Now on Now: Consumerizing and accelerating HR services

Creating great employee experiences
At ServiceNow, we believe in giving our employees a great workplace experience. Positive interactions forge a bond between our company and our employees, just like great service creates customer loyalty in the consumer world. Why is this so important for ServiceNow? Because our people deserve it–and because it helps us attract and retain the best talent.

The consumerized experience starts before the first day on the job. Our human resources team embraces new employees, giving them the information and support they need before they even join. And, when a new hire shows up for the first time, our HR team makes sure everything is ready so that employees can quickly get up to speed and become productive.

Manual onboarding processes consumed our HR team
While our HR team has always delivered a good onboarding experience, we used to rely on manual processes to get the job done. Our staffing coordinators spent long hours quarterbacking the onboarding process, ticking off checklists, and sending dozens of requests to other teams for workspaces, computers, phones, payroll system updates, credit cards, orientation training, and more.

This was time-consuming and inefficient, and it didn’t deliver the best possible onboarding experience. “You only have one chance to create a great first impression. You can’t do that if you’re overwhelming new hires with information by email. We made things work, but we weren’t delivering a truly satisfying consumerized experience,” says Danielle Lulley, senior manager, HR business systems and applications.

Scaling to support business growth
As our growth continued to accelerate, it became clear that these manual processes wouldn’t scale. According to Danielle, “We needed to onboard hundreds of employees every year, and that number was increasing rapidly. There was no way we could keep up using spreadsheets, phone calls, and emails. We had to automate. We couldn’t support our business growth. And, even if we could keep pace, HR would be consumed by back-office administrative activities, rather than giving our employees the attention they deserve.”

That’s when we decided to use our own solutions for enterprise onboarding.

Accelerating onboarding with Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions
By moving from manual work to automated workflows using ServiceNow^® Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions, we’ve accelerated and streamlined our onboarding processes. When an employee is about to join, HR only has to enter new hire data once. Forms, documents, and databases are populated automatically. Then, ServiceNow automatically assigns onboarding tasks to our HR, facilities, IT, and other teams, and manages these tasks to completion. Our HR team constantly monitors the status of these tasks, so if anything starts to go off track, the team takes corrective action.

With ServiceNow Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions, HR has complete visibility. Danielle explains, “Now we have ServiceNow^® Performance Analytics dashboards that give our staffing coordinators real-time visibility of the onboarding process. These dashboards also give us key metrics so that we can measure how we are doing and drive further process improvements. And that visibility isn’t limited to HR—hiring managers can also easily see how things are progressing.”

More efficient and fulfilling work 
This automation has delivered major efficiencies—and it’s also boosting team morale. According to Danielle, “We’re saving 10,700 hours a year in onboarding effort. That means we’ve been able to scale our recruiting and onboarding efforts without having to grow our team. And our recruiting team is much happier. Before, they were frustrated because they were bogged down in mundane administrative work. Now, they can focus on attracting and hiring the best talent, which is what motivates them.” 

Faster time to productivity 
And, onboarding isn’t just more efficient–it’s also quicker. For instance, we’ve accelerated provisioning of IT resources for new hires by 94%. That has a direct impact on the new hire experience, cutting provisioning time from three days to a few hours. New employees have what they need right away, making onboarding smooth and enjoyable. And this means that they come up to speed more quickly, since they have instant access to all the resources they need to get familiar with ServiceNow and become productive contributors.

Consumerizing the employee service experience 
Let’s talk about that onboarding experience in more detail. We haven’t just automated our backroom processes. We’re also using ServiceNow to consumerize onboarding, giving new hires a single, user-friendly portal for their onboarding needs. 

“Our employee portal gives new employees a personalized self-service portal where they can find the information they need and complete their onboarding activities. Instead of having to cope with a deluge of emails, everything they need is just a click away. And if they can’t find what they want, they can ask for help right in the portal. Our new hires love it. That’s why we now have 86% employee onboarding satisfaction,” says Danielle. 

The employee portal isn’t just for new hires. It’s our one-stop shop for HR services. Using the portal, ServiceNow employees can submit HR requests, choosing from a wide range of services. Danielle explains, “For everyday HR requests—such as available benefits options or policy inquiries—employees don’t want to wait to talk to someone in HR. It wastes their time. What they want is instant information, anywhere and anytime. With the employee portal, that’s what they get—whether they’re on a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile phone.”

Faster, more accurate responses with case and knowledge management 
“It’s also much better for our HR team. First, because the employee portal has knowledge embedded, employees can easily find information by themselves, which reduces our caseload. When an employee does need to create a case, we automatically capture all of the supporting information we need on the request form. That eliminates a huge amount of back and forth,” states Danielle. 

“Because cases are automatically assigned and tracked, they don’t bounce around like emails, so we respond faster and more accurately. And, when an employee has a special need or requires high-touch, personalized support, our HR team can now give them the attention they deserve, rather than being consumed with administrative tasks.” 

Danielle also stresses the autonomy that ServiceNow gives the HR team. “We’re always growing the services we offer to our employees. ServiceNow makes it simple to do that. We can easily add new services to the employee portal, including creating new forms and workflows. There’s no need to go back to IT—we can do it by ourselves. That means we can innovate faster and increase the value we give to our employees.”

Lessons learned

Tap into out-of-the-box capabilities 
Danielle offers advice for other HR teams: “First, it's important to familiarize yourself with the application. We wanted to take advantage of its out-of-the-box capabilities, rather than just continuing forward with our previous approach. We arranged for a product overview and demo sessions. That way we could see the full potential of the solution and how we could apply this to our onboarding processes.” 

Communicate early and often 
According to Danielle, effective communications are critical. “We put in place a comprehensive communications plan. We engaged with our HR, IT, and facilities teams early on and included them as key stakeholders on the project team. Even when a team wasn’t involved in the first phase—for example, our payroll team—we still kept them informed. That’s important because you want their buy-in for future phases. And we made sure we gave our executives the visibility they needed—everything from general communications to in-depth status updates. That way, we got the support and feedback we needed to succeed.” 

Create clear up-front requirements 
Danielle also stresses the importance of clear requirements. “Get your requirements documented and prioritized early on. We wanted to deploy quickly, so we limited the scope by focusing on the HR, IT, and facilities tasks in the first phase. Each team documented its existing processes and their requirements. We then looked at how we could configure these requirements into the application, with a conscious effort to keep customization to a minimum."

The bottom line 
With ServiceNow^® HR Service Delivery, we’re delivering the experiences that our employees deserve. And we’ve scaled to meet business growth while lowering costs. Instead of spending time on mundane administrative work, we’re unlocking the potential of our HR organization, so they can focus on the high-touch, personalized services that employees expect. 

Along the way, we’ve also increased employee satisfaction, accelerated time to productivity, and have given employees access to the HR services they need, anytime and anywhere. 

At ServiceNow, employees are our biggest asset. That’s why we continue to grow our HR services and make them easy to use. Great employee service isn’t optional—it’s a cornerstone of the way we do business. HR Service Delivery makes that possible and excites us about the future.