The Employee Journey: Your Path to Making Change Stick
Successful companies know that growth is impossible without change. They embrace and accelerate change to stay ahead of market demands, evolving customer needs, emerging technologies, and disruptive events.
But even for the most successful companies, change is notoriously difficult to master. In fact, more than 70% of all organizational change initiatives fail (BCG, 2019). You’ve probably witnessed this yourself. Despite the best intentions to transform operations or culture, enthusiasm wanes almost as soon as the campaign launches. The result? You’re back where you started after significant investments of resources and time.
No business wants to be left behind.
Nor can they afford it. That’s why LOCAL uses Change Marketing to help values-driven leaders embed new processes and behaviors - new habits - into the fabric of their organizations. Because when change sticks, it opens the door to growth.
Breaking old habits and learning new ones
The Power of Habit explores how behavior change happens in daily life, and how we can apply that approach to help companies transform. The golden rule is to “keep the cue and the reward, but change the routine.”
What routines at your company will be impacted by the change? When do those routines occur? Where are the opportunities to “inject change” and foster the new routines and behaviors that will deliver on the business promise?
At LOCAL, we believe you can’t manage change – you have to market it.
Leading brands win hearts and minds by crafting a consistent, memorable narrative across all channels. In this same spirit, LOCAL drives employee engagement and loyalty by delivering cohesive stories and compelling experiences across the employee journey.
After all, your employees are the biggest drivers of the success – or failure – of company-wide change. Employee buy-in is the most critical factor in making transformation real. That’s why we think of employees as an audience worth winning. But change takes time—time to build your campaign, launch it, and, most importantly, sustain it so that one day, your change becomes the new business as usual.
The employee journey is the path to lasting change.
Ask yourself: Across your employee experience, what are the moments that matter? What are the “cues” that provide an opportunity to teach new routines?
Each moment is an opportunity to tell your story, to “inject change” into the employee experience. Change marketing gives you the opportunity to tell that story across the entire employee experience so that each employee touchpoint reflects your company’s ambitions. When that happens, you’re much more likely to achieve them.
Consider a company launching a change initiative to improve the customer experience, requiring new behaviors and routines from employees. Rather than create and sustain a separate initiative to drive this behavior, they look to the existing employee experience and explore where improving the customer experience can be lived out. For example, employee recognition and rewards can be tied to the new behaviors that improve the customer experience.
The LOCAL Employee Journey Model
Our Employee Journey model spans every key moment - moments that matter - from the first time a prospective employee learns about your company to the day they retire after a long career with you. Each touchpoint is an opportunity to tell a consistent story that embodies who you are as a business and how you want to show up in the world.
A Case Study: Patagonia
Patagonia has always been a mission-driven organization with a long-standing commitment to environmental protection and social responsibility. In December 2018, as urgency around climate change escalated, the company updated its mission to reflect a bolder, more focused aspiration:
“We’re in business to save our home planet.”
To consistently deliver on this mission, Patagonia leans into its core values of quality, integrity, environmentalism, justice, and not being bound by convention. The company infuses these values into the employee journey in several ways:
But how else could we ensure Patagonia’s mission is not just a nice-sounding corporate policy but a lived experience at work?
Just for fun, we can use the Employee Journey Model to further align Patagonia’s employee experience with its mission to save our planet. Here’s how:
By implementing the Employee Journey Model, Patagonia can ensure that its mission resonates throughout the entire employee experience, creating a workplace where the mission is not just known but truly lived.
Infuse your organization’s story into every touchpoint
When processes and messaging support your story of change across all touchpoints, you meet every employee where they are with a consistent and engaging message. Over time, your story becomes an integral part of your culture.
Your story becomes their story.
And when your people understand where your organization is going and the role they play in getting there, they’re more equipped to drive your next phase of growth.
Let’s get started.
Do you have a story to tell? LOCAL can help you shape a narrative that speaks to your ambitions and to your people.
Interested in using the Employee Journey Model to market change inside your organization? We can help you figure out where to start, what to prioritize, and how to execute a plan to deliver change that sticks. Let’s talk.