YBS Group improves employee satisfaction with centralised HR services

YBS Group is dedicated to putting people first, creating employee experiences that foster great work
The Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) Group operates around a central mission to be the most trusted provider of financial services in the UK. With an expanding customer base and an increasing corporate footprint, YBS Group wanted to create a one-stop shop for Human Resources (HR) services under its wider-level adoption of ServiceNow.

YBS Group’s employee service platform, known internally as ServiceConnect, serves a variety of functions across the business. Built on ServiceNow, ServiceConnect includes the company’s IT Connect and Compliance Connect services, which support the company’s IT and compliance functions respectively. After a period of analysis and consultation, YBS Group launched HR Connect, which is devoted to people policies and aspects of life inside the organisation.

HR shop built on ServiceNow eases employee transitions and saves management time
YBS Group’s HR Connect provides a single, central location for the company’s 4,500 employees to access a range of HR-related services. Employees can ask questions, find information, and become more individually empowered in the workplace, reducing pressure on the HR team.

Focused on tasks associated with the onboarding and offboarding of employees, HR Connect provides the tools and functions associated with new employees, a change of contact details, general queries, and an employee leaving. With approximately 40 new permanent colleagues per month, as well as staff moving to new job functions or switching departments, HR Connect has significantly reduced the onboarding burden for YBS Group.

ServiceNow data and insights help YBS drive efficiency and continuous service improvements
To create the HR Connect solution, YBS Group used ServiceNow out-of-the-box HR Service Delivery capabilities and configured the software in house to map its own approach to HR cases and categorisation. Each instance of HR-related data is given a designated workflow, allowing some tasks to happen in parallel and some sequentially. The workflow drives the HR request and an audit trail is created for every piece of HR data in motion.

“We use the service level agreement (SLA) tooling in ServiceNow so that we can analyse and track different areas of our HR business and understand where we can make improvements. We can use this technology to pull out reports and see how we are performing at any single moment in time. As a service portal, it works to connect people and allows users to request services with different functions right across our business,” says Emma.

HR can be an intangible discipline due to the nuances of human personalities, behaviour, and performance. ServiceNow allows YBS to manage the complexities and uncertainties of the tasks, applying reporting, auditing, and SLAs to bring a greater level of order to the way the HR department operates.

“With ServiceNow driving our HR capabilities, YBS Group is able to deliver a fast, efficient HR service for staff-related operations. Managers can process tasks and fill in forms more quickly, freeing up time to work with employees on other activities. People are overall happier about the way the company works and are now kept more informed about the way HR processes work,” says Emma.

YBS Group increases productivity across the enterprise, and plans to expand ServiceNow to other HR services
YBS Group confirms that with its HR Connect deployment built on ServiceNow and now part of the firm’s ServiceConnect system, its productivity has overall increased because case management controls allow HR to be more efficient.

“Expanding our use of ServiceNow to HR let us work more closely with IT because we are feeding more HR data into the IT department and that creates a larger pool of operational data to use across the enterprise,” says Emma.

The onboarding HR function began as a pilot and YBS Group says it has certainly proved its effectiveness. Going forward, the company is looking to extend to other HR services, including holiday, maternity, and paternity leave and overtime, as well as HR systems access for managers to view staff salaries and sick days. YBS Group plans to look deeper into its HR function to examine exactly how ServiceNow can help further streamline processes.

“As we evolve to become a more holistically digital company, our operational HR data now forms part of our wider data-driven management framework,” says Emma. “We are also delivering the user experiences that employees now expect in the digital age, in our HR services and beyond.”

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