In our organizations we like to put the life cycle of an employee into a neat series of buckets such as recruitment, onboarding and separation. But is the employee lifecycle model really an accurate way to look at an employee’s time at our organizations, or is there a better way?

In our organizations we like to put the life cycle of an employee into a neat series of buckets such as recruitment, onboarding and separation. But this is more of the organization’s perspective of what the employee lifecycle should look like, not so much an accurate picture of what employees really encounter during their time in an organization.

When we put employees into these rigid, pre-determined buckets it really causes us to view them as worker bees, not individuals. If we look at this from the employee’s perspective, their time at the organization looks quite a bit different. We would see that their time not only includes recruitment, onboarding and development, but it also includes personal aspects such as having a baby or buying a house for the first time. We would also see that it is hard to have such rigid boxes. Development, for example, is not a one time thing it really should be happening constantly.

Employees who are working for you view themselves as individuals and we are seeing this shift from work/life balance to work/life blurring. Shouldn’t we create an employee lifecycle that reflects this reality?