When you hear the words “employee experience”, what comes to mind? Most people I talk to about this think in terms of the Human Resources perspective – culture, benefits, perks, role responsibilities, etc. It’s true that all of these things contribute to creating an overall positive experience at work, but there’s a foundational area that's needed to deliver a truly great employee experience – IT. At ServiceNow, our purpose is straightforward - We make the world of work, work better for people. We do this by offering customers a powerful workflow platform underpinned by a common data model and machine learning. This trifecta unlocks productivity and creates great experiences across employee, customer and IT workflows.
For the race car driver in this photo, without a high-performing pit crew he’s going to have a very poor experience. Think of IT Workflows as your high-performing pit crew for ServiceNow. From pre-hire to fully functioning employee, there are functions that IT provides that are foundational to the employee lifecycle.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through how ServiceNow IT Workflows combined with ServiceNow HR Solutions deliver a truly great employee experience.
Build a Great First Impression:
Developing a truly great employee experience begins before someone starts with the company, otherwise known as Day-1. Leveraging the Employee Onboarding & Transitions solution, HR can pre-define onboarding workflows that include activities required to be executed by pre-hires, Hiring Managers, IT, HR, as well as other departments with the goal of ensuring the new hire can be productive on Day-1. Throughout the process, the pre-hire and all departments have visibility into status and can seamlessly communicate amongst each other when needed.
After a person decides to join an organization and begins the onboarding process, IT plays a key role to ensure the following questions are addressed by Day-1:
Will they have a computer?
Have you ever started a new job and didn’t have a computer on Day-1? This has happened to me more times that I’d like to admit! When this happens, new employees are unable to be productive on Day-1, but more importantly people begin to ask themselves if they joined a disorganized organization. If it’s not important enough for the organization to provide me with the most basic thing I need to do my job when I start, what other challenges should I expect ahead? Through the onboarding workflow, a critical first step is to source and provision a computer through the Asset Management application. By managing your hardware assets, you will understand what assets you have, where they are located, who uses them and track their costs. When you have assets that are not being used by anyone, why not consider reusing what you have instead of buying a new computer for every new hire? Besides saving money, you will greatly benefit from faster deployment times and ensure the new hire has a computer on Day-1!
Will they have all of the software (including SaaS services) they need to perform their job?
Ensuring an employee has a computer on Day-1 is critical, but if that computer doesn’t have the necessary software needed to perform their specific job functions then what’s the point? This is where Software Asset Management (SAM) comes in. Most organizations have a standard image that gets deployed each time a computer is provisioned, which typically includes the core applications for all users (MS Office, Slack, Virus Scanner, etc.). But what about the software needed to perform a person’s job function? Let’s take the example of a business process analyst who relies on Visio as part of their daily responsibilities. How do we ensure Visio is provisioned on the new hire’s computer prior to their arrival? As part of the onboarding request, a manager can select the necessary software and SaaS services the new hire will need access to, or these can be pre-selected based on the profile of the new hire. As part of the onboarding workflow, ServiceNow can incorporate SAM to check for existing entitlements for software titles and SaaS services. If no entitlements are available, ServiceNow can present the Asset Manager with several options, including the ability to reclaim unused instances of software or to create a purchase request. We’ll talk about ongoing optimization of software licenses later. Once an entitlement is available, the software can be automatically provisioned through IntegrationHub. One of the most common deployment tools used across our customers is Microsoft SCCM, for which we have an out of the box Spoke (integration) for deploying software and executing other actions. A complete list of out of the box Spokes can be found here. By incorporating SAM into the onboarding workflow, we can ensure that new hires have the specific software installed and access to the SaaS services they need to be productive on Day-1.
Will they have access to the appropriate business applications?
The final piece of the puzzle needed from IT for an employee to be fully productive on Day-1 is having access to the organizational business applications that are required to perform their job functions. Let’s take the example of a new financial analyst who relies on having access to SAP Financials to perform their job function. Based on a user’s profile or based on manager selection, access can automatically be granted to business applications using IntegrationHub as part of the onboarding workflow.
A great onboarding experience is the first step in the employee experience journey, but most importantly to the employee this is a sign of great things to come! A survey conducted by The Society for Human Resources Management found that 69% of employees are more likely to remain with an organization 3+ years after a structured onboarding experience. By leveraging ServiceNow’s Employee Onboarding & Transitions and IT Workflows, we’ve provided a seamless and automated onboarding experience that the employee and the organization will benefit from long term.
Deliver a Great Employee Experience:
Delivering a next-generation employee experience involves making it easy for employees to get service, enabling digital workflows across people and functions, and unlocking productivity across the organization. At its core, ServiceNow’s HR Service Delivery Solution is purpose-built to transform the employee experience into a next-generation one. But did you know that by combining HR Service Delivery with IT Workflows, you will create a truly great employee experience?
Beyond the onboarding process, IT plays a key role throughout the employee lifecycle to ensure the following questions are addressed:
Is it easy for employees to get Service?
Making it easy for employees to get service means there should be a single place to go regardless of what type of service they need. The decision for which system fulfills their needs should be abstracted from the employee. Whether an employee needs to get help because something’s not working, order a mouse, or check their benefits coverage, they can visit the Employee Service Center which is a personalized experience based on their role. Once there, they can see announcements such as company events or planned maintenance, search across departments to find answers, complete required tasks created by Human Resources, submit requests, report issues, and chat with a Virtual Agent.
One of the most common things employees need to request is software, or access to a SaaS service in order to perform their job functions. In speaking with customers, this process has historically been a huge pain point since it involves so many departments and disparate systems. With ServiceNow, it’s always been a given that employees can request a piece of software through a portal and all of the departments necessary to fulfill the order can be included in a structured workflow and the provisioning can be completed automatically. The piece that was missing was being able to easily determine if there were any existing entitlements, so in most cases a new order was placed, or the software was simply installed with the intention of truing up with the publisher. The end result of each of these methods is an increase in software costs. ServiceNow introduced an integrated Software Asset Management solution two years ago and it has seen rapid innovation and adoption since. One of Its greatest features is the ability to identify software and SaaS subscriptions (coming in NY release) that are not actively being used and kick off workflows to uninstall or reclaim licenses for re-use. By using SAM on ServiceNow, you will be continuously optimizing your licenses to mitigate compliance risk and save on software costs. Gartner estimates companies will save an average of 30% on software costs in the first year of a SAM program!
Will business applications will be available to employees when they need them?
You know what makes for a terrible experience as an employee? When you’re under a deadline to close the books and the financial system has an outage. This causes unnecessary stress on countless employees – those submitting the work, those who need to review the work, leadership who needs to report the results, the IT staff that needs to scramble to find root cause, IT leadership who needs to answer to the business, etc. – the list goes on and on. Wouldn’t it be great if you could significantly reduce the number of service outages and free employees from unnecessary stress? Our customers are realizing tremendous value in improving the health of business applications using our AIOps solution, having seen up to an 80% reduction in Service Outages and a 99% reduction in event noise. What do I mean by AIOps? Per Gartner, AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) platforms combine big data and machine learning functionality to support all primary IT Operations functions. To learn more about ServiceNow’s differentiated approach to AIOps, I encourage you to read this conversation with Chanda Dani.
Ensuring business applications are available when employees need them also requires that IT follow governance practices before making any Changes. Did you know that 80% of outages are caused by Change? Companies who are most successful in mitigating the risk of impact of Changes adopt Change Management for proper planning, review, and approval. If done right, not only will successful Change rates increase, but stakeholders will be notified of planned outages to avoid unnecessary increases in incident volume, and IT Operational alerts will be suppressed so that IT Ops team can focus their efforts on resolving real issues.
If an employee does something to cause a security risk, are we prepared to respond quickly?
So, one of your employees clicked on a link from an email and was taken to a site and a piece of malicious code was downloaded to their computer. To make matters worse, that malicious code spread across the network and has infected many servers which has affected access to critical business applications. Like the outage situation I described earlier, lots of employees are now experiencing stress for different reasons, especially the employee who initiated it! When this situation occurs, is your organization prepared to respond quickly? Are you able to prioritize which systems to fix first? ServiceNow’s Security Operations suite can help you quickly respond to Security Incidents and Vulnerabilities through rich intelligence, business context, and automated remediation. On average, our customers are prioritizing vulnerabilities 60% faster and responding to security incidents 45% faster. By remediating security threats faster, you are reducing risk to your organization and reducing stress on employees.
All Good Things Must Come to an End
When employees leave the company, how can you be assured their computer is returned and access to all business applications and cloud services is revoked?
No matter how great an experience is for an employee at a company, eventually they are going to make a career decision and move on. Of course, an organization could also make a decision that an employee’s services are no longer needed. Regardless of the reason why someone leaves, it is critical that the organization ensures secure offboarding to mitigate the risk of that employee accessing company systems later. I mentioned earlier how Onboarding & Transitions was used to onboard an employee with a streamlined and structured process. Well, this solution also includes a structured and streamlined offboarding process! As part of this workflow, we can ensure that we collect any company assets the employee was provided with, we can automate revoking of access from business applications through IntegrationHub, and we can use SAM to reclaim the now available software licenses and SaaS subscriptions.
Visibility is Foundational to Everything
I touched on a lot of solutions and how using them together on a common platform enables tremendous value for an organization. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, our platform is underpinned by a common data model, which is the Service-Aware CMDB. Having visibility and business context of your infrastructure and applications enables greater value across all of the solutions I talked about in this article, and all of the other solutions we provide. Here are just a few example outcomes:
- Onboarding / Offboarding / Access Requests – Automatically include defined application owners in workflows for approvals / notifications
- Hardware / Software Asset Management – Understand the total Hardware and Software costs of your business applications
- AIOPS – Prioritize response by fully understanding the business impact of operational events from specific components. Reduce the noise through Alert Correlation of related components
- IT Service Management – Make better decisions on Change scheduling and risk impact by fully understanding business impact for individual components
- Security Operations – Prioritize response by fully understanding the business impact of security events & vulnerabilities from individual components
Measuring Progress
Embarking on a transformational initiative of delivering a truly great employee experience is not a project. It is journey. Like any journey we take in life, it is important to set goals and continuously track progress against those goals. Tracking progress against goals consists of understanding where we are right now, and what's left to achieve the goal. Along the way, it is important to understand how specific actions we've taken have affected our performance. Let's look at an auto racing example. At the beginning of the race, every team has the same goal of winning the race. Before the race begins, the pit crew reviews data from past races matching the weather and track conditions to set the initial race tune-up. As the race progresses, the pit crew monitors Key Performance Indicators (KPI) remotely to make data-driven decisions on how to improve performance (choosing the right tires and tire pressure, instructing the driver to make adjustments to the car and their driving line, etc.). Regardless of whether or not the team achieves their goal of winning the race, they will have a better understanding of what went well and how to improve their performance based on the actions taken.
The same concept applies to your goal of delivering a truly great employee experience, or any other goal you've set. Along the way, you can gauge employee satisfaction (KPI) through surveys and measure the employee satisfaction performance over time using Performance Analytics. As you see employee satisfaction scores change, you can look at the actions performed at those points in time to understand why the score was impacted.
It's Go Time!
Now that I've armed you with what it takes to deliver a truly great employee experience, I have one question for you. Are you ready to get started?
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