The Employee Life Cycle (ELC) is an HR model that tracks the journey of an employee within your organization. It begins the moment a potential employee becomes aware of your brand and ends on the final day of their employment at your company. 

Besides being a relevant HR tool, it can also be a valuable opportunity to tap into the emotional well-being of your employees and build upon a better emotional culture of your organization.

Moreover, understanding the role emotions play through every step of the employee life cycle will help your company retain talent and improve its reputation.

Let’s dive into the 6 steps of the journey and look at how integrating emotions can better your people’s experience, from recruitment all the way to after someone has left their job. 

Stage 1: Attraction

This is the stage when individuals first come to interact with your brand, even before you have a position open. And having a positive culture that prioritizes employee development and innovation is going to win your brand a great reputation.

The best employees out there won’t join a company that does not promote an organizational culture that fits their beliefs and values. So invest in developing a healthy organizational culture and build the right brand to attract the right people.

Integrating emotions in this phase: 

Make sure that your current employees are fulfilled within your organization. Ask them frequently what can you do better as an employer.

Build a culture of recognition. Appreciate your employees for their progress and good work – employees are naturally attracted to companies that can offer them the best developmental paths and, subsequently, recognize and reward their success.

Stage 2: Recruitment

This marks the stage when individuals pass from candidate to employee and the moment they create their first impression of you as an employer.

Integrating emotions in this phase:

Develop a recruitment strategy to help you assess who is the best fit for your organization, both in terms of skills and emotions.

Integrate tools to measure EI competencies into your recruitment process, such as EI assessment reports, role-play simulations, and psychometric profiling.

Involve your employees. In addition to encouraging them to refer candidates, ask them to help design the requirements for the new position and describe the emotional profile of their potential colleague.

Stage 3: Onboarding

The third step’s main focus is to help new employees blend in with your organizational culture and understand your goals, attitudes, and values as a company.

During this stage, new hires identify the knowledge, skills, and behaviors that are required to function effectively within the team, and providing an engaging employee experience is essential to their retention and success.

Integrating emotions in this phase:

Make expectations clear, both on your and your employee’s side. Let them know what you expect from them, both in terms of work done and emotions, and provide space for them to voice their outlook, hopes and intentions as well.

Incorporate EI development programs in order to expose them to the expected behavior within the company.

Conduct regular check-ups to see how new employees are integrating. This will make them feel heard and will prove your workplace to be a safe space where they can be vulnerable and ask for support.

Stage 4: Development 

The development stage includes everything that helps your employees mature and grow within your organization, from climbing the career ladder to learning new skills. It is during this stage that you begin to foster ongoing professional development and continuous improvement of your employee.

Integrating emotions in this phase:

Empower your people. Encourage them to achieve things they never thought possible – every employee wants to join an organization that supports their growth.

Encourage knowledge sharing through coaching, where employees get to share their experiences and skills with others. Focus on leadership and coaching EI development programs in order to further develop the right mindset and skillset for people within the company.

Tap into development planning. Help your employees set developmental goals, understand what motivates them and support them (be it through coaching, reimbursement of their seminar costs, or a coaching path to follow through). Developing your employees affects every other part of your employee’s life cycle as well.

Stage 4: Retention

The fifth stage of the cycle looks at the frameworks and strategies in place to ensure you retain your top talent. A positive culture company is essential at this stage – a poor culture will eventually lead to high turnover rates, meaning you will have to start from the beginning again and again.

Integrating emotions in this phase:

Seek out employee feedback regularly. Listen actively, act on their feedback and explore whether you’re prioritizing the right things to drive retention at your business.

Understand, support and reward. Explore what motivates each employee, help them set out on their developmental path of choice, and reward them for their progress. Do it often.

Focus on building relationships with your employees. Great work has a lot to do with team works and relationship intelligence, be careful to provide enough opportunities for your people to play and connect with each other.

Stage 6: Separation

Goodbyes are difficult and putting an offboarding process in place for employees to leave on good terms will help tremendously. It’ll help derive learning outcomes and make sure that all parties involved remain on good terms.

Integrating emotions in this phase:

Survey departing team members – it’ll help you understand why they are leaving, and what needs and can be improved. 

Ask and offer honest feedback. Organize an exit interview where departing employees get to evaluate you as an employer and give you a real insight into what it’s really like to work in your organization.

Continue good morale within your team. The departure of a valued employee can shake things up, make sure you connect with concerned members of your team to prove commitment and assure that the team will eventually recover and learn as a result.

As you go, make certain you work towards improving your employees’ experience at each stage of the model. Listen to their concerns, dreams and objectives, design learning and developmental experiences to empower them to realize their full potential and ensure emotions are being expressed and valued all the way.

And to help you in this journey, our recently launched GENOS ALL ACCESS subscription plans allow you to integrate emotions throughout the employee’s life-cycle experience: with EI Selection reports, EI Assessment tools and EI developmental programmes and coaching. And all available for less than 5 Euros/month/person.