What is a Colleague Journey?

Every organisation already has a colleague journey.

The question is whether anyone knows what it is…

There is a moment, somewhere around the third week of a new job, when most people quietly recalibrate their expectations. The breathless enthusiasm of recruitment gives way to the slightly more complicated reality of actually working somewhere. I guess that’s the end of the “honeymoon phase”.

• The “dynamic and collaborative culture” turns out to involve a great many meetings without clear purpose.
• The “clear development pathway” turns out to be a PDF that was last updated 8 years ago.
• The onboarding process, described during interviews as “really comprehensive,” turns out to consist of a laptop that does not work for three days and a hurried lunch with someone from the team who was told twenty minutes before you arrived that they would be your buddy.

This is not a disaster. It is fairly normal. But it is also the beginning of a pattern that will repeat, in different forms and at different intensities, throughout the entire time that person works for your organisation.

Every stage of the relationship between a colleague and their employer, from the moment they first encounter the brand to the moment they leave (and, increasingly, beyond), carries its own opportunities to build trust and its own risks of quietly destroying it. The colleague journey is the framework that attempts to make this entire arc visible, manageable, and, ideally, something that an organisation designs with intention rather than stumbles through by accident.

What Is the Colleague Journey?

The colleague journey is the complete sequence of stages and experiences that characterise a person’s relationship with an organisation over time. It typically begins before the individual has any direct contact with the organisation (through employer brand and reputation) and, in the most sophisticated treatments, extends beyond departure into an alumni relationship.

The framework asks a deceptively simple question: what is it actually like to be attracted to, hired by, integrated into, developed within, and eventually separated from this organisation? And where, along that arc, does the experience break down?

The idea is not new, though the terminology has shifted over the years. Human resource management has long organised itself around lifecycle stages: recruitment, induction, development, performance management, succession planning, exit. What the colleague journey concept adds, and this is where the customer experience heritage becomes important, is the insistence on seeing these stages from the perspective of the person going through them, not from the perspective of the HR function administering them.

The distinction matters more than it might initially seem. An onboarding process that looks beautifully efficient from an operational standpoint, with all the forms completed and the compliance training scheduled, may feel bewildering, impersonal, and anxiety-inducing from the perspective of the new colleague experiencing it. The colleague journey framework insists that it is the second perspective, the lived experience, that determines the outcome.

Where the Idea Comes From: Customer Journey Mapping

The colleague journey did not emerge from the HR function. It was borrowed, quite explicitly, from marketing and user experience design, where customer journey mapping has been a core practice for decades. In the customer context, journey mapping involves documenting every touchpoint a customer has with a brand, from initial awareness through purchase, use, and advocacy, identifying the emotions, expectations, and pain points at each stage, and using that understanding to design better experiences.

Pine and Gilmore (1999), in their influential work on the experience economy, argued that economic value had shifted from commodities to goods to services and, finally, to experiences. Their contention was that in mature markets, it is the quality of the experience, the way something feels, not just what it does, that differentiates and creates value. This thinking has profoundly shaped how organisations think about customers, and the extension to employees was, in hindsight, inevitable. If experience is the primary source of value in the customer relationship, why would it not be equally important in the employment relationship? We do, after all, live now in an “experience economy”.

Jacob Morgan (2017) was among the most prominent voices to make this connection explicit. In The Employee Experience Advantage, Morgan argued that organisations needed to apply the same rigour to designing the employee experience that they applied to the customer experience, and that doing so required a fundamentally journey-based perspective. His framework, which encompassed culture, technology, and physical environment as the three pillars of employee experience, was built on the premise that the experience of working for an organisation is not a single, static thing but a sequence of episodes that unfold over time, each of which shapes the overall relationship.

Josh Plaskoff (2017) pushed the analogy further, arguing for an explicit application of design thinking to the employee experience. Plaskoff’s contribution was to emphasise empathy, prototyping, and iteration, the core principles of human-centred design, as methods for understanding and improving the colleague journey. Rather than designing HR processes from the top down and hoping they land well, Plaskoff advocated starting with deep empathy for the people going through those processes and designing from their perspective outward. This is, of course, exactly what good customer journey mapping does, and the parallel is not coincidental.

We should note, however, that the analogy has limits. Employees are not customers. The employment relationship involves dimensions of power, identity, obligation, and interdependence that the customer relationship typically does not. Treating employees as “internal customers” can lead to a consumerist framing that underplays the mutuality, complexity, and, frankly, the messiness of what it means to belong to an organisation. The customer journey metaphor is useful as a lens, not as a total description of the employment relationship. We will return to this limitation later.

The Typical Stages

While every organisation is different, the colleague journey is typically described in terms of eight to ten stages. The exact number and naming, but they’re roughly as follows:

Attraction and Employer Brand. The journey begins before the person has applied for a job, sometimes before they have even heard of the organisation. Employer brand, the reputation and image an organisation projects into the labour market, shapes who considers working for you and what expectations they form before any direct contact occurs. This stage is shaped by everything from your website and social media presence to what current and former employees say about you on Glassdoor, at industry events, or over coffee with friends. The expectations formed here become the foundation of the psychological contract and those early expectations have a remarkable persistence. What people believe about your organisation before they join will shape how they interpret everything that follows.

Recruitment and Selection. The recruitment process is, for many people, the most intense and emotionally salient phase of the journey. It is where the organisation makes its most concentrated effort to present itself favourably, and where the candidate is simultaneously at their most attentive and their most anxious. Every interaction during recruitment, the tone of the job advert, the responsiveness of the recruiter, the behaviour of the interviewing panel, the speed and quality of communication, sends signals that the candidate uses to construct their understanding of what working here will actually be like. Recruitment is also, notably, a stage where power asymmetries are starkly visible. The organisation has something the candidate wants (a job), and the candidate is acutely aware of this. How the organisation uses that power, whether it treats candidates with respect and transparency or as supplicants to be processed, reveals a great deal about its underlying culture.

Onboarding. The transition from successful candidate to functioning colleague is one of the most critical, and most frequently botched, stages of the entire journey. Onboarding encompasses the first days, weeks, and months of employment, during which the new colleague is forming their initial impressions of the lived reality of the organisation. The research is unambiguous: onboarding is a period of heightened psychological vulnerability and heightened receptivity. People are simultaneously anxious about whether they have made the right decision, eager to prove their worth, and acutely sensitive to whether the promises made during recruitment are being kept. A well-designed onboarding experience builds confidence, connection, and commitment. A poor one seeds doubt that may never be fully resolved.

Integration. Distinct from onboarding, though the two overlap, integration refers to the longer process of becoming a fully functioning, socially embedded member of the organisation. Where onboarding is about getting started, integration is about belonging. It encompasses learning the unwritten rules, building relationships, understanding the political landscape, finding your place in the social fabric of the team and the wider organisation. Integration can take months or even years, and it is a stage that many organisations essentially ignore, assuming that once someone has completed their induction, they are “in.” The reality is that feeling genuinely part of an organisation is a much slower and more fragile process than completing an induction programme, and the colleagues who feel well-integrated are demonstrably different, in terms of engagement, commitment, and performance, from those who do not.

Development. Once a colleague is established, the question of growth becomes central. The development stage encompasses everything related to learning, skill-building, and personal and professional growth: formal training, coaching, mentoring, stretch assignments, job rotations, feedback, and the myriad informal learning opportunities that arise from working alongside capable, generous colleagues. For many people, development is the stage that most powerfully shapes their long-term relationship with the organisation. An employer that demonstrably invests in your growth is communicating something fundamentally different about the deal than one that expects you to deliver but does not invest in your capacity to do so.

Performance. The ongoing management of performance, encompassing goal-setting, feedback, appraisal, recognition, and accountability, is a stage that is less a discrete phase and more a continuous thread running through the entire journey. We include it as a distinct stage because the way an organisation approaches performance has a disproportionate impact on the employee experience. Performance management systems that feel fair, transparent, and developmentally oriented build trust and engagement. Systems that feel arbitrary, politicised, or punitive erode both.

Progression and Promotion. Closely connected to development but distinct in important ways, progression concerns the colleague’s movement through the organisation: vertical promotions, lateral moves, expanded responsibilities, and changes in status, scope, or influence. Progression is where expectations are at their most charged and disappointments are at their most acute. Being passed over for a promotion is one of the most reliably documented triggers for psychological contract violation, particularly when the criteria seem opaque or the process seems unfair. Organisations that manage progression well communicate clear, honest criteria, provide genuine feedback, and treat those who are not selected with the same respect as those who are. Organisations that manage it badly create a tournament culture of resentment, suspicion, and quiet disengagement among the majority who are not advancing as quickly as they had hoped.

Offboarding and Exit. The way an organisation handles departure, whether voluntary or involuntary, reveals an enormous amount about its values and its maturity. Offboarding is a stage that many organisations barely acknowledge. The leaver hands back their laptop, serves out their notice in an atmosphere that ranges from politely awkward to openly resentful, and leaves. Exit interviews, when they happen, are typically conducted by HR professionals who record the responses, file them, and never look at them again. This is a missed opportunity of staggering proportions. The exit stage is one of the richest sources of honest feedback an organisation will ever have, because people who are leaving have far less incentive to self-censor. It is also a moment that shapes the departing colleague’s final memory of the organisation, which, as Kahneman’s peak-end rule suggests, will disproportionately colour how they remember the entire experience.

Alumni. Increasingly, organisations are recognising that the colleague journey does not end at exit. Former employees remain connected to the organisation as potential rehires, referral sources, clients, advocates, and, if their experience was poor, vocal critics. The alumni stage acknowledges this ongoing relationship and treats former colleagues as a community worth maintaining.

Moments That Matter

Not every touchpoint in the colleague journey carries equal weight. One of the most useful contributions of the journey-mapping approach is the concept of “moments that matter,” critical episodes or transitions that have a disproportionate impact on how someone experiences the overall relationship. These are the points where things either go memorably right or memorably wrong, and they shape the emotional narrative of the entire journey.

The concept has roots in Kahneman’s peak-end rule (Kahneman et al., 1993), which demonstrates that people’s retrospective evaluation of an experience is disproportionately shaped by its most emotionally intense moment (the peak) and its final moment (the end), rather than by the average quality of the experience as a whole.

Applied to the colleague journey, this means that a few pivotal moments, the first week, the first performance review, the first time you are passed over or promoted, the way you are treated during a personal crisis, the way your departure is handled, will colour the entire memory of what it was like to work somewhere. Organisations that understand this allocate their attention and resources accordingly, focusing less on making everything uniformly adequate and more on getting the high-stakes moments genuinely right.

Common moments that matter include: the first day (which sets the tone for everything that follows), the first meaningful feedback conversation, the first significant challenge or setback, the transition to a new role or team, the response of the organisation during a personal difficulty, and the experience of leaving. These moments are not the same for everyone, and part of the value of mapping the colleague journey within your own organisation is identifying which moments carry the most weight for your particular population. But the general principle is robust: if you want to improve the colleague experience, do not try to improve everything at once. Identify the moments that matter most and start there.

The Connection to Employee Experience, Employer Brand, and Culture

The colleague journey is not a standalone concept. It sits within a web of related ideas that together describe the human dimension of organisational life.

Employee experience (EX) is perhaps the closest conceptual neighbour. Where the colleague journey describes the stages and touchpoints over time, employee experience describes the cumulative quality of what the individual encounters at each stage: the cultural environment, the technological tools, the physical workspace, the quality of leadership and relationships. Morgan (2017) argued that employee experience is the sum of everything an employee encounters, observes, and feels throughout their relationship with an organisation. The colleague journey provides the temporal structure; employee experience provides the qualitative substance.

Employer brand is the organisation’s reputation as a place to work, and it is both an input to the colleague journey (shaping initial attraction and expectations) and an output of it (shaped by the cumulative experiences of everyone who has ever worked there). The colleague journey framework makes visible the frequently uncomfortable gap between what the employer brand promises and what the lived experience delivers. Most employer branding operates in the attraction stage, but the brand is made or broken in every subsequent stage, by the daily reality of what it actually feels like to work somewhere.

The psychological contract (Rousseau, 1995), the unwritten set of mutual expectations between an individual and their organisation, is formed, tested, and either honoured or violated at every stage of the colleague journey. What makes the journey framework useful in relation to psychological contracts is that it helps organisations see where in the lifecycle violations are most likely to occur. Recruitment seeds the contract; onboarding tests it; development and progression either fulfil or betray it; exit reveals the final verdict.

Organisational culture is the medium through which the colleague journey is experienced. Every stage is lived within a cultural context that shapes its meaning and impact. An organisation with a genuinely supportive culture will deliver a different onboarding experience, a different feedback conversation, a different exit process than one with a culture of fear or indifference, even if the formal processes are identical on paper. Culture is not a stage of the journey; it is the water the journey swims in.

How to Map Your Own Colleague Journey

The practical value of the colleague journey concept lies in actually mapping your own, not in admiring the generic model. Here is a pragmatic approach, informed by both the design thinking tradition and the realities of organisational life.

Start with empathy, not process. The most common mistake in journey mapping is to start with the organisational process and describe it from the inside out. Resist this. Start with the colleague’s perspective. What is it actually like to find out about this organisation? To apply? To be interviewed? To arrive on your first day? To be a year in and still unsure whether you belong? Gather real data: interviews, focus groups, diary studies, anonymous surveys, exit interview themes. Do not assume you know what the experience is like because you designed the process. The gap between design intent and lived experience is where most of the useful information lives.

Map the stages, then identify the touch-points. Using the stages described above as a starting framework (adapting them to your own context), identify the specific touch-points and interactions that characterise each stage in your organisation. A touchpoint is any interaction between the colleague and the organisation: a conversation, a system, a communication, a decision, a physical environment, a policy experienced in practice. For each touchpoint, try to understand what the colleague is thinking, feeling, expecting, and needing. Where are the gaps between expectation and reality? Where are the moments of friction, confusion, or disappointment?

Identify the moments that matter. Which touch-points have the most disproportionate impact on the overall experience? These will vary by organisation, role, and individual, but patterns will emerge. Common high-impact moments include the first week, the first significant feedback, being overlooked for an opportunity, experiencing a crisis, and the final weeks before departure. Focus your improvement energy on these moments first.

Look for the gaps between promise and reality. This is where the colleague journey intersects with employer brand and psychological contracts. At each stage, ask: what are we promising, explicitly or implicitly? And what are we delivering? The distance between the two is your credibility gap, and it is the single most useful diagnostic the journey mapping process can produce.

Prioritise ruthlessly. You cannot improve everything at once, and trying to do so is the fastest route to improving nothing. Use the data from your mapping exercise to identify the two or three areas where the experience is most broken and the impact of improvement would be greatest. Then do something about them, before mapping anything else. A journey map that leads to action in two areas is infinitely more valuable than a comprehensive map that leads to a beautifully formatted report that sits on a shared drive untouched.

Iterate. Journey mapping is not a one-off project. The colleague experience evolves as the organisation changes, as the labour market shifts, as demographics and expectations change. Build review cycles into the process and treat the map as a living document, not a finished artefact.

Limitations and Caveats

The colleague journey framework is not a panacea, does have limitations.

The linear model oversimplifies. Real careers are not tidy progressions from attraction through development to a graceful exit. People loop back, skip stages, experience multiple stages simultaneously, and move between organisations in patterns that bear little resemblance to the neat lifecycle model. The colleague journey framework is a useful simplification, not an accurate description of how careers actually unfold.

Every organisation is different. The model described above is just an example. In some organisations, the attraction stage barely exists because most recruitment is through personal networks. In others, the alumni stage is irrelevant because the sector is small enough that everyone already knows each other. The framework needs to be adapted to your reality.

Not all stages are equally important everywhere. A fast-growing startup will find that onboarding and integration are overwhelmingly the stages that determine success or failure. A mature public sector organisation may find that development and progression are where the most significant experience gaps lie. Context determines priority.

The employee-as-customer analogy has limits. Employees are not customers. They are members, contributors, stakeholders, and, in many senses, co-creators of the organisational experience. The customer journey metaphor is useful for shifting perspective towards the human experience of organisational processes, but it risks introducing a consumerist logic that underplays mutuality, obligation, and the fact that the employment relationship involves things, like power, dependency, and identity, that the customer relationship typically does not.

Mapping is not the same as improving. Journey mapping has an appealing completeness to it; it feels like an accomplishment. But a map that is not followed by action is an expensive wall-chart. The value of the colleague journey concept lies entirely in what you do differently as a result of understanding it. If the map does not lead to change, it has not achieved anything, however attractively it is designed.

Learning More

To go deeper, explore these resources on people-shift.com:

• Employee Experience
• Employee Engagement
• Organisational Culture
• Career Drivers
• Career Anchors

The People Shift View

At PeopleShift, we find the colleague journey framework genuinely useful, not because it tells organisations something they could not have figured out on their own, but because it provides a structure for paying attention to things that are otherwise remarkably easy to ignore. It’s a useful tool around which to have conversations with leaders and managers, and a useful way of thinking about experiences and moments that matter.

As we say above though, without taking action as a result of it, it’s pretty useless, no matter how fun it might be to build and how attractive the final outcome might be.