General Mills Delivers World-Class HR Service Delivery to 38,000 Employees

[Sunita Khatri]

In 2015, General Mills began their global HR transformation with a goal to deliver world class service to their 38,000 employees in 30+ countries. Pam Velcheck, Senior Manager of Global HR Service Delivery at General Mills and Debbi Francl, HR Transformation Leader at ServiceNow, spoke about their journey at the Knowledge18 conference.

Without a consistent HCM platform, a system of employee engagement and a single source of truth in HR, the General Mills HR team realized the transformation was greater than consolidation or implementation of new technology - it became a company-wide mission to #workdifferently. This vision was championed at the highest levels of executive leadership at General Mills. The HR transformation approach was categorized into three disciplines: 40% to redesign processes, 40% on change management, and 20% to deploy enabling technology. General Mills selected Workday as their core HCM platform and ServiceNow as their Service Delivery partner for case management, knowledge management, HR content, and to create one single point of contact for employee, manager and HR interaction.

Redesigning of the Processes

The real, yet challenging, work began when the transformation team went around the world identifying opportunities to standardize and redesign for efficiency - this included much work on process redesign as well as an audit of policy and knowledge content in each region. The team discovered 150,000+ pieces of content spread across desktops, paper files, and ancillary systems worldwide. Ultimately, after a content consolidation effort, General Mills went live with only 5,000 knowledge articles. Another key area evaluated were roles and responsibilities - historically front-line managers depended heavily on HR. Now due to increased self-service and automation, HR roles were redefined; the role of front line managers accepted increased ownership to manage their teams' development (promotions, transfers, hiring, etc.); and HR business partners are able to focus on strategic workforce needs. The global transformation team also spent six months evaluating the variety of languages employees spoke around the world to identify where they would situate their global HR centers and eventually set parameters for language translation needs.

How Service is Delivered at General Mills in 2018

In January 2018, after almost 3 years of redefining HR processes, how service would get delivered and conducting change management programs for employees, managers and HR, General Mills went live with Workday and ServiceNow. The General Mills team designed a multi-tier service and experience model. As the first touch point, the employee is directed to access a centralized global HR portal (called G&Me), a single destination designed for employees to gain knowledge and insights on anything they need using the ServiceNow platform, which is connected to the back-end HR system that allows employees to initiate an HR transaction or access their personal data, and lastly if needed, an employee is offered several options including real-time chat, phone calls or web forms to initiate an inquiry for a unique service need. "It was very purposeful for us to have employees go to the service portal for everything they need. Employees don't care what's happening to get the work done, they just want an easy way to get it done" said Pam Velcheck.

For example, a use case shared was around an employee needing to set up direct deposit. The first step in this experience would be to access the G&Me portal for quick information, which then redirects the employee to the HR system to set up direct deposit, but along the way if there are unanswered questions, the employee can either chat, call or submit an inquiry to HR, making the whole experience frictionless, intuitive and easy for employees. "ServiceNow is really helping to enable the employee to get everything they need from a knowledge perspective, and Workday is how they transact on what they need to get done" said Pam.

Since go live, 76% of the global population has accessed the G&Me portal, they've deflected greater than 80% of cases due to achieving self-service success and greater than 70% of cases have been resolved at the tier one level.

Here are some questions that came up during Pam and Debbi's session.

Q: How do you structure who manages chats vs. who takes phone calls and who manages cases?

A: Once you take chats you end up on chats all day so we try to ensure there's a healthy variation in whose doing what - if you're on chats then that's what you'll do so that you can manage your requests.

Q: What is the difference between content and knowledge?

A: Content is what our agents need to learn/access to gain knowledge for transacting on cases and we use ServiceNow to build this. Knowledge is what our external customer (employees) are able to view.

For questions on this blog please reach out to Sunita Khatri (Sunita.khatri@servicenow.com)
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