Employee Experience Audit
A read of the journey your people actually walk - stage by stage, moment by moment - and the few that decide whether they stay, grow, or quietly check out.
Our employee experience audit maps the journey your people actually walk - from the first advert they see to the day they leave - and marks the moments that decide how it feels. We look at six stretches of that journey: attraction, onboarding, the everyday work, growth, the transitions people pass through, and exit. Then we give you the few moments that matter most - the ones working well and worth protecting, the ones quietly breaking, and the one to redesign first.
An engagement score tells you the temperature. It rarely tells you which moment in the journey set it. The audit finds that moment, and the fix lives in redesigning it, not in nudging the number.
Organisations with a strong employee experience see 59% lower turnover than those without (Gallup).
When an employee experience audit helps
An audit earns its place when the experience is costing you somewhere specific, and you need to see which stretch of the journey it traces back to:
The situation | How it helps |
|---|---|
People leave sooner than they should | Traces the exits back to the moment the journey lost them, so you fix the stage, not the symptom. |
New starters take too long to land | Reads the onboarding stretch against how it feels day one to day ninety, so people arrive properly, not just processed. |
The eNPS moved and no one knows why | Goes underneath the score to the touchpoints driving it, so you act on the moment, not the metric. |
The EVP you promise isn't the job people get | Sets the experience you designed against the one people live, and shows you where the promise and the day part company. |
A restructure is about to reshape the everyday | Reads how the change lands across the journey before it hits, so the moments that matter survive it. |
You're standing up an EX function | Gives you a baseline journey map to build from, so the work starts from where people actually are. |
What we look at
Most organisations already run surveys and pulses, so there's usually a read of how people feel. We start there, then walk the journey itself - the stages people pass through, and the moments inside them that set how the whole thing lands.
The lifecycle end to end
Every stage from attraction and onboarding through the everyday work, growth, transitions and exit - the whole arc, not a slice. Most organisations know some stages intimately and others hardly at all.
We map your lifecycle as your people actually pass through it, stage by stage. Setting the well-known stages beside the unexamined ones shows where attention is already paying off, and which stretch of the journey deserves it next.
The moments that matter
The first day, the first 1:1, a promotion, a return from leave, a hard restructure - the touchpoints that carry more weight than the days around them. They're also the moments most within your gift to design.
We find which moments matter most in your organisation - they differ by workforce - and gather recent, real accounts of how each one goes. That gives you a shortlist of high-leverage redesigns instead of a general programme.
The three environments
The physical, digital and cultural spaces people work inside, and whether each one helps or drags at the moment it's needed. The same 1:1 lands differently in a quiet room, over a laggy call, or in a team where feedback feels risky.
We read each environment at the moments that matter most - the tools people actually touch, the spaces they sit in, the norms around them. Often two environments are working and one is dragging, and naming which changes the fix entirely.
The listening architecture
Where surveys, pulses, eNPS and exit and stay conversations feed a loop that closes - and where the loop goes dead. Listening earns its keep on the response, not the asking.
We audit the full architecture: what you ask, what the data shows, and what visibly changed as a result. You end up knowing which channels people trust, which have gone quiet, and where closing one loop would restore faith in the rest.
Designed intent against lived reality
The experience the EVP promises set beside the one people actually feel on a normal week. Both are real: the intent shapes what you build, and the lived week decides what people tell their friends.
We take the promises in your EVP, your job ads and your onboarding, and test each against what people describe. Where the promise holds you have an EVP to market harder; where it slips, you'll know whether to change the week or the wording.
Friction and effort
The everyday drag - the systems, hand-offs and hoops - that makes the job harder than the work itself needs it to be. No single instance looks worth escalating, which is exactly how it accumulates.
We ask people to walk us through one ordinary task and count what stands between them and done - logins, approvals, re-entering the same information. The result is a friction list ranked by effort saved: small items, big cumulative relief.
The six angles stay constant; how we walk them, we shape around you - your lifecycle, your locations, your listening tools and operating model - so the map is your journey, not a template.
Why these six angles
We read experience as a journey because that's how people live it - as a sequence of stages and moments, not a single climate. The lifecycle sets the frame; the moments that matter are where the weight sits. A first day, a first 1:1, a promotion, a return from leave, a hard restructure - these carry more than the ordinary days, and a stumble at one of them colours the stretch on either side. So we find them first, then read what happens there.
The three environments - physical, digital, cultural - are the conditions each moment plays out inside, and any one of them can quietly undo a well-meant design. The listening architecture is how the organisation hears its own journey; where a survey goes out and nothing comes back, the loop has gone dead, and that gap is usually visible in the experience. Designed intent against lived reality is the master signal here: the distance between the EVP you promise and the week people actually get.
Friction sits underneath all of it. Most of what makes a job harder than it needs to be isn't the work - it's the effort around it, the systems and hand-offs and hoops between a person and the thing they're trying to do. It rarely shows up in a score, and it's often the cheapest, highest-leverage thing to fix. These six are our lens, refined across many organisations, and they're deliberately about the journey as it's felt, not the org chart it runs on.
How it works
We build the audit on service-design artefacts, not a scored questionnaire - we map the journey the way people actually walk it, through more than one lens, so the findings hold up:
- We map it - the employee journey end to end, marked with the moments that matter, then blueprinted - the front-stage experience set against the back-stage processes, systems and ownership that produce it. The blueprint shows where a good intention meets a broken hand-off.
- We measure it - a listening pulse across the journey, or a fresh read of your existing survey, eNPS and exit data. We show you where the experience splits - by stage, by team, by tenure - not just the average, because the split is usually where the moment is.
- We listen at the moments that matter - cross-section interviews with people who've recently passed through the first day, the promotion, the return, the exit - what actually happened there, set against what the design intended.
- We notice the environments - time spent in the real physical, digital and cultural spaces people work inside, seeing the friction a survey never reaches.
The thinking behind the method
No single method captures a journey on its own, so we use several and cross-check them. A survey tells you how people feel, but not where in the journey the feeling was set - and an average hides how differently a new starter and a ten-year veteran walk the same lifecycle. Interviews reach the moment, but only from the people who've just lived it. Walking the environments shows you the friction people have stopped noticing because they've routed around it for years. Used together, they triangulate: a finding has to show up in more than one before we mark it on the map.
We build the read on a journey map and a service blueprint on purpose. A map alone tells you where the experience breaks; the blueprint tells you why, by setting the front-stage moment against the back-stage process and ownership behind it. A cold first day is rarely a values problem - it's usually an unowned hand-off between recruitment and the line manager. The blueprint makes that visible, which is what turns a complaint into something you can redesign.
And we interview at the moments that matter rather than at random, because that's where experience is made or lost. Someone three weeks past a messy onboarding, or a fortnight back from parental leave, can tell you precisely what the touchpoint felt like and where it dropped them. We show you the spread across those accounts, not a single tidy number - two organisations with the same eNPS can be completely different journeys to walk.
What you get
A journey map you can work from, not a report filed and forgotten. We walk you through:
- The journey your people actually walk - mapped end to end, stage by stage.
- The moments that matter, marked - which are landing well and worth protecting.
- Where the experience breaks, and why - the touchpoint and the back-stage reason behind it.
- The one or two moments to redesign first, for the most difference across the journey.
Where two things are both true and pulling against each other - "we promise a fast, autonomous first month" and "the systems take six weeks to grant access" - we mark both on the map. That gap between the promise and the plumbing is usually where the redesign starts.
How we hand it back - and what happens next
The audit ends in a working session over the journey map, not a document dropped in your inbox. We take you through it in person - the stages, the moments marked, where the experience breaks and the back-stage reason why - so it lands as something you can act on, rather than a map read once and filed.
Some of the most useful findings come as tensions - a promise the EVP makes and a moment in the journey that quietly breaks it. We mark those rather than smoothing them into one clean story, because the tension is usually the moment worth redesigning first.
From there it's your call. Sometimes the map is enough and you carry the redesign yourselves. Sometimes you want us alongside to reshape a moment that matters, or a whole stretch of the lifecycle. And if the fix turns out to be lighter than you feared - one unowned hand-off, not a programme - we'll say so.
Focused now, or continuous over time
This is a focused, one-off read of the journey your people walk right now. If what you want is the whole organisation tracked continuously - experience as one thread among eight - that's States of Vitality, our organisational-health platform. Different job: a deep read of the journey now, versus the wider picture over time.
Common questions
Is this the same as our engagement survey?
No. A survey gives you the temperature - a score for how people feel right now. The audit finds which moments in the journey set that score, and what to redesign so it changes. We map the lifecycle end to end, read the touchpoints that carry the most weight, and set the experience you promise against the one people actually get.
How is this different from an eNPS or pulse programme?
A pulse tracks the number over time; it rarely tells you which stage of the journey moved it. We take your pulse and eNPS data as a starting read, then walk the journey to find the moment behind the movement - and hand you a map you can redesign from, not another dashboard to watch.
Who do you involve?
A cross-section, not just leaders. A listening pulse goes across the organisation, and we interview people who've recently walked the moments that matter - a first day, a promotion, a return from leave, an exit. The people who've just lived a touchpoint describe it far better than the people who designed it.
How long does it take?
It's usually weeks rather than months, but it depends on the size of your organisation and how many stages and locations the journey runs through. We build each audit around you, and agree the timeline when we scope it.
How much does it cost?
There's no standard price - we build each audit around you, so the cost reflects the size of your organisation, the scope, and the depth you need. We scope it with you and give you a clear figure before you commit.
Is it confidential?
Yes. Pulse responses are anonymous, interviews are confidential, and we report in stages, moments and patterns, never in a way that identifies an individual.
The onboarding was designed. The benefits were designed. The survey was designed. But how people actually feel about working here? That emerged from the conditions your organisation creates every day. We help you see those conditions clearly - and change the ones that matter.
The Employee Experience Blueprint gives you a designed, end-to-end employee experience: the whole life cycle mapped, the moments that matter named, and the everyday journey and the practices behind it redesigned for the people who live it. We design it with your people, so the result is genuinely theirs.
The Employee Experience Rollout takes the experience you designed in the Blueprint and makes it real across the organisation. The moments that matter run in real teams, managers are equipped to lead them, and the HR processes, technology and listening that carry the experience are in place. We run it with your people, so the organisation can keep it going once we step back.
Employee Listening & Response keeps the employee experience your rollout delivered fit and improving as the organisation changes. It runs a steady beat of listening across the employee lifecycle, turns what people tell you into visible action, and builds your own people's ability to keep it going. You can keep us on a light ongoing rhythm as well, or take the capability and run it yourselves.
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Ready to see the journey they walk?
Tell us what you're hearing from your people and what you need to understand, and we'll say whether an audit is the right move.