Meet the 2026 Best Employee Experience Contest winners
ServiceNow’s annual Best Employee Experience Contest, now in its third year, spotlights organisations that deliver exceptional employee experiences. Winners and honourees emphasise personalisation, usability, and automation as they connect employees to resources across every corner of the enterprise.
This year, customers used AI to accelerate employee productivity and automate work. This allowed employees to focus on strategic matters rather than mind-numbing busywork. And a new trend emerged in which customers established ServiceNow as their AI front door to orchestrate multiple layers of AI technology for their employees.
Top 5 winners
First place: Stellantis
Automotive giant Stellantis built its Digital Me employee experience the way you'd engineer a car: structured processes, rigorous testing, zero shortcuts. The unified front door spans IT, HR, procurement, facilities, finance, and communications. It was validated through personas, journey mapping, and cross-regional usability testing before a single employee logged in.
With 500,000 employees and 38 stakeholder groups transforming at the same time, Stellantis' governance and user experience design models were particularly impressive and effective. Now Assist handles search summarisation, knowledge translation, and virtual agent conversations. It also deflected roughly half of all support tickets within the first two weeks it went live.
“Am I getting the right information faster? Is it taking me to the next step? That's the key—search, get an answer, and move on,” says Dean Gibbins, global IT director at Stellantis.
Key results: 50% ticket reduction within the first two weeks; 30,000 employee sessions per month; 79% usability score
Second place: NBA
The NBA's Home Court portal proves that the best employee experiences don't just answer questions; they take action. Home Court consolidates three portals into one unified hub for IT, HR, facilities, and communications.
By layering in Now Assist for natural language requests, the NBA gave employees a way to get work done without navigating multiple systems. AI Search ensures employees get curated, NBA-specific answers rather than generic web results that could lead to costly decisions. This project was so high profile that even NBA Commissioner Adam Silver got involved to provide meaningful input.
“We set out to address feedback with a simple, intuitive mega menu organised around topics that help staff quickly find what they need,” explains Nick Ricciardi, vice president and head of IT customer experience at the NBA. “Paired with AI-enhanced search, this directly tackles the pain points employees shared.”
Key results: 75% increased employee productivity; 61% search deflection rate; 38% of agent time saved with self-service
Third place: Keurig Dr Pepper (KDP)
MyKDP replaced separate HR, tech, finance, and intranet portals with a single, AI-powered front door. Intelligence built into the back end allows employees to simply describe what they need, and AI routes them to the right place. The platform runs AI-powered search, an auto-categorisation AI agent, and an AI resolver that cuts HR case resolution from two days to six seconds.
KDP also employed an aggressive strategy to boost mobile adoption, ensuring ServiceNow was “unavoidable” through promotions to its deskless employees.
“No longer do you have to remember what portal you're going to,” says Jason Haines, senior director of employee experience at KDP. “You don't have to know if it's an incident or a service request. Just describe the work you're looking for. We use AI to route it on the back end and get it into the right hands faster.”
Key results: HR cases resolved in six seconds instead of two days: 25% of HR agent time freed by AI; 91,000 total monthly active users
Fourth place: Siemens
Siemens envisioned a future in which employees never have to navigate to any system, application, or provider. They just ask, and AI handles the rest.
That idea is already delivering at scale. A single unified IT portal serves 250,000 employees across 143 countries in five languages, with a bot-first strategy combining Moveworks as the conversational front end and Now Assist AI to power back-end automation.
“We set out to create a single unified gateway. AI automation really changed the game,” explains Ilya Kovalenko, service integration and management strategy manager and product owner at Siemens. “Together with Moveworks, we transformed IT support into a streamlined and actionable experience.”
Key results: 94% of service requests fully automated; 1.7 million employee interactions per month; 140,000 virtual agent conversations per month
Fifth place: Lennar
home@Lennar replaced fragmented intranets and siloed department sites with one unified experience across HR, IT, and communications. The platform is built on a foundation that gives field workers instant answers while on job sites. The result was immediate organic pull.
“home@Lennar didn’t happen by accident. It happened by design. Our OneLennar value is all about breaking down silos and creating a unified experience for every associate, regardless of division or market,” notes Adam Clark, vice president of corporate systems at Lennar. “Deploying ServiceNow HR Service Delivery and Employee Centre Pro as our backbone gave us the technology to match that ambition.”
Lennar cultivates a fun culture that drives engagement via CEO updates, news, and employee spotlights. To do that, its communications team delivers curated videos every day via Vbrick’s integration with ServiceNow.
Key results: 98% ticket deflection; 88% search deflection; 80% of associates visit weekly
2026 Best Employee Experience honourees
(in alphabetical order)
DFI Retail Group
For a retailer with thousands of employees spread across offices and store floors, fragmentation isn't just inconvenient; it's costly. DFI Retail Group solved it with DFI Link, a single destination for 5,000-plus office employees to connect, learn, and get help, with a frontline rollout to 15,000 store employees underway.
Digitalised onboarding replaced manual, fragmented processes with guided journeys that prepare employees from day 1. Self-service workflows handle everything from HR transactions to leadership communications.
“Our team members are at the heart of everything we do. DFI Link was designed to empower them with the tools and information they need to excel in their daily work,” says Chantelle Chiew, group technology director at DFI Retail Group. “When we invest in making our team members’ lives easier and more productive, that excellence naturally flows through to the exceptional service we deliver to our customers.”
Key results: $1.1 million in annual cost savings; 92.5% of searches resolved accurately; more than 50% of cases deflected via self-service
H. Lundbeck
When one portal can replace more than 100 shared mailboxes and a legacy system—and do it fast enough that teams ask to get on the platform before you've rolled it out—you've built something special.
That's what happened at H. Lundbeck. The pharmaceutical company created a single entry point across IT, HR, finance, procurement, and facilities with mobile access and support in more than 30 languages, breaking down barriers for field sales and global affiliates who previously couldn't get help without a local intermediary.
The project team proved to the chief financial officer that their automated integrations for finance and supply chain to SAP S/4HANA would pay off. Additionally, they retired 12 point solutions for facilities with Workplace Service Delivery, which cut software spend in half.
“Almost immediately after go-live, multiple parts of the organisation were asking how and when can we get on ServiceNow,” says Danuta Kadziolka, senior manager of IT business support services at H. Lundbeck. “The demand is too huge for us to even handle, and that's showcasing that we were super successful.”
Key results: 151,000 hours saved annually through self-service; 94% employee satisfaction score; 92% adoption across the organisation
Labcorp
At Labcorp, the stakes for a good employee experience go beyond productivity. With 70,000 employees across 17 countries focused on advancing human health, every minute saved finding an HR answer is a minute reinvested in the work that matters.
A dedicated people leaders site features live chat and one-on-one HR support, which has cut manager wait times from 24 hours to a mere 35 seconds. And DiNA, Labcorp's internal AI avatar, is expanding across HR, careers, and onboarding to give employees answers in natural language and complete Workday tasks on their behalf.
“We’re transforming how work happens. By removing friction from everyday moments, we give our teams time that fuels focus, innovation, and impact so they can do what matters most: improving health and improving lives,” says Teresa Brinson, director of global HR portal experience at Labcorp.
Key results: $1.2 million in increased annual productivity; 90% search deflection rate; 89% customer satisfaction score for chat
Medtronic
Medtronic's HRmony portal starts with a simple premise: Employees shouldn't have to wade through content to find what's relevant to them, so it doesn't make them. HRmony serves hyper-localised content by country, union contract, and location so that every employee sees exactly what applies to them and nothing that doesn't.
The AI digital assistant, powered by Moveworks, gives manufacturing employees a faster way to get HR support without ever leaving the line, and more than 100 custom use cases are already live.
“Employees don't want to wade through content to find what's relevant to them,” says Louise Ernewein, principal content management specialist at Medtronic. “We serve it up on a plate: what they need to know, what they need to see, and what they need to act.”
Key results: More than 100 custom use cases built with Moveworks; 6,000 hours saved by AI assistant since launch; 77% ticket deflection
UCLA Health
UCLA Health built its employee experience for the nurse on a night shift who can't wait until morning for an HR answer. With 80% of its workforce frontline—and often working without HR coverage—UCLA Health deployed Now Assist AI Search to give employees accurate, instant answers around the clock.
A custom auxiliary manager role was engineered specifically for the clinical environment, giving nurse managers and medical school administrators access to employee data across matrixed teams. As a result, HR business partners are freed from reactive requests and repositioned as strategic partners.
“HR business partners can now be more strategic, rather than running someone a report because they need data,” explains Stacey Titter, senior manager of HR digital transformation at UCLA Health. “Manager Connect is helping elevate HR to be a more trusted and strategic partner.”
Key results: 88% employee satisfaction score; 70% AI search-driven deflection rate; 70% ticket deflection rate
Special recognition
City and County of San Francisco
The City and County of San Francisco serves 35,000 employees across 60 departments with a single unified destination for HR, internal communications, and services. The internal design team led with content first, generating buy-in and employee traffic while simultaneously building out HR service workflows.
With 70% of the workforce frontline or deskless, getting this right wasn't just an IT project. It was a commitment to employees who had never had a digital front door before.
"The fact that we did something that has been attempted and never accomplished in an organisation hundreds of years old—centralising contact lists, providing receipts for requests, making content available across all 60 departments—is revolutionising the employee experience,” says Syd Heller, acting director of systems and analytics at the City and County of San Francisco.
Key results: 32,000 unique monthly active users; 291,000 total monthly sessions; content from across all 60 departments
These world-class examples are proof that great employee experiences are a business advantage. They consolidate every aspect of the business into a singular experience and use AI to automate work and supercharge productivity.
Find out how ServiceNow can help reinvent your employee experience.