Employee transitions: Everything you need to know in 2022

Today is the day you discover a brand new way of using your HR vocabulary: namely, in the context of “employee transitions”.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Another notion to grasp? Another process to master?” I know, it’s a lot, I get it. But trust me, you’re already an expert!

So what exactly is an employee transition?

Well, by now you’ve all heard of onboarding (including preboarding), most are familiar with offboarding, and many (due in part to the pandemic) are becoming well-versed in crossboarding and reboarding. An employee transition is the overarching term to describe ALL of these processes.

Defining employee transitions

Essentially, an employee transition is any moment when your people move from one phase of the employee lifecycle - to the next. It could be a fresh recruit joining your organization (onboarding), a new parent returning to work from parental leave (reboarding), a gifted individual making an internal move (crossboarding) or a soon-to-be ex-employee departing your organization (offboarding).

Employee transitions are high risk, high reward scenarios and, depending how they’re handled, can improve or hurt retention, engagement and productivity.

In short, every transition in an employee’s tenure is a critical opportunity to showcase just what a fantastic employer you are and grow your team members' connection to your organization.

What they have in common

Traditionally, different employee transition moments are treated as separate processes, often managed in stand-alone systems by different entities within an organization.

The thing is, this approach doesn’t make all that much sense. Why? Because each transition is simply one facet of the same connected process.

At the heart of every employee transition is essentially the same set of challenges. As an employer we’re looking to remove barriers for employees, minimize HR administration time, maximize positive organizational impact and capture data for future improvement.

Bringing all these processes under one digital umbrella will ultimately give HR leaders more oversight and deliver better overall results (for both people and profit) than a disconnected approach.

For an employee, transition moments are just like any life change, they come with equal measures of excitement and trepidation. They look forward to the changes and challenges, but also fear the unknown, the idea that they may not be prepared for what the future has in store.

Treating each of these transition moments as equally important to your employees can help build on the excitement and mitigate their misgivings - making for a much more pleasant experience.

Lessons from onboarding

Onboarding is the “original” employee transition, the first to be recognised for its importance as a pivotal employee moment.

Good employee transition strategy takes its lead from the lessons learned in onboarding. It balances experience and process to produce a seamless journey that integrates both employees and key organizational stakeholders.

And just like onboarding, every transition moment has an all-important “first day” experience that sets the tone for what’s to come. That first day could be as a new manager, as part of a talent development program, within a new team, after returning from extended leave, as part of a relocation, or even following a departure.

What to expect in 2022

We’re already seeing a big shift from human resources leaders to consolidate the sheer number of digital tools they are using to manage their talent. What was once a boon - having distinct tech to handle every individual process - is swiftly becoming an unmanageable rabbit’s warren of complexity.

In 2022, expect to see the concept of employee transitions become more prevalent as solution providers (including Talmundo) respond to this need and augment their product offerings to be more integrated and user-friendly than ever before.

To prepare for the changes to come, consider these two questions:

What transition moments already exist within my organization?
Does my organization value each employee transition equally?

We’ll take a closer look at each transition separately in our next blog post.

Want to talk more about digital employee transitions with Talmundo?
Speak to one of our friendly team members today!