Transforming the employee experience at Standard Chartered Bank

One of my favourite sessions at Knowledge 2019 was “People, process and culture.” The presenter was Kate Mathias, global head of HR change portfolio and transformation at Standard Chartered Bank.

ServiceNow is one of the bank’s main internal technology platforms. However, Mathias said she approaches digital transformation from a people perspective, rather than a technology perspective per se.
 

Prioritising the employee experience
Standard Chartered is prioritising the employee experience for its 86,000 employees around the world. The bank has been in business for more than 150 years and operates in 60-plus markets around the world, so knowing what matters to each person in each role is a huge undertaking.

According to Mathias, the bank’s HR function was bogged down by a number of manual processes.  So Standard Chartered launched a people-centred design initiative to improve its day-to-day operations. Mathias and her colleagues decided to do more than just change management. They also focused on adoption management to help assess the impact of new technologies.

Only after go-live do you learn how to manage and prioritise the employee experience, noted Mathias. User testing and validation are essential when you’re bringing new services to life inside the organisation. In the earlier stages, usability research and persona development can teach you what really matters to employees.
 

Crunchy realities
Standard Chartered views the management of its major platforms as an essentially dynamic process. The bank works constantly to adapt each solution to emerging constraints.

“The approach described here is all well and good, but the crunchy realities of work in the real world are often much harder than they look on paper,” said Mathias. This is especially so if you consider the global nature of our business and the strictly regulated environment that we operate in.”

By now, Standard Chartered has rolled out the ServiceNow employee experience platform to 40% of its total market. The company maintains some 20,000 FAQs and more than 5,000 knowledge articles on ServiceNow.

Standard Chartered has also created more than 160 custom HR services, including 90 HR Service Catalogue items. The bank currently provides 138 automated services that use digital workflows to manage tasks such as forms, letters and case creation. It has also replaced much of its obsolete technology and transformed its HR portal using employee insights, research and testing.

Thoughtful, timely & trusted
Standard Chartered encapsulated its move to ServiceNow with the creation of a new logo that cradles the words ‘thoughtful, timely & trusted’ around a button labeled “Our service promise’. Core to that service promise is end-to-end accountability so that people understand the bank’s focus on how technology impacts employee experiences.

Going forward, Standard Chartered plans to complete its global implementation of ServiceNow and launch a chatbot and mobile pilot project. The bank also intends to integrate ServiceNow technologies with other platforms, with the goal of creating even better employee and customer experiences.

Standard Chartered says it has already recorded an upswing in customer satisfaction where ServiceNow is live. Now that’s what I call a bank with change!