From onboarding to exit: How to maximize the employee lifecycle

Use employee engagement software to engage your workforce every step of the way

The employee lifecycle incorporates the following stages:

• Preboarding: The time between an accepted offer and an employee’s first day
• Onboarding: Orientation, training, and support delivered over a new hire’s first months in a role
• Development: Support for learning and career growth
• Engagement: Building a workplace culture of connection and belonging
• Retention: Keeping top talent invested in your organization and their work
• Transition: Supporting change and offboarding with care

The challenge for managers and HR teams is ensuring high levels of employee engagement at every point in that journey.

We know that just 23% of employees are engaged at work. And that disengagement hurts everything from employee retention to customer loyalty to employee well-being to productivity.

So how do you maximize the employee life cycle, ensuring levels of engagement that drive business success?

It helps to have the right employee engagement software on your team. With employee engagement tools, you can create a seamless, consistent, and personalized journey for all employees — whether they’re working in the office, from home, or on the frontlines of your organization.

Let’s take a look at how you can make that happen. Here’s how to use software tools to improve engagement throughout the employee lifecycle.

How to enhance the employee lifecycle with engagement software

#1. Preboarding: Creating a great experience before day one

First impressions matter. And the preboarding phase is your opportunity to introduce a new hire to company culture and set the tone for their employee experience.

An effective preboarding process welcomes new employees to the organization. It also calms those inevitable nerves, as it gives new staff all the information they need to prepare for their first day.

You can use employee engagement software during this phase to:

• Sustain employee communication between the offer stage and an employee’s first day
• Share useful documents and get employees to sign any necessary paperwork
• Share welcome messages from managers and team members
• Provide a road map of the onboarding process, so new hires know what to expect

With Blink’s Employee Journeys, you can use start-date triggers to send tailored employee communications ahead of their first day. You can also include an employee’s line manager in the journey for a seamless and supportive experience.

#2. Onboarding: Setting the stage for success

According to Gallup, employees who get a great onboarding experience are 2.6x more likely to be “extremely satisfied” at work. They’re also more likely to stay working for you.

This is a crucial time. The first 90 days in a role are considered some of the riskiest in terms of employee retention. New hires start working for you with high hopes and expectations. If the reality is too far from what was promised during recruitment, they’re likely to jump ship.

The good news is that employee engagement software can help you maximize engagement and minimize that attrition risk during the onboarding process. 

Here are some key actions to take at this stage to boost — and maintain — employee morale:

• Personalize the onboarding journey, ensuring content is hyper-relevant at key employee milestones with customizable templates
• Provide self-serve access to resources, training, and team profiles, so employees can get to know the entire company and their co-workers
• Check in regularly with pulse surveys, offering recognition for employee efforts and seeking their real-time feedback on the onboarding process
• Train employees on how to use your employee engagement and internal communication tools, plus existing HR systems like Workday

Employee engagement software helps you deliver the right information to new employees at the right time. This prevents overwhelm and ensures a streamlined onboarding process.

You also free up a resource that is better than any bot at inspiring employee engagement — your real-life employees.

By leaving your software to take care of the nuts and bolts of the onboarding process, managers and co-workers can spend more time with your new hire. That means they experience meaningful interactions and feel part of the team more quickly.

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#3. Development: Nurturing growth and learning

In its 2025 Global Culture Report, O.C. Tanner explores why some employees are thriving, while others are only surviving. It reports that employees are 68 times more likely to thrive at work when their organization prioritizes skill-building and career development.

Nurturing employee skills and supporting them to reach their career goals is key to engagement and retention. And the right employee engagement solutions help you to achieve that.

You can use your software to:

• Integrate training modules into your employee engagement platform to deliver a seamless experience
• Craft personalized development plans that align with employee and organizational goals
• Offer gamified and micro-learning training sessions to engage busy employees and allow them to learn at their own pace
• Track progress toward personal and departmental objectives, offering regular support and recognition

With Blink’s employee intranet, seamless integration with L&D software is easy. With single sign-on technology, employees can access the latest training modules via the intuitive Blink interface — in just a few clicks. No additional login details necessary.

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#4. Engagement: Building a culture of connection and belonging

Supportive workplace relationships are a bedrock of employee engagement. So helping employees to make connections with coworkers — and to feel part of company culture — is a sure-fire way to improve the employee experience. 

If you have a remote team or lots of frontline employees, this is something you have to be very intentional about. It’s easy for people who work away from HQ to feel disconnected from the wider organization.

Luckily, this is another thing that an employee engagement app can help with. You can use your platform to:

• Share real-time company news and amplify company culture via a multimedia news feed
• Support employees to find like-minded co-workers with social features, like communities, which are based around hobbies and interests
• Encourage co-workers to collaborate and share knowledge, exchanging resources via team messaging tools
• Measure engagement with the help of employee surveys, employee sentiment analysis, and advanced analytics on platform usage

A tool like Blink is available via an intuitive employee app. So employees can get company news and interact with co-workers via their smartphones. This ensures all employees — no matter where they work — experience the sense of connection and belonging that is key to engagement.

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#5. Retention: Keeping top talent invested

Talent retention is about more than competitive pay. In fact, research shows that engaged employees look for a 31% pay increase to consider taking a job with another organization.

So what can you do to inspire this type of loyalty among your employees? Besides fostering employee development, career growth, and performance management — all while creating a culture of recognition — you can harness your employee engagement software to reduce employee turnover. 

Here’s how:

• Use platform data and employee feedback to identify disengaged employees and their pain points, staying ahead of potential issues
• Launch well-being initiatives, providing resources and programs that support physical mental, and emotional health and boost employee satisfaction
• Make social recognition an integral part of company culture, showing employees that you value their contributions

Your software allows you to track employee engagement — and discover areas of the employee experience that need improvement. These actionable insights can help you pinpoint the benefits and workplace changes that will make the biggest difference to employee retention.

Read more: How to make employee retention your competitive advantage

#6. Transition: Supporting change and offboarding with care

The employee lifecycle doesn’t end when an employee hands in their notice. How you handle transitions — whether that’s a promotion, a role change, or an exit — can impact your employer brand and the morale of remaining employees.

So treat transitions as a chance to gather useful feedback from your employees. Try to discover what they did and didn’t like about the employee experience — and seek concrete ways to improve employee engagement.

You can use your employee engagement software at this stage in the employee lifecycle to:

• Provide resources and support as an employee transitions to a new role
• Send automated exit pulse surveys to capture valuable feedback before an employee leaves
• Create a centralized content hub where employees can document workflows, processes, and critical knowledge before leaving
• Analyze employee feedback to inform future engagement strategies

End the relationship on a positive note and ex-employees are more likely to recommend your organization as a place to work. They may even “boomerang” back to you when looking for their next role.

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Maximize your employee lifecycle with the best employee engagement tools

The employee lifecycle is a series of opportunities to engage, develop, and retain talent. And good employee engagement software provides tools to optimize every stage of that journey.

With the right platform, you can improve internal communications, training, recognition, and connection. You can inspire employees to feel more invested in their work, so they’re happier and more loyal to your organization.

Pick a mobile-first engagement tool and you ensure that every member of your workforce gets access to the same great employee experience. They can access your platform via their smartphones, checking in at a time and place that works for them.

So what does all of this mean for your organization? Sustained engagement throughout the whole of the employee lifecycle across your entire organization means: 

• Improved productivity
• Reduced absenteeism
• Lower levels of attrition
• Improved employee well-being

According to Gallup, high engagement teams also experience a 23% increase in profitability, which makes employee engagement software an excellent investment for any organization.

‍Blink. And find out how an employee engagement platform can transform the employee life cycle.