not really about the map. It’s about the process. And so the more that you can, you can incorporate the activity of it, then you’ll start getting the outcomes that you’re looking for. Because otherwise you have a nice poster. And that doesn’t really do anything for anybody.

Russel Lolacher
Where does employee journey mapping fall down?

Jeannie Walters
Oh, well, you brought one of them up is the exit is really not paying attention to the exit assuming that people are just going to be with you. I joke about this a lot. But when whenever I talk about customer experience or employee experience To like a group, there’s always somebody who comes up to me and says, Oh, I’m so glad you said this, because I get it. It’s just that everybody else in my organization doesn’t. And so I think part of where it falls down is we assume that we know this stuff, we assume that it’s common sense. We assume that our internal process maps and our internal documentation is actually reflective of the real world. And it’s often not. And so I think that’s, that’s where I see it fall down a lot. The other thing is we only focus. I mean, this is the same for customer experience to people are like acquisition acquisition, how do we get how do we get the employees? How do we get the employees, and we focus so much on that part, that we ignore the people who are giving us signals that they’re about to leave us? Because we haven’t paid attention to that. And so one of the things that I like to talk about, too, is that when you’re looking at, like, where should we start with this journey? If you know, for instance, well, we, we’ve noticed that after a year and a half, we have a lot of people leaving? What’s that about? What I would do is look at the last several people who have left and say, what were the signals? You know, let’s map out their experience from six months before they left to when they left and figure out what are those signals we should be looking for, as employers. And so I think there are lots of different ways to do that. But it falls down because we assume so much we assume we know what people are going through, we assume our processes work. I mean, another example of this, I took a bunch of things back to a clothing store to return. And they had to call the manager up the manager then and this was after the Christmas holidays. So like, there were a lot of people making returns. He literally because we ordered them online, but I was returning to the store, which they said I could do. He literally had to call and report in every single SKU number in order to get the right price because they had different pricing in their systems. And I asked him about it. And I said you have to do that for every return. And he said, Yeah, we’ve told our regional manager, we’ve told like he was, he knew he’s the manager of the store, he’s spending a half hour doing this for every single return. That’s not a great use of time. That’s, that’s an expense. He was trying to tell people that. And so if we look for those things of how can we? How can we ask the questions, you know, how can we make this more efficient for you? What are your ideas? They will tell you, they’ve got great ideas, we just have to ask them.

Russel Lolacher
So you’ve mentioned retention, and how journey mapping can certainly help with that. As a tool, an employee journey map, how can it help employee engagement?

Jeannie Walters
Oh, I love this question. Yeah, I think I mean, just like anything else, I think if you are including people with their true kind of voice and saying, you matter, that’s a huge way to engage people. And whenever you’re working on journey mapping, you have to include the people who are part of the journey, right? So having workshops with them, follow up, you know, I’ve done things where I did a ride along with H back repair guys, because they were saying, well, the assumption inside the organization was, well, they’ve got all these steps, and it should be working out because we were told that this would increase our customer satisfaction. And when I talked to the guys, they were like those steps make no sense at all. And when I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work, and they want me to execute, you know, X number of visits per day, and those steps add all this time, and it doesn’t make a difference to the outcome. I mean, just letting them vent to me, honestly made it like one of them said I was about to leave. And he’s like, I’m so glad they brought you, you know, to see this because we’ve all been saying things and nobody’s listening. And I think that’s value. That’s how you engage people are saying, We want to hear from you. We respect your ideas. And this is you know, how we’re going to actually act on it. People will be more engaged. If that happens. I can’t tell you how much employee journey mapping needs to happen in organizations. However, very few people are doing it. Why what is the resistance to doing this? Well, I think you you mentioned part of it is who owns it. It’s really hard. It’s hard to figure out, you know what, who can take this on who can really run with it? I think that’s a big challenge in an organization. And there are so many different…I don’t know if goals is the right word or I you know, if you look at how organizations are set up. I often say they’re like sometimes the journey map, they assume is journey map by org chart. And so they think, you know, what if I’m doing my role in learning and development Well, and, you know, we’re we’re moving people through the process in the way that I think it must be working, because I’m getting rewarded, right. As a leader, I’m getting rewarded for the outcomes that we’re getting. But it’s still very siloed. It’s still very departmentally focused. And so we need to just like everything else, we need to make sure that people understand like, you’re part of the journey is a part of the journey, we need to reward everybody, we need to make sure we’re we’re including everybody, so that we do look at this holistically. We understand that you know, what, in those onboarding sessions, we’re setting expectations that they will be either happy with, or disappointed about, in six months, 12 months, 10 years down the line. That’s how important those expectations are. And so really tying things together in that holistic way. It’s hard. And I think that’s a big part of it is we do not ask people to look at the employee journey in that holistic way. Right now. We really talk about it as if, again, acquisition, acquisition acquisition, and then we curse the people who leave. That’s about it.

Russel Lolacher
And I know you’re a big supporter of this idea is that trust is lost between word said and actions taken. So why not look at it as your onboarding process is the word said, and actions taken is the journey along the way, of course, people are leaving, because remember all those really nice things. You said at the beginning? Well, you haven’t delivered on any of them as we’ve progressed. So a horse, they’re going to leave, they don’t trust you to do what you’re going to you say you’re going to do. Right, an organization that’s just just with customers, people, this is an employee problem.

Jeannie Walters
Yeah. Well, and I think the other thing that I’m seeing is that we are, you know, sometimes we over focus on efficiency, and we don’t include the people in that. And I think when we are looking at the employee journey, it’s really important to let the employees know that they are, they are first. And in order to deliver on that you need to show up like that. And that means, you know, instead of saying, we need more more more production, asking the employees what what’s in your way, how can we help you? How can we make sure that we can remove some of those obstacles and challenges? And I mean, the star employees always have workarounds. And if you can figure out what are those workarounds about, then you can start really chipping away at the stuff that matters in the employee journey, because they will figure out a way to do it. But if they have work arounds, that’s a problem.

Russel Lolacher
Jeanne, I gotta ask you the final question of the podcast. Love having you on. Thank you so much.

Jeannie Walters
Thank you! This is fun.

Russel Lolacher
So last question. What is one thing, one thing, one simple thing that people can do right now to improve their relationships at work?

Jeannie Walters
I would say bring your authentic self. And just, if, if that’s not enough, then that gives you something to but I think if we all bring our authentic selves, magic happens.

Russel Lolacher
And let’s hope you work at a culture that allows you to do that.

Jeannie Walters
Yes, here here! Yes.

Russel Lolacher
Thank you so much again, Jeanne. As I’ve mentioned in the podcast, Jenny’s been very generous to offer her workbook on the employee journey mapping. Yeah, I’m gonna go actually download it right after we get off this podcast. So thank you so much for your time. It has been an absolute pleasure and I look forward to I’ve known you for years that we’ve never been in it like never had a conversation like this. So I’m just like, giddy. I’m like I like this actually happened.

Jeannie Walters
I know your Twitter avatar speaks!

Russel Lolacher
Yes, exactly. I’m just a postage stamp to you. That’s all I am.

Jeannie Walters
This is great. Russ. Thank you for what you’re doing. This is really important.

Russel Lolacher
Thanks, Jeannie!