Employee Workflow: Q&A with Blake McConnell

How ServiceNow delivers great experiences for employees

Employees have many moments that matter during their journey with a company. Some moments are more significant than others, but they all require support from different systems and departments across the enterprise.

Digital workflows remove the friction and inefficiencies of the tasks connected to these moments, so that employees can focus on more strategic, meaningful work. We recently sat down with Blake McConnell, Senior Vice President  of Employee Workflow Products, to learn how companies use ServiceNow to improve the employee experience.

What makes ServiceNow’s employee workflows unique?

When employees need to resolve issues related to their jobs, their inquiries can go to many different places on the back end, such as facilities or finance. These inquiries relate to what we call “moments that matter” in the employee work lifecycle. They include everything from navigating maternity and paternity leaves—the major moments—to everyday requests like, “I need a new monitor,” or “What’s for lunch at the cafeteria today?”

ServiceNow provides technology that dramatically improves all of these experiences, whether they’re major events or everyday requests. We help customers get to a place where moments that matter are increasingly self-service, no matter how employees want to find answers: via browser, mobile, chat or voice.  This way, the organization functions more efficiently and employees can get back to doing the jobs they love. 

The enterprise IT market is pretty crowded. What differentiates ServiceNow?

It’s the Now Platform. Our single platform approach is unique to ServiceNow. To deliver a seamless and unified experience for any moment that matters, you need a platform that spans the organization and cuts across multiple departments.  That’s how you eliminate the friction and disconnectedness that occurs when you haven’t digitized and unified all those workflows.

It’s not easy to break down corporate siloes. Often, that’s not a technology issue so much as a people and change management issue. But when someone like a CEO decides that she wants to create better experiences for employees—and stands up and says that this is important— we can help make it happen.

Many legacy systems were designed for one specific purpose and can degrade the employee experience because they weren’t designed with the employee in mind. By contrast, the  employee experience is always top of mind for ServiceNow. Increasingly, we’re building out our single platform with an employee-first mindset.

How are you evolving the Now Platform? What can we expect in the future?

Employees need one place where they can easily get service from HR, IT and other departments in the organization. That’s why we built Employee Service Center, which provides a single, brandable center for employees to find user‑specific content, receive targeted communications with step‑by‑step guidance, and submit and track cases or requests when they need help.

We’re also investing in native mobile capabilities that allow employees to access services using the native capabilities of their smartphones, including push notifications, camera, swipes, facial recognition and so on. Employees enjoy consumer-style service experiences, while departments benefit from lower costs and fewer inquiries.[RM1]

How does the Now Platform help deliver great employee experiences?

Think of something as simple as changing a home address. Historically, that process has often required employees to use separate applications maintained by departments like finance and HR. Employees want and expect that to be easy to do.  Why are things like this still so much harder at work than in our personal lives?

Onboarding is a great example. There are many steps to bringing an employee on board. Some relate to HR, others to IT, finance and facilities. With ServiceNow, these processes all get kicked off at the same time, automatically. IT provisions the right applications for that person’s job. HR handles background checks. Facilities finds a place for the new employee to sit.

ServiceNow manages all these processes in one digital workflow, as opposed to emails being sent to a shared services inbox.  The goal is for every new employee to be Day 1 ready when Day 1 arrives. 

Ultimately, this is about collapsing the time to productivity for a new employee.  Great experiences and productivity are two sides of the same coin. When the new employee has a great experience, the company reaps the benefit of their productivity that much faster.   

Everyone in our industry talks about digital transformation. Can you share an example of a customer that has used ServiceNow to transform employee workflows?

A great example is Asurion, a provider of electronic device insurance that’s presenting at Knowledge 2019. The company transformed its onboarding process using ServiceNow.  Their recruiters used to handle most onboarding tasks, which tended to involve multiple systems, departments and processes. You needed one process to request a computer, another process to get a parking pass, and so on. 

IT and HR leaders from Asurion attended Knowledge 2018 and asked themselves, “Why isn’t our employee experience as good as our customer experience?”

Using ServiceNow, Asurion went live with new automated processes in only two months. Now, as soon you hire someone and create a new employee record, there are simple checklists for everything that employee needs. It’s working so well that 86% of new hires say they’re satisfied with the onboarding experience.