Journeys
Purpose: Increase productivity and employee engagement with Cleary Journeys! Journeys are powerful tools used to automate and manage onboarding, offboarding, change management, and more. You can be sure everyone involved in the process has transparent accountability through task tracking. You’ll also save time through repeatable, personalized workflows.
Who can Manage Journeys?
Users that have the Super Admin and Journey Manager permissions enabled can create and manage Journeys in Cleary. You can manage those permissions like so:
- Navigate to the Admin section in Cleary’s main navigation bar, then click Users on the left navigation bar.
- Search and click on a created user, and navigate to User Permissions on the top of their page
- Click the checkbox for Journey Manager or Super Admin
Creating a new Journey
To create a new Journey, you’ll navigate to the Admin section in Cleary’s main navigation bar, then click on Journeys on the left navigation bar. You’ll then click Create new journey.
The following module will appear. You’ll start by choosing the Journey type you wish to implement: New Hire Onboarding, Employee Offboarding, or Custom Journey.
These journeys will share most of the same functionality but are related to different employee experiences.
New Hire Onboarding and Employee Offboarding speak for themselves, while Custom Journeys can be set up for a number of different experiences - Employee Promotions/Transfers, Product Training or Migration, Paternal Leave, and more.
You’ll have the option to select different templates given your Journey type, which will populate a number of drafted journey steps that you can use as templates to get started!
If choosing New Hire Onboarding, you can select General New Hire Onboarding, Engineering New Hire Onboarding, Sales New Hire Onboarding, or Manager New Hire Onboarding. There will also be a General Employee Offboarding template if choosing the Offboarding type.
Multiple journeys can be active within the same journey type (e.g. one journey for all new hires, one for sales hires, one journey for manager hires, etc).
- Note: You can have employees on one or multiple journeys. So a new engineering manager can be on the General New Hire, Engineer, and Manager onboarding journeys.
If preferred, you can create your own journey from scratch, but we’d recommend taking a look at the templates to get started!
Once selecting the Journey type and template, click Create to begin customizing your Journey and adding your Journey Steps!
Designating a Journey Admin
Begin by clicking Settings to the right of the Journey you’ve created.
We’ll first designate a Journey Admin by searching for an employee.
The journey admin will receive any alerts and errors relating to the journey. In addition, you can populate Journey Admin as a recipient or owner in some Journey steps (more on that below), which will populate this individual.
You can change your Journey admin at any time, which will be reflected in any of the active Journey steps.
Journey Editors
Below the Journey Admin settings, you'll have the ability to designate Journey Editors. These users will be able to edit this particular journey, without having full control to access or edit other journeys.
Journey Steps
Once a journey has been created, you’ll begin editing the journey and creating/customizing journey steps. These reflect the different tasks and methods of communication you’ll set up for anyone involved in the Journey.
If you select a templated journey type, you’ll see a number of drafted steps available.
Steps will have Draft to the right of the step name (see below), and will not be activated until customized and Published.
You can click into a drafted Onboarding step to customize it. You can also create your own by clicking Create a New Step on the bottom of the page.
There are 7 different onboarding steps, some exclusive to the Journey type you choose. Click below to learn more about each Journey step, with examples of how they can be used to streamline your workflow:
For all Journeys:
For Onboarding and Custom Journey Types:
Assign a Buddy
For Offboarding Journey Types:
Journey Settings
Once you’re content with the journey steps you’ve created, you can further customize your journey using Edit Journey Logic, Add Employees and Settings
Journey Logic
Changing the journey logic will determine how employees are added to the journeys you’ve set up.
Begin by clicking Edit Journey Logic:
For Onboarding Journeys
If selecting All new hires, any employee with a start date in the future will be added to the journey automatically.
In addition, you can customize how long after their start date they can be added to the journey. This prevents users from being added to onboarding journeys if a start date is retroactively added well past their start date.
In the example below, users will be automatically added to the journey if their start date is in the future, or less than 5 days in the past.
Alternatively, you could select Specific new hires.
This will allow you to select who is automatically added to the journey based on location, team, etc. You still have the option of customizing how long after their start date an employee can be added to the journey.
In the example below, only new hires with the role of Manager, who have a start date in the future or less than 5 days in the past, will be added to the journey.
For Offboarding Journeys
If selecting All offboarding employees, any employee with an end date in the future will be added to the journey automatically.
In addition, you can customize how soon before their end date they will be added to the journey. This prevents users from being added to offboarding journeys too far in advance of their end date (e.g. contractors who have an established end date when they join).
In the example below, users will be automatically added to the journey if their end date is less than 14 days away.
Alternatively, you could select Specific offboarding employees.
This will allow you to select who is automatically added to the journey based on location, team, etc. You still have the option of customizing the timing before their end date an employee can be added to the journey.
In the example below, only offboarding employees with the role of Manager, who have an end date in fewer than 14 days, will be added to the journey.
For Custom Journeys
If selecting Everyone at the company, all employees will join this journey once published.
Alternatively, you could select Specific groups of people.
This will allow you to select who is automatically added to the journey based on location, team, etc. This can be useful if migrating a team to a new tool, for example.
In the example below, only employees in the QA Job Family would be added to this journey once published.
Add Employees
Clicking Add Employees in a journey will allow you to add employees either in addition or alternatively to adding them through the Journey Logic. A module will appear with several options:
Clicking Specific People will allow you to search for a user and add them to the journey.
You can also click Upload CSV. Uploading a CSV with employee emails in a single column will populate them to the journey. Emails that don’t match existing users will not be added to the journey. .
For custom journeys, you have the added option of selecting Add Entire Company and Specific Groups. In the example below, we’re adding design interns into this custom journey!
Activating Journeys
With all of the above customized, you should now be able to Activate your Journey!
Before activating, you’ll want to make sure that the steps you want active with your Journey are not in the draft state. Any steps still in the drafted state will not occur if the Journey is activated. You can see the difference between drafted and published steps below.
To publish a drafted step, simply click into the step, scroll to the bottom, and click Publish.
You can then click Activate Journey! You’ll also see the number of employees that will be added to this journey once you’ve activated it.
Managing Journeys
As a Journey Manager
Once your journey has been activated, you can click into the active Journey and see this view:
Here, you’ll get a timeline view of the employees on the journey and their associated tasks, along with their Status and Journey Start Date. This can be a great way to get insight into where employees are at in their active journeys, as well as to give them a nudge if they’re Off Track.
Hovering your mouse over the clock Icon will allow you to see the details of a journey step. Clicking will open that Journey step in a new tab. For tasks, you can change who the task is assigned to, as well as the due date.
If in an onboarding journey and the preboarder's manager changes, you can click in the communication and resent the comm to the new manager.
If the step is scheduled into the future, you also have the option to initiate that step earlier by clicking Send now, as below:
Journey steps associated with tasks will have empty or completed checkboxes displayed once they have been scheduled. When the task owner completes the step that will be reflected here.
Any ! icons will represent action needed on a journey step. This could reflect an unsent communication, or a task that is overdue.
If hovering on a communication step with Action needed, you can click Resend this step to send out the communication to the employee.
If hovering on a Task step that is overdue, you can click View Details, taking you to the task. You could then click Mark as completed if the task is actually complete.
As a User on a Journey
For any employees on active journeys, they will be sent notifications when tasks are triggered.
In addition, they’ll see any active tasks shown on their home screen in Cleary.
FAQ
Q: For a new hire, are notifications going out to their personal email address or their work address?
A: For preboarding users, email notifications and communication are sent to their personal email address until their start date. Beginning on their start date, we will send notifications and communications to their work email address. If their work email is not added on their start date, notifications and comms continue to be sent to their personal address until a work email address has been added.
Q: An employee's start date has changed. Do I have to remove them from the journey and re-add them?
A: No, as long as the user's new start date is synced from your HRIS/ATS and is reflected in Cleary's user entry, the steps will change with respect to the new start date.
Q: Are we able to test journeys before having them go live?
A: Yes! Please reach out to Cleary support and they will be able to set you up with testing your journey before it is live to employees.
Q: How often are employees on journeys notified about tasks and surveys?
A: Employees on journeys will be emailed whenever new tasks or surveys are assigned. In addition, notifications will be sent out every day if there are overdue tasks or surveys that have not yet been completed. If they have multiple overdue tasks, they will be sent a single notification notifying them of the set of overdue items.
Q: For offboarding journeys, can emails be sent out after the employee's end date?
A: At the moment, no. When an employee reaches their end date, further communication would not be possible in offboarding journeys.
Q: If employees are already on a journey and I edit a journey step, will the edits be reflected for employees on the journey?
A: Yes, if the journey step has not yet been triggered, any edits made will been seen by those already on the journey.
Q: If I remove an employee from a journey, is there any way they would automatically be added later?
A: No, employees who are manually removed from a journey will not be automatically added later. They can be added again by selecting their name after manually adding employees to the journey.
Q: Can we just add people to journeys when we see them get created or updated in the system?
A: Every time a user import is run (CSV or integration), we’ll add people to journeys afterwards.
Every time a user is created manually, we’ll look to see if we need to add them to journeys.
Lastly, run a background job to look to add people to journeys if a user has been manually updated. There is also a daily process that runs every morning to add any users to the journey who for some reason were not added by one of the former mechanisms.