I'm a really big fan of the Employee Center, and have been since it's first release. I can still remember being told about it landing on the roadmap during the Certified Master Architect Program back in 2021 and commenting that it would be a game changer because of the number of organisations asking me the same question back when there were separate IT and HR portals on the platform: How do we give the employee a single pane of glass?
The EC obviously brings employees into one place to access support across the enterprise. A single portal, a single taxonomy of content, multiple sources of knowledge and conversational interactions.
Yokohama extends this further by introducing walk up capability; enabling employees to schedule slots to drop into tech bars or lounges to meet not just with IT - but also HR.
I went through the config and documented that here. Now lets look at what it looks like. I am logging in as a normal user, not an admin or an HR/IT agent.
From the Human resources menu, I can see the Schedule appointment link.
I can also see that in the quicklinks section of the main HR topic page:-
I can select that I need help with an HR matter, in person and I am directed to the appointment location which I have configured.
I complete the form…
And select an appointment (Note, to make life easier demonstrating - I set the lounge to be 24/7 x 365. So I can see some rather interesting time slots! Lets pick 6am, then click "Schedule appointment"
I'm redirected to the list of my appointments. From here I can update or cancel it, or create a new appointment.
From the main portal page, in My active items, I can also see my Appointments:-
Switching to the backend - I configured a user (Beth Anglin) with HR access as well as IT access as part of my config, because that user was already handling walk ups for tech bars.
I can impersonate her and find the walk up records; and from their accept it to assign it to me.
The functionality from this point is very basic. For instance, if I look in the HR Agent Workspace, I see no list of walk-ups or appointments. So if I was an HR Agent acting in a setup like this, who would never really be in the SOW - I won't see appointments.
Secondly, there appears to be no dashboard or landing page content drawing attention to the appointments being part of our agents workload.
So that's something to consider adding/building, once you have a clear idea what the organisation supporting the walk up locations is going to look like (unless they are multi-disciplined, as Beth was in my quick whizz through)
