Your employee journey map is gathering dust in a folder somewhere, isn’t it?
You invested time and energy creating it. Workshops, sticky notes, beautiful diagrams. You presented it to leadership. Everyone nodded. It got saved in a shared drive.
And then… nothing.
Six months later, IT has implemented three new systems without consulting P&C.
A hiring manager added “just one more interview round.” The onboarding buddy programme quietly disappeared. Pre-boarding emails are still being sent from an old template nobody remembers creating.
The journey map you might have created?
Still looks gorgeous. Also completely irrelevant.
The problem isn’t the map (in fact it’s great). The problem is that we treat employee experience as a project, not a product. We create the map. We tick the box. We move on.
Meanwhile, the actual employee experience continues evolving – without us.
The Accountability Gap Nobody Talks About
Here’s where it gets messy. You’ve documented the pain points. Everyone agrees onboarding needs improvement. The pre-boarding experience has gaps. The handoff between TA and IT is clunky. First day is chaotic.
Great. Now who’s fixing it?
Long silence.
“Well, HR should probably…” “I think IT needs to…” “Shouldn’t the hiring managers be…”
Everyone knows something’s broken. No one owns fixing it.
This isn’t about people being lazy or uninterested.
It’s about how we set up the work.
Journey maps show us the what – touch points, emotions, pain points. They’re brilliant at creating shared understanding. But who’s accountable for pre-boarding communication? Who decides when laptop provisioning happens? Who coordinates between TA, IT, and P&C? Who prioritises which improvements happen first?
Who actually does the work?
The answer is usually some variation of: “HR? Maybe? Probably?”
Except employee experience isn’t owned by one function.
It’s cross-functional by nature.
Pre-boarding needs TA to trigger it, IT to provision systems, P&C to send communications, and the hiring manager to connect personally. One function can’t fix it alone. But without clear ownership, no one moves.
The Shift That’s Already Happening
There’s a reality emerging across Swedish and Nordic companies: HR and IT are being asked to work together differently.
Not IT implementing HR’s requirements. Not HR working around IT’s constraints. Actually collaborating. Jointly accountable for employee experience.
But there’s no shared way of working. No common language. No tool that bridges both worlds.
Here’s what I’ve noticed after years working with design systems and customer experience: the problems HR faces with employee experience are identical to the problems I’ve been solving in other contexts for over 20 years.
Multiple stakeholders with different priorities.
Constantly evolving needs.
Cross-functional dependencies everywhere.
No clear ownership.
The context is different.
The challenges are the same.
What If We Combined the Methods That Already Work?
Journey mapping? Brilliant for understanding the employee perspective.
Service design blueprints? Perfect for showing internal stakeholders and interdependencies.
RACI matrices? Essential for clarifying who does what.
Agile sprints? Proven way to make continuous improvements.
Design systems thinking? Enables modular, scalable solutions.
The problem isn’t that these tools don’t work. They do. Incredibly well.
The problem is we often use them separately. If at all.
Meanwhile, the actual work of improving employee experience falls through the gaps between functions.
So I started experimenting:
What if we combined these approaches?
What if the journey map wasn’t just documentation, but part of a working system that enables HR and IT to actually collaborate?
That’s Systems Journey Mapping.
Not that it’s revolutionary – it’s not.
But because it combines proven methods in a way that actually helps you move from insight to action.
How Systems Journey Mapping Works
What if HR and IT could collaborate towards joint goals – combining CX methods, systems thinking and agile sprints?
Born from the same Design Thinking mindset I always circle back to –including empathy, problem definitions, ideating, prototyping, testing and implementing to scale.
Connecting People, Business and Tech.
Reinventing how HR collaborates with IT, bridging the gap.
Here’s what that could look like:
#1 | EMPLOYEE JOURNEY MAP
The employee’s experience of a journey (Onboarding).
Adding their touch points, actions, pain points, emotions.
The employee perspective is the connecting factor.
WHAT & WHY
A journey map is a visualisation of an experience
of a journey from a person’s perspective. Here I’ve chosen Onboarding, a key journey to get right.
From top down it shows phases – first day, first week, and so on – then this person’s actions, touchpoints they engage with, pain points and emotions at each stage. This is the top layer of the journey. It helps make the invisible visible – show where gaps exist and where there’s frustration. Connects the dots. Classic CX method, extremely powerful.
For HR, it transforms vague complaints like “onboarding is broken” into concrete, prioritised problems you can actually address.
#2 | STAKEHOLDERS, GOALS & METRICS
Clarity on how and where stakeholders and systems fit in.
Spotting opportunities to collaborate on and improve,
all towards shared goals, tracked with agreed upon metrics.
WHAT & WHY
Mapping the internal stakeholders involved at each phase – for example TA, P&C, IT, hiring manager, buddy and team for the Onboarding journey.
Not the “on paper” process, but who’s actually involved where and how. Making it easier to understand root causes in order to turn them into opportunities towards shared goals. Testing and tracking to scale what works.
This “behind the scenes” comes from service design blueprinting – making hidden connections visible. Including clarity on the effect it brings, the expected outcome.
For HR it’s a possibility to include the right people to improve, increased buy-in through co-creation and clarity on joint goals.
#3 | RACI & CONNECTIONS
Now we assign accountability, crucial step to make progress.
Also clarity how underlying systems or people are connected, that one part can affect another.
WHAT & WHY
Now we assign accountability. Key for progress.
For each touchpoint: Who’s Responsible for doing it? Who’s Accountable for the outcome? Who needs to be Consulted? Who should be Informed?
And crucially – where are the interdependencies? Where does IT depend on P&C getting information from TA? Where does the buddy need the manager to do something first?
These connections (the arrows in the visual) show where things typically break down.
No more “I thought you were handling that” and by connecting everything back to the experience,
there’s a joint understanding of the context.
#4 | USER STORIES FOR SPRINTS
While still connecting back to the overall journey, this is where it gets granular. Clear tasks to plan into sprints. Transparency on what’s done, by who and when. Towards which joint goals.
WHAT & WHY
This is where we move from documentation to action. Opportunities become concrete going into
a backlog. Each improvement is a “user story”
– a mini journey for a specific user with a need towards a goal. It becomes a task which a cross-functional team puts into sprints. Product teams use this.
This visual example is one part of a larger journey.
Example user story: “As a new hire, I need my laptop on day one so I can start working immediately.”
Who needs to do what? What’s the priority?
What can we tackle in the next sprint?
Improvements happen continuously. Clear tasks towards goals, no “let’s finally fix onboarding” forever projects. Transparency on what’s done, when. Connected to the employee experience.
#5 | SYSTEMS THINKING
This is where magic happens. Connecting shared “modules” for continuous improvements, at scale.
Allows for adaptability, flexibility and speed. Always connected to the experience.
WHAT & WHY
This is the magic part, the amplifier. Employee journeys are like any other experiences, made up of smaller processes or steps which (some, not all) repeat across an employee lifecycle – so these “modules” can be re-used across journeys.
By organising them into a linked system, your continuous improvements spread to all instances.
Allowing for scalability, iterative progress, flexibility and faster time to adapt. Exact setup depends on your needs and possibilities, but as an example a hybrid model allows for central ownership with contributions from throughout the business.
This comes from design systems and allows for experience improvements to scale. Keep journeys consistent while flexible and adaptive.
What This Actually Enables
When you bring these five layers together, something shifts.
Systems get designed with employee experience in mind from the start – because IT and P&C are working from the same map.
Improvements are iterative and prioritised through sprint planning based on actual impact, not whoever shouted loudest in the meeting.
Accountability is visible. No more finger-pointing when something breaks. No more managers doing it “their way” while HR tries to maintain consistency.
You can scale what works without manually replicating it across every team, market, or scenario.
And perhaps most importantly: HR stops being brought in to “fix” things after decisions are made.
You’re at the table from the beginning, with infrastructure that gives you strategic influence, not just coordination tasks.
This Is How Swedish Companies Can Scale
Sweden faces a 70,000-worker deficit. Companies are scaling internationally. Hybrid work is complex. AI adoption is accelerating. The talent shortage isn’t ending.
You can’t solve these challenges with annual HR projects or by hoping managers will follow your guidelines.
You need infrastructure.
Clear systems that help your existing team work smarter.
Cross-functional collaboration that doesn’t require heroes.
Modular solutions that scale without fragmentation.
That’s what Systems Journey Mapping provides.
Not theory.
Not another framework to add to the shelf.
A practical, working system that bridges how HR thinks and how IT works.
Because great experiences are designed. Not accidental. Not afterthoughts.
Designed with intention, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
Ready To Work Differently?
If the challenges in this article feel familiar – if you’re tired of being accountable for things you don’t control, if your tech implementations aren’t delivering, if scaling internationally means reinventing processes for every market – let’s talk.
I help HR leaders design employee experiences that don’t gather dust. Combining methods from CX, design systems, and agile product development to create infrastructure for real collaboration.
Book a call to explore how Systems Journey Mapping could work for your organisation ↓