on - edited on by
Jen Holland
Every quarter we take you behind the scenes of a large organization deploying Employee Center though Show & Tell webinars hosted by Live on ServiceNow.
During our Q4 2023 event, one of the leading global biopharmaceutical organizations stepped into the limelight to share their journey of moving away from a customized portal to a more employee-centric, unified experience on Employee Center Pro.
Below are 4 tactics they shared to successfully deploy and realize value from Employee Center:
1. Build a robust Taxonomy design process – They used their knowledge base categories as a starting point and brainstormed with content owners regarding how the new taxonomy and topic pages should look like. After building a taxonomy structure that content owners agreed with, they did different modalities of user research with their power users. This included card sorting, usability testing, and mobile ethnography to understand how their users are engaging with the content.
A quick validation of this approach was that users were now leaving feedback for resources that were always available on the portal, but users were discovering just now because of the improved taxonomy.
We highly recommend including users in your taxonomy design process.
2. Enable 'Early Access’ to double-down on user research – Instead of Beta testing, they shortlisted 2000 power users and provided them ‘early access’ to the new Employee Center Pro portal, in production with live data and content. With this approach the power users get the impression of experience the upcoming innovation first-hand, instead of testing something that may be still unfinished or with bugs.
The early access period acts as a user research period for them. The goal is to analyze whether users can successfully get their tasks done on the new portal. They also used this time to phase out the customization and replace them with out-of-box capabilities. Throughout this process they collected feedback on the new functionalities and experiences offered.
3. Position Dynamic Topic Microsites as a low code environment for Content Owners –
They struggled with many unmanaged SharePoint sites within the organization as content owners found maintaining content on employee portal restrictive. However, with the introduction of Microsites, the same content owners are happily moving to Employee Center since they can put subtopics, external links, knowledge articles, and catalog resources all at one place, and create differentiated, personalized experiences using Rich Content.
Visit the Dynamic Topic Microsites academy session and FAQs to learn more.
4. Get Tactical with Portal Governance via three-tiered framework – They built a three tired governance model with clearly structured responsibilities and stakeholder model. Below is what it looked like:
Tier 1: Portal collaborators - Content managers and taxonomy owners
Meet bi-weekly to review and discuss everything at the portal content level. Including:
- Writing style – consistency, language used, key words optimization, etc.
- Training for large language models
- Managing Authors – identifying content for update, working with authors for making the updates, etc.
Tier 2: Portal Governance - Operational leads of different functions – IT, HR, Finance, etc.
Meet bi-weekly to monitor and discuss on progress made with the portal and value realized. Including:
- Progress on planned enhancements
- Feedback received from User Research
- Analytics
- Decision support on new features
Tier 3: Steering Committee - Executive Sponsors
Meet quarterly to review strategic direction and build enterprise-wide alignment. Including:
- Budget allocation & prioritization decisions
- Alignment with other company-wide initiatives
- Evangelize achievements
- Continuous improvement
The portal owner is central to and the driver for all the three-tiers governance tiers. Each of these tiers are critical in building an enterprise-wide portal that truly fulfils its promise of driving self-service, employee productivity, and employee experience.
Witnessing large organizations share their experiences, creative designs, and success stories with Employee Center is nothing short of inspiring. Thank you to our presenter from the leading biopharmaceutical organization and sharing the above insights.
Stay tuned for more great stories and lessons learned through our Show & Tell webinar. Follow this article to register for upcoming events and accessing other stories shared.
