7 reasons why your journey mapping exercise may fail

Nothing is more powerful than Employee Journey Mapping for understanding and improving the employee experience. However, it also comes with its own set of challenges.

Many Employee Journey Maps are only partially completed or, worse, end up in a drawer collecting dust.

Below are seven common challenges you may encounter when creating a journey map and ways to mitigate them.

1. Too Many Moments to Consider

An Employee Journey Map comprises many Moments that Matter, each with several Touchpoints. For example, moments like someone’s first day have multiple touchpoints with the new hire, the hiring manager, and potentially the new hire buddy, HR, and IT.

Across the journey, there are hundreds of such Moments and Touchpoints to consider, which is a daunting task and requires extensive research in advance.

Solution: Don’t start with a blank slate. Before beginning, compile a comprehensive list of all Moments that Matter that you might include in your map.

How Pyn can help: Pyn includes a pre-populated Employee Journey Map with hundreds of Moments and Touchpoints, along with details of workflows to consider.

2. All Theory, No Impact

You may have detailed all journey stages and designed perfect Moments that Matter - but having clarity and good ideas alone won’t lead to change.

It's similar to how you work with engagement survey results; they provide information, but you still need a process to move from insights to action.

Many teams spend a lot of time creating their journey and roadmap towards a better employee experience without really affecting the employee experience.

Solution: Assign an “Owner” and “Action” to each Moment that Matters. Consider, for example, a Moment like a 'promotion to manager'. Ensure you decide who manages that moment (Owner) and what helpful guidance to send to the new manager, preferably automated (Action).

How Pyn can help: Pyn ‘activates’ your journey design by allowing you to assign teams and owners for each Moment, automatically detecting when an employee experiences a Moment, and then triggering communications to the right person(s).

3. Trying to Solve Everything at Once

Some organizations struggle with prioritizing what moments need improvement first and finding ways to implement changes effectively across the organization. While all Moments are important, you need to start somewhere.

Teams that don’t use data (e.g., “how many employees experience a Moment”) or don’t have the right process to assess priorities risk trying to boil the ocean.

Solution: Use data to identify and prioritize key pain points in your employee experience, then implement changes incrementally, starting with the most critical issues.

Some additional advice from Felicitas Schweiker, former VP of People & Culture at parcelLab who uses an Employee Journey Map with her team:

“People remember the beginning, the peak, and the end. If you don't know where to start, I would say make the first day a great experience and make the exit also a good one, because this helps people remember you”.

How Pyn can help: With Pyn, you can see how many people are experiencing or have experienced a moment. For example, you can see how many managers have been promoted in recent weeks or how many folks are about to celebrate a five-year anniversary. Pyn also allows you to tag priorities with Current Status (we do/do not have this in place) and Priority (this is a high priority to improve) for project planning.

4. It’s Hard to Collect Enough Data

Improving the employee experience requires empathizing with employees, understanding their needs, and crafting customer-centric experiences that help folks feel confident and excited about each moment in their journey.

This involves asking employees about their experiences and gathering other data to understand obstacles or how often people experience moments.

In short, designing Moments will requires additional work, such as surveys, interviews, and examining data in other HR systems. This can slow progress to the point where teams feel the project takes too much time.

Solution: Develop a streamlined data collection process, leveraging existing HR systems and periodically engaging employees through concise, targeted surveys.

How Pyn can help: Consider launching a survey to assess parts of your journey. Pyn can help you launch surveys through other systems like Culture Amp or collect data through embedded surveys. Pyn can also show how many folks in your organization have experienced certain moments in recent months.

5. Cross-Departmental Collaboration is Slow

Employee journey mapping often requires input and collaboration from multiple departments, such as HR, IT, and operations. Additionally, stakeholders may be spread across different time zones.

Getting everyone in one (virtual) room to do the journey mapping exercise is hard but important. Effective collaboration builds cross-functional alignment, incorporates diverse perspectives, and encourages knowledge sharing.

Solution: Try a combination of meeting stakeholders in groups via videoconferencing and working asynchronously.

How Pyn can help: Pyn’s Journey Designer allows you to invite others into a shared Map, tag Touchpoints to a team or individual, and collaboratively design your Moments.

6. Scope Creep

The employee journey involves multiple stages, personas, touchpoints, and experiences. Mapping this journey comprehensively can be complex and time-consuming.

Deciding the scope and level of detail to include in the map is a challenge in itself. Differentiating between different personas (e.g., Engineer vs. Sales, Remote vs. In-Office, Manager vs. IC) risks the project ballooning into something unmanageable.

Solution: Define clear boundaries and objectives for the journey mapping exercise, focusing on the most relevant personas and touchpoints and the most common use cases first to keep the project manageable.

How Pyn can help: Pyn allows you to build out a foundational journey map first and layer in more variations of workflows and communications by demographic or personas over time.

7. Company Changes

The employee experience is dynamic and can change over time. Keeping the journey map up-to-date and relevant can be challenging.

Solution: Regularly review and update the journey map to reflect organizational changes and evolving employee experiences.

How Pyn can help: Pyn allows you to identify trends in how many employees experience certain moments and makes it easy to add or modify Moments that Matter and associated tasks, workflows, or communications.

Want to avoid these pitfalls from the start? Pyn's Employee Journey Designer lets you map every moment in the employee lifecycle and automate the communications that go with them — free to get started.