Building an employee experience platform
Listed on both the London and Hong Kong stock exchanges, Standard Chartered is a leading international banking group, with a presence in 53 of the world’s most dynamic markets and serving clients in a further 64. Its purpose is to drive commerce and prosperity through its unique diversity, and its heritage and values are expressed in its brand promise, here for good.
At the heart of the bank’s ambition is the People and Culture strategy and an ambition to enable an outstanding Employee Experience at scale. This comes to life in all aspects of colleague’s experience with the bank, including pioneering how flexible working is done in the financial services industry. The bank consulted with colleagues to create a new flexible working model that aims to promote employee choice, well-being and operational efficiency, and attract and retain top talent.
This new vision of a People and Experience centric approach was brought to life with a new HR portal, powered by ServiceNow, now the single point of entry for all human resource related employee services. HR leaders are building on these firm foundations with an ambitious continuous improvement programme to unleash the full potential of a new ServiceNow employee experience platform.
Improving business performance, unlocking value
Standard Chartered has a reputation for innovation, one that it reflects in the experiences it creates for its people.
“Our focus is on being an employer of choice,” explains Isaiah Das, Head of myHR and Digital Service. “We want to have an outstanding employee value proposition that the market recognises and results in talent coming to us first.
“We continue to innovate to improve the colleague experience. We accelerated this at the start of the pandemic in Q1 2020, when we launched our HR Hub powered by ServiceNow. Building on this, we launched flexible working at scale through the platform. Now, we’re continuing this journey by looking at the complete employee experience.”
Standard Chartered is investing in what it calls “employee listening and advocacy”, putting people at the heart of its operations and listening to what’s important to them. This delivers both direct improvements in business performance and value for customers.
“We want to maximise the value of the ServiceNow platform,” continues Isaiah Das. “To do that we’re thinking in terms of employee journeys that provide a seamless, connected experience.
“Moving from a processing mindset to an experience mindset is when real transformation happens, when we can deliver great experiences for all colleagues, but with a human touch.
“Focusing on delivering great experience at scale on our HR hub makes it an indispensable tool for our colleagues. Because of this high usage we now have access to huge volumes of powerful data that informs our strategy. The insights that come from the data provide a huge opportunity for us to understand our employees better and drive improvements that people really want.”
High quality content drives case deflection
Isaiah Das says the bank’s partnership with ServiceNow, across multiple business units and solutions, puts it in a strong position to achieve its vision for the ultimate employee experience.
“We’re always learning,” agrees Jolanta Kamelska, Knowledge Management and Portal Lead based in Warsaw, Poland. “The platform is always evolving and accessing support and expert advice gives us lots of ideas about new things we can use.”
Jolanta reports that the HR hub is used in all its markets. Self-service, supported by more than 200,000 views of knowledge articles every month, is helping to drive overall case deflection rates of more than 85%.
“High-quality content provides clear explanations and better services, supported by other resources such as tutorials, to help colleagues self-serve in different systems, without engaging our agents,” she adds. “We analyse feedback from colleagues to constantly improve and cover all the angles that people need.
“We have around 300 authors and 10 editors working on our knowledge base to maintain high standards. We’ve also added new features to the portal, such as shortcuts to other systems. Our goal is that it becomes a single integrated service hub for everything an employee needs. Helping our people to self-serve saves time and helps them to be more productive. And if they still need help, one of our agents is always available.”
Reinvesting in the employee experience
The cumulative impact of self-service across Standard Chartered is substantial. In 2023, Jolanta reports that more than 104,000 productivity hours had been saved by bank employees self-serving in myHR. This in turn creates greater capacity for our HR agents to deliver service improvements and even better experience. Evidence of their success is an employee satisfaction score of 86%.
Around 45,000 employees are regular, monthly users of myHR, with 96% of all employees using it at least once a year.
“Automation and self-service free up capacity for our agents to address more complex cases and focus on more strategic, higher-value tasks,” adds Isaiah. “For example, we have automated the generation of standard letters, including employee applications for flexible working.
“This automatically records the agreement between employer and employee, aligned with local regulations and laws, protecting all parties. Around 22,000 letters are now produced this way every year.”
Personalised employee journeys
A new channel, Live Chat, is also very popular with around 10,000 chats initiated each month and 90% of chats picked up in less than 30 seconds. Prior to this, phone was a preferred channel for colleagues but with a digital chat channel embedded in the portal, the ease of use and excellent service levels make this a popular and easy way for employees to get help from HR.
To capitalise on insights from the data, the bank can now build accurate profiles of individual employee types, from senior leaders to new joiners across different markets.
These personas provide a detailed understanding of their respective information needs, where gaps are and which issues crop up most regularly, equipping our HR Service Management team to plug gaps, resolve recurring issues, provide additional support and improve the overall experience.
“We’ve also used the platform to significantly improve the employee onboarding journey by focusing on experience, rather than process,” explains Isaiah.
“Using data, we can define what different new recruits’ information needs are and which categories of knowledge articles they will find most useful, depending on their personas, their skill sets and location.”
He adds: “For some, this will be about payroll, taxes and pensions; for others it’s about training and personal development. We’re creating content that talks to people’s personal experience and preferences. Employee advocacy like this helps new colleagues feel welcome and valued, ensuring they hit the ground running.
“At the end of 2023, we launched the offboarding journey to digitise and connect the entire exit process across departments and most importantly to deliver a great leaving experience that would allow us to maintain a relationship with colleagues even after they have left.
“The feedback from our users has been really encouraging, with a high score given by our alumni to our people leaders who are now guided digitally through this important moment that matters.”