Equinor helps employees reach their full potential with a global service platform

Equinor’s user-centric approach for fast, quality service delivery 

To power its vision and drive value for Equinor, the global business services team set out to modernise service delivery
The Equinor Global Business Services team has a vision to “enable a better Equinor,” with a strategic focus on improving the employee experience, accelerating digital transformation, and enabling future ways of working.

Unni Torflåt Østbø, Head of Corporate Service Management at the global energy company, explains: “I firmly believe that business support services should maximise the potential and productivity of end users and create business value for the organisation.”

But the existing support infrastructure presented challenges in its complexity and high operational costs. Service delivery was built around an outdated core, with departments using different systems and new functionality simply added on top, with only simple integration.

“We needed to move away from a very fragmented system to create an enterprise service management strategy that intrinsically brought together all our services in a complementary way, for maximum impact and efficiency,” says Unni.

A global enterprise service management platform built on ServiceNow delivers fast, quality service to employees, suppliers, and contractors
Using ServiceNow, Equinor created a single, cloud-based platform for the delivery of global business services to approximately 49,000 employees, suppliers, and contractors.

“It was a big bang implementation, with all services put into the platform at the same time,” says Unni. “The ease of integration with other applications and systems was a key factor in moving to ServiceNow, creating a single source of truth for all our business services right from the start.”

The “request and deliver” services extend across multiple business functions, including finance, HR, IT, procurement, facility management, land administration, safety and security, as well as drilling, exploration, and gas trading. Around 6,000 operators from 285 departments use the platform to deliver more than 320 different services, comfortably handling in the range of 60,000 tickets every month.

Improvements to onboarding services enable new employees to be productive immediately
Collaboration across the organisation has improved considerably, by using the same tools for different—yet related—tasks across teams, business units, and vendors.

A key example is the employee onboarding service, where the service offered to hiring managers has been dramatically simplified through automation and the integration of service delivery from HR, IT, facilities, and security.

Unni explains: “We have reduced the workload on managers for onboarding a new hire by removing the need to submit a ticket at all. What used to include up to eight requests is now triggered by support at the end of the recruitment process. The process design and automation mean we can now get a new employee started in the first hour of the first day.”

A people-first approach yields a 15% increase in employee satisfaction and a more efficient work day
A key focus for the Global Business Services team is user centricity and creating an experience that mirrors that of consumer services, to enable an efficient work day for all. Employees now have just one place to go to raise a request or issue, whether that’s to reset a password, apply for a car loan, or initiate a recruitment process.

“The user is central to our strategy, so speed and quality of service are critical,” says Unni. “The workflows we have are complex, often involving as many as seven departments in any one request, but for the user the experience is efficient and seamless.”

A new approach to measurement reflects the team’s focus on the employee experience, moving away from metrics like handling time and number of incidents to benchmarking performance on the service experience, quality of services, improvements in service, and business value.

“ServiceNow enables us to demonstrate how the global services team is directly contributing to improvements in user productivity and enabling an efficient work day,” says Unni. “We have intricate insights on our overall performance right down to satisfaction on a case-by-case basis.”

In less than two years, employee satisfaction in Global Business Services has increased by 15%.

ServiceNow gives Equinor the visibility it needs to drive smooth performance across the enterprise
The single source of truth has proved to be invaluable in enabling Unni and her team to take a more proactive approach, to drive further improvements.

“Reacting with speed and efficiency is critical, but to really change our approach we need to look at why we have incidents in the first place and what is triggering the requests,” explains Unni. “ServiceNow means we don’t have to wait for someone to request a password reset or tell us the system is down before we take action.”

The higher level of transparency extends across all the service workflows in Equinor with dashboards showing what teams are working on, the status of requests and incidents in real time, and performance against the new KPIs.

“The higher level of transparency ServiceNow gives us makes it very easy to know where we need to make improvements. The platform is fundamental in moving us from a reactive function to a proactive business service,” highlights Unni.

Equinor relies on ServiceNow as the foundation for service delivery in the future
Looking ahead, Unni considers ServiceNow to be the critical platform to underpin Equinor’s service strategy in the future. While she used to draw comparisons with others in the energy industry, Unni’s ambition lies in aligning Equinor with the best organisations in the world for the quality of the service experience.

“Since 1972, we have been pushing the boundaries of imagination and technology in the oil and gas industry,” says Unni. “With ServiceNow we can be even more ambitious, by leading the way in enabling new ways of working for users and customers in any sector.”

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