Employee Experience Canvas

About the Employee Experience Canvas

What is the Employee Experience Canvas?

The Employee Experience Canvas is a visual framework that helps you describe and remove points of friction for employees. Similar to templates like the Business Model Canvas, the Employee Experience Canvas is a tool to organize your thoughts and develop solution ideas in a structured way.

We designed this template for scenarios in which your organization observes friction or bottlenecks at important points of the employee lifecycle. The goal of this exercise is to analyze these moments that matter and come up with measurable solutions to improve the experience.

Any business team involved in people processes – such as HR, People Operations, Office Management, Finance, IT, and so on – can apply the Employee Experience Canvas to their area of responsibility.

How do you use this template?

Although it’s possible to create an Employee Experience Canvas on your own, this exercise works best in small groups of three to five people. Expect to spend 90 to 120 minutes filling out the canvas.

Try to focus on a moment that matters that isn’t too broad. For example, “onboarding” is too big of a bucket to fix in one workshop, while “informing new hires about essential company policies” is specific and tangible.

You can download our template (it’s free!) to print it in tabloid (A3) format or draw the grid on a whiteboard. To collaborate effectively without constantly bumping into each other, markers and sticky notes are your friends. The PDF includes a version with instructions and examples, a blank canvas, and a print-friendly version.

How do you create your Employee Experience Canvas?

Step 1: Moment that matters

Pick a situation that has a significant impact on the employee experience. Put yourself in the employee’s shoes: what are the hurdles to overcome, the jobs to be done?

Step 2: Employee context

What are the personas and shared characteristics? What are their fears and desires?

Step 3: Friction points

What gets in the way of employees reaching their goal? Where do things take too long?

Step 4: Why it matters

How do the friction points affect the employee and the business? Are there relevant data points? Any feedback we received?

Step 5: Solution ideas

How can we reduce friction? What can we add, change, or remove to make the employee experience more seamless?

Step 6: Available resources

What’s our budget? Which internal and external resources can we use?

Step 7: Means of interaction

How will the solution be used? What does the touchpoint look like?

Step 8: Adoption drivers

How do we get people to use it? What’s our rollout strategy?

Step 9: Experience metrics

How do we measure success? When do we expect to see the first results?

Step 10: Next steps

What other stakeholders are affected that we need to involve? What are specific action items we can committ to?