HOW-TO GUIDE
How to Build an EX
Program Roadmap
By
XM Institute
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This how-to guide will help you create an employee experience (EX) program roadmap:
a one-page strategic document illustrating current and future employee listening
programs in your organization. A roadmap is a critical tool to communicate your EX
vision and produce a tangible set of activities. While this guide contains suggested steps
and advice to help you navigate this process, you can (and should!) adjust the approach
as needed to match your specific environment. This may include completing steps in a
non-linear fashion, adding steps or activities where necessary, skipping steps, or
bringing in outside advisors to provide additional support and guidance.
STEPS
This how-to guide on building a closed-loop program contains the following steps:
1.
Document the Current State of EX.
Establish a baseline understanding of employee
listening activities happening across the organization and map your key
stakeholders.
2.
Define Your EX Vision.
Develop a compelling vision for the future state of employee
experience for your organization.
3.
Assess Your EX Capabilities.
Complete a diagnostic assessment of the
organization’s EX maturity level, identifying the competencies and skills already in
place and areas of development.
4.
Identify Key Experience Gaps.
Detail which employee experiences are critical for the
attainment of your business goals and draft an EX Project Evaluation Inventory to
address them.
5.
Prioritize Your EX Projects.
Prioritize EX projects that address your strategic needs,
ranking them in order of delivery for your roadmap.
6.
Build Your EX Program Roadmap.
Create an EX program roadmap that visualizes
the path you expect to take over the next 2 to 5 years in order to realize your EX
vision.
Step 1: Document the Current State of EX
Goal: Establish a baseline understanding of employee listening activities happing in
across the organization and map your key stakeholders.
This first step is all about discovery. The current state of EX in your organization is the foundation
on which you build a compelling future roadmap. Employee listening activities already happening
across your organization may range from one-off feedback requests to ongoing programs of
work. As a first step on the path to building a roadmap, deepen your understanding of the current
state of the employee experience management within your organization, such as which employee
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listening posts exist, the teams and individuals who use employee insights, and a map of critical
stakeholders for your EX program moving forward.
Some activities you may want to carry out in this step include:
•
Identify teams or individuals who are collecting EX data.
The goal of this activity is
to take stock of where in the organization employee experience data is being
collected, analyzed, and actioned. This might be enablement teams running training
sessions, HR teams responsible for promotion and performance management, L&D
teams who provide leadership development, teams assembled to design the future
of work, those who run onboarding programs, IT or tech support, managers who
measure team culture, and more. They may be conducting their own listening
projects or accessing ones that are centrally managed.
•
Conduct discovery sessions.
Connect with the people collecting EX data to learn
more about their EX work. The goal of these discovery sessions is to uncover details
of the EX projects that are in flight or planned. Areas to explore in these discovery
sessions might include the technology systems they are using, how they are
collecting and storing data, listening post design, the business needs to be met, and
stakeholders involved.
•
Inventory existing listening posts.
Now that you have taken stock of what employee
listening activities are happening across the organization, create a document that
collates this information in one place. The goal of this activity is to create a single
summary of the current state of EX in your organization. This will form the building
blocks of your roadmap, enabling you to build on progress and optimize existing
programs. To map the current state of EX, list out the projects currently underway
and their details.
•
Develop an internal stakeholder map.
A well-thought-out stakeholder map provides
direction for when and how to engage with stakeholders who are critical to the long-
term success of your EX program. The goal of creating a stakeholder map is to
provide direction on when and how to engage with the individuals or groups who are
vital to the long-term success of your EX program, allowing you to craft more
effective communication plans and engagement strategies that will keep these
stakeholders aligned with your EX efforts over the long term. Stakeholders may be
specific individuals (e.g. a senior leader or program manager) or groups of people
(e.g. people managers, the communications team). Use XM Institute’s Stakeholder
Map to guide you.
•
Build understanding of key employee journeys.
At the end of the day, fixing
individual, isolated employee touch points will only get you so far. Ultimately, to
deliver great employee outcomes, you will need to consider critical employee
experiences within the broader lifecycle context. These journeys map an employee
persona through critical touchpoints, such as applying for a job, accepting an offer,
onboarding, training, performance reviews, promotion, parental leave, internal
mobility, and service interactions – right through to exit and alumni experiences. The
goal here is to first identify the most important journeys employees take with your
organization and then understand how employees feel along those journeys as well
as how effectively your internal processes support them along the way. Journey
maps are an excellent tool you can use here to not only develop this holistic
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perspective but also bridge organizational silos and unite EX activities and
understanding across the business.
Tips & Tricks
1. Don’t rush through this step! It lays the foundation for the rest of the activities
in this roadmap guide.
2. A good place to start looking for existing EX activities is across the people
operations functions, such as recruiting, enablement teams, HR, and others.
3. Keep the end of the process in mind – collect the information in a way that
makes it easy to access, add to, and revise as needed.
4. You will inevitably need to update and refine this information as you move
through future steps or discover more, so don’t spend too much time making
everything perfect.
5. These activities do not need to happen in a fixed order. You might start with
the stakeholder map and go from there.
Resources to support you:
TOOL
W
orksheet:
Stakeholder Mapping
MULTIMEDIA
What is Journey
Mapping?
LAUNCHPAD
Fundamentals of
Employee Experience
Step 2: Define Your EX Vision
Goal: Develop a compelling vision for the future state of employee experience for your
organization.
Now that you have a good understanding of where you are, it’s time to articulate where you
want to go. Your EX vision is an inspirational statement on how your organization aspires to
best serve employees. It is a standard that everyone can strive for and look to when making
decisions that impact employee experiences. This EX vision will act as your north star,
aligning behaviors and activities as you work to enact experience-centric changes over
multiple years and projects. To be effective, this vision must be grounded in your
organizational mission and purpose.
Activities you may want to carry out in this step include:
•
Describe how employee experience accelerates your organization’s mission and
purpose.
The goal of this activity is to set the foundations of how your EX roadmap
underpins the organization’s overall success. Begin with your organization’s mission
and purpose: How do employee experiences accelerate you toward this? Which
business needs will be met by the EX program?
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•
Express the desired outcomes of your EX program.
Now it’s time to cast your mind
forward in time. The goal of this activity is to describe what future success looks like.
Skip forward 5 to 10 years and imagine that your organization has far exceeded all of
the strategic goals, thanks in part to the incredible success of your EX program.
What happened? What changed for employees?
•
Write your EX Vision Statement.
This is the 2 to 3 sentence statement on how your
organization aspires to serve employees. The goal of this activity is to create an EX
vision statement that is simple and clear, connects to your organizational strategy,
describes an aspirational future state, sparks emotion and inspiration, is unique to
your organization, and describes what success looks like.
•
Align your key stakeholders.
Regardless of how ambitious or achievable your EX
ambitions end up being, it is essential that you secure the commitment needed to
help you reach them. This will help align investments and activities across the
organization and ensure that all the people responsible for executing on your
roadmap are incentivized to do so. While there is no “right” way to attain this buy-in,
one method is to hold a workshop with key stakeholders who will need to play a
significant role in bringing your roadmap to life. The goal of this effort is to develop a
unified perspective on the direction and objectives of your EX program and then
secure the commitment necessary to achieve those aspirations.
Tips & Tricks
1. Inputs to your EX vision come from a variety of sources, including company
strategy and values, senior leader interviews, survey of stakeholders, journey
mapping exercises, and more.
2. These activities could be conducted as a working group or as part of a
workshop. Including key stakeholders in this step to ensure buy-in and
resonance across the organization.
3. A vision statement illustrates the future state of employee experience at your
organization. How you will deliver on this vision becomes the purpose and
mission of the EX program or team.
4. Keep it simple. You ultimately want everyone to be able to remember and
reference this vision.
Resources to support you:
BLOG
XM Competency:
Leading a Multi-Year
Transformation
TOOL
Executives’ Commitment
to XM: Assessment
BLOG
Effective
Communication: A
Critical Skill to
Propel XM Success
Step 3: Assess Your EX Capabilities
Goal: Complete a diagnostic assessment of the organization’s EX maturity level,
identifying the competencies and skills already in place and areas of development.
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Organizations don’t achieve their EX vision overnight. It can take years to build this culture
and for people across the organization to grow their capabilities. Now you know where your
EX program is starting from and where it’s headed, the next step is to assess your
organization’s ability to execute your EX vision and roadmap into the future. This includes
understanding what EX competencies and skills are already in place across the business
and where you will need to invest in development.
Activities you may want to carry out in this step include:
•
Complete an EX maturity assessment.
The XM Operating Framework provides a
blueprint for building your organization’s Employee XM capabilities. As you master
the framework’s six XM Competencies, you will progress through five stages of
maturity. Use the EX Maturity Assessment to evaluate how you are currently
performing in each of these Competencies and Skills and determine where your EX
program maturity currently falls across the five stages. The goal here is to identify
your existing EX strengths and weaknesses, helping you surface gaps between your
baseline capabilities and where you ultimately need to be to reach your EX vision.
This assessment will also help you uncover where there are already strengths and
skill sets that you could capitalize on to accelerate your roadmap to completion.
•
Socialize the Maturity Model and results with key stakeholders
. A maturity
assessment not only provides a structured approach for identifying and quantifying
your organization’s existing EX strengths and weaknesses, but it is also a valuable
communication tool. It will help you create internal alignment around common
employee experience terminology and the essential capabilities required to derive
value from your EX efforts as well as convey the range of activities required to do EX
well. The goal here is to use the maturity model as a means of setting and aligning
expectations with key stakeholders across the business, so everyone understands
what is required in order to achieve your stated EX vision.
•
Identify cultural headwinds and tailwinds.
An organization’s culture shapes how
people think, believe, and act. Achieving your EX vision will almost certainly require a
number of individuals and groups across your organization to adjust how they
perform their everyday roles. How supportive or unsupportive your culture is of
these changes will therefore significantly impact the speed and success of your
roadmap’s implementation. The goal here is to identify existing cultural tailwinds you
could tap into to accelerate your EX projects as well as potential headwinds you are
likely to encounter so you can proactively plan for overcoming these challenges.
•
Uncover key technology gaps.
Technology is an essential component of any
successful EX program as it enables the organization to collect, understand, and
take action on employee experience and operational data. The goal here is to identify
technology investments your organization will need to make to bring its EX vision to
life. This could include Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS), data
analytics platforms, learning management systems (LMS), or a more comprehensive
experience management platform. To uncover these technology gaps, we
recommend partnering with your IT department and the groups you spoke to in Step
1 who are already collecting EX data in some form.
Tips & Tricks
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1. Revisit the results and retake the assessment again in 12 to 18 months to track
your progress towards greater XM Maturity.
2. You do not need to aim for the highest levels of EX maturity if that isn’t right
for you. This assessment is meant to provide guidance on next steps as you
advance your organization’s maturity.
3. Involve key stakeholders in these assessments. Bringing them into the process
early will help secure their commitment and buy-in.
4. Be honest with yourself in the process. Completing these assessments are
intended to help you, so answering with complete honestly only helps set you
up for the greatest success.
Resources to support you:
TOOL
Employee
Experience Maturity:
Assessment
BLOG
Five Tips for Using Our
XM Maturity
Assessments
LAUNCHPAD
Maturing Your XM
Program
LAUNCHPAD
The XM Operating
Framework
LAUNCHPAD
Nurturing an XM-
Centric Culture
Step 4: Identify Key Experience Gaps
Goal: Detail which employee experiences are critical for the attainment of your
business goals and draft an EX Project Evaluation Inventory to address them.
Measuring and acting on every employee experience is not feasible or necessary. In this
step, identify moments in the employee journey that your organization needs to get right
and draft a program framework to address them. Begin by identifying the business-critical
talent challenges that are present as well as EX areas of opportunity that might be your
competitive advantage. Following this, create an overview of the EX projects that align with
these priorities and some light details on how they would be delivered. At the end of this
step, you will have a long list of potential EX projects, but don’t worry too much about
resource constraints right now – it is not expected that you would deliver all of these
projects as prioritization will happen in the next step.
Activities you may want to carry out in this step include:
•
Identify the business-critical talent challenges.
One way to identify experience
gaps is to start with the most acute business challenges your organization is facing.
These challenges are either existing or potential roadblocks that may impede your
organization from advancing toward strategic goals. For example, is there high
attrition in some parts of the business? Are there increasing levels of burnout that
threaten employee sustainability? Has there been insufficient progress on diversity?
The goal here is to surface challenges that are disproportionately affecting employee
engagement and your organization’s operations. There are a number of different
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sources you can tap into to find these critical issues, including your listening post
inventory from Step 1, areas of weakness on your maturity assessment in Step 3,
moments of truth on existing journey maps, or even just conversations with
influential business owners across the organization.
•
Identify areas of opportunity in EX that could be your competitive advantage.
In
this activity, identify where there are untapped opportunities to deliver standout
experiences that will set you apart from your competitors. The goal of this activity is
to identify employee experiences that enable your organization to attract, retain, and
develop great talent. For instance, you could create a world-class future or work
model to incorporate hybrid working. You might invest in leadership development to
foster a culture of belonging or invest in employee benefits that meet the diverse
needs of your employees. The goal here is to pinpoint a few specific areas where
meaningful improvements will set you apart from the rest of the market.
•
Analyze key drivers of employee outcomes.
If your organization already has some
employee experience and operational metrics in place, you can use driver analysis to
identify which potential moments or variables most impact employee attitudes and
behaviors. The goal here is to determine, in a quantitative way, which factors
disproportionately affect key employee and business outcomes so you know where
to focus your improvement efforts. For example, if your annual engagement survey
indicates the top driver of employee intent to stay and engagement is psychological
safety, it makes sense to prioritize improving this.
•
Create an inventory of potential EX Projects.
Document the potential EX projects
that your organization could deliver to address the identified challenges and
opportunities. The goal of this activity is to produce an EX Project Evaluation
Inventory that captures a high-level overview of potential employee experience
projects, along with some light details on how each project would be implemented.
The asset created is a fairly substantial inventory of potential EX projects, which you
should then run through a prioritization exercise and use to fill in your eventual
roadmap. Use the XM Institute’s EX Project Evaluation Inventory Worksheet to guide
you through the completion of this document.
Tips & Tricks
1. It can be easier to identify urgent challenges than untapped opportunities.
Consciously consider the positive aspects of your culture that you could
amplify or opportunities that are unique to you.
2. Your EX Project Evaluation Inventory begins with organizational strategic
objectives. Prioritize a maximum of 10 opportunities and challenges as too
many will impede your progress.
3. When determining if a moment is a key driver, be sure to look at longer trended
data points (ideally over at least 3 periods) rather than at a single point in time.
4. To help identify experience gaps, examine or enhance employee journey maps
that were a recommended activity in Step 1.
5. Take a look at your industry peers and competitors to find inspiration and see
where you may have competitive advantages and opportunities to create great
employee experiences.
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Resources to support you:
T
OOL
Template: EX
Project Evaluation
Inventory
RESEARCH
Best Practices Across
the Disrupt
Competency
BLOG
Driving Action From
Journey Maps
BLOG
Three Analytical Tools
That Every XM Leader
Should Understand
BLOG
The Five Questions
of Journey-Centric
Thinking
BLOG
Create More
Actionable Insights
With Employee
Journey Analytics
Step 5: Prioritize Your EX Projects
Goal: Prioritize EX projects that address your strategic needs, ranking them in order
of delivery for your roadmap.
Equipped with a long list of potential projects in your EX program framework, it’s time to
determine what will get done and when. In this step, use a prioritization matrix to rate each
project and identify the highest priorities. Based on your own unique context, you may
choose unique prioritization criteria or use weighting the scoring method.
Activities you may want to carry out in this step include:
•
Use a prioritization matrix to rank potential projects.
One common and effective
way to prioritize EX projects is to use a matrix that ranks each potential EX project
using pre-defined criteria. This tool will help you compare and rank your list of
projects according to factors that are important to your organization. The goal of
this exercise is to – in an empirical way – order your list of potential EX projects from
those that are most critical to achieving your EX and business objectives to those
that are least critical. We recommend using XM Institute’s EX Project Prioritization
Exercise tool to guide you here. This exercise is particularly valuable when used in
conjunction with the EX Project Evaluation Inventory suggested in Step 4.
•
Socialize and validate priorities.
Once you have ordered each of the proposed EX
projects based on their priority rating, socialize this list across the organization.
Seek input from executives and key business owners who will be involved in
executing your EX roadmap. The goal here is to secure organizational buy-in and to
ensure that the projects you are prioritizing are aligned to the broader company and
line-of-business objectives.
•
Revisit the EX project plans and update them as necessary.
Having evaluated each
EX project, you may have some edits to make to your EX project plans. The EX
Project Evaluation Inventory suggested in Step 4 is an example of such a plan. The
prioritization matrix and project evaluation inventory documents are not set in stone,
so it is likely that they will need to be updated as new information becomes available
or business needs change. The goal here is to ensure that the suite of strategic
assets you are creating all work in tandem with each other, staying updated as new
information and decisions emerge.
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Tips & Tricks
1. To get more robust data in your prioritization ratings, you may choose to
survey multiple people who have insight into EX programs at your organization.
2. Invite stakeholders to give ratings on prioritization factors. You may weight
some ratings differently, but including a variety of perspectives will help you
secure buy-in for the final roadmap.
3. Each stakeholder is likely to consider their project(s) most important. Use data
to help you make the case empirically for why you are prioritizing one activity
over another.
4. Communicate the methodology and outcome of the prioritization process with
stakeholders as needed. This transparency can provide assurance that
decisions were made in an empirical manner.
5. Update the Project Inventory and Prioritization Matrix at a regular cadence (6,
9, or 12 months), after you’ve completed a number of the projects, or after a
major business or strategy shift.
Resources to support you:
TOOL
Worksheet: EX Project
Prioritization Exercise
TOOL
5 I’s of Employee
Engagement:
Strengths and Gaps
Step 6: Build Your EX Program Roadmap
Goal: Create an EX program roadmap that visualizes the path you expect to take over
the next 2 to 5 years in order to realize your EX vision.
You have arrived at the final step to map out the EX Program roadmap! By the time you
arrive here, you should have an EX vision statement, a completed EX Maturity Assessment
with your overall maturity and competency levels, and a list of high-priority EX projects. In
this step, you are sequencing your list of EX projects in a roadmap template, to create a
visual representation of the blueprint you expect to follow over the next two to five years to
achieve your EX vision. Keep in mind this roadmap will change and evolve as initiatives are
completed and new priorities surface, so you will need to be prepared to revisit and adapt
your roadmap on an ongoing basis.
Activities you may want to carry out in this step include:
•
Choose a timeframe for your roadmap.
The stretch of time your roadmap covers
will depend on a number of different factors, including your business cadence, how
ambitious your EX vision is, where you’re starting from, your level of organizational
commitment, plus broader industry and environmental factors. We recommend that
your roadmap scopes out somewhere between two to five years of EX projects. You
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can choose to put in place time markers at annual, bi-annual, or quarterly time
periods. The goal here is to choose a timeframe that is long-term enough to provide
you with a clear view of what’s to come but not so long-term that the far-future
projects become meaningless.
•
Select a roadmap design
. Pick a roadmap documentation format. While roadmap
templates abound, the goal here is to choose a design that is appealing, consumable,
and on-brand for your organization. We recommend connecting with other XM
program teams – including customer, product, and brand experience groups – to
collaborate on a consistent visual design, format, and language for the roadmap. We
also advise keeping your roadmap to a single page (or creating a one-page version of
the document), so you can use it as a communication tool to share plans for your EX
program with the rest of your organization.
•
Add EX projects and programs into the roadmap template.
Take your list of
prioritized EX projects and map them into your roadmap template. Ensure you
should differentiate between projects that run for a set period of time versus those
that are ‘always on.’ If you completed an EX Project Evaluation Inventory in Step 4,
you likely already have many of these key details for each activity. The goal here is to
create a visual representation of your tactical plan for completing each EX project,
which – when added all together – should result in your company delivering your EX
vision.
•
Secure stakeholder commitment and resources.
Once you have a draft roadmap,
take it back to your key stakeholders and the groups who will be responsible for
executing specific EX tasks to secure their support of the project plan. Check with
them that there is sufficient time, tools, technology, headcount, and budget to
accomplish the stated business objectives in the given timelines. For near-term
projects, set up a regular meeting cadence to make sure you are on track to hit the
milestones you’ve laid out. The goal here is to ensure that everyone who is
responsible for bringing your roadmap to life is aligned with the plan and
understands what’s expected of them and when.
Tips & Tricks
1. Roadmap timelines are broad estimates, contingent on many factors, so give
yourself some buffers. These are living documents that adapt to change and
crystalize as information becomes available.
2. Early on in the roadmap, include some projects that are likely to result in quick
wins to help you build momentum and buy-in for your CX efforts.
3. Be realistic with goals, delivery times, and expectations of impact. Setting
goals that are too aggressive can negatively impact your buy-in and support in
the long run.
4. Keep your EX Project Evaluation Inventory hand as this will provide the detail
needed to go deeper on each project, such as expected business outcomes and
impact.
5. Don’t overlook technology management. Data, administrative, and integration
elements all have an important place in a well-defined program roadmap.
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Resources to support you:
TOOL
Prioritizing
Improvements Across
EX Skills and Actions
TOOL
Effective XM
Communication Plans:
Strengths and Gaps
WHAT COMES NEXT
Now that you have your EX Roadmap, here are some next steps to consider:
•
Assemble your team.
Your EX roadmap will require both funding and staffing, so
make sure that these are in place before you jump into the projects. Don’t fall into
the trap of trying to accomplish all that you’ve defined without any of the required
resources. Start by identifying your core team.
•
Establish a governance structure.
You need to set up the organizational
structures that will provide the appropriate decision-making, alignment,
accountability, and conflict resolution. This typically includes an executive sponsor,
executive steering committee, cross-functional working group, and EX
ambassadors.
•
Detail your near-term project plans.
These are the fine details relating to the
projects that will be delivered over the next 9 to 12 months. It should include
expected outcomes, timelines, and resource allocations. Ensure there is sufficient
time, tools, technology, headcount, and budget to enable success.
•
Start communicating successes.
Look for opportunities to get small wins and make
sure you share those success stories and highlight the employees who were
involved. This will help to create momentum and support for the roadmap from
across the organization. Developing a well-defined communication plan can help you
keep employees and other stakeholders informed about the value and progress of
EX activities.
