Workforce Management has become one of the most important priorities for CEOs in 2023, even more than financial-related topics. After the pandemic, significant and persistent change has occurred.  Employees are looking for new ways of working, flexibility and an engaged experience.  Traditional working methods and practices are contributing to the phenomenon of the “Great Resignation”.

Now more than ever the ability to retain and empower their workforce is an enormous challenge for companies and having a good digital strategy to increment employee engagement and satisfaction is a must. 

ServiceNow Employee Experience workflows grants customers the ability to deploy pre-configured employee experience packages, that help to speed up your digital transformation and improve the employee experience. During this blog, I would like to explain two of the most important Employee Experience features.

EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE PACKAGES

The Employee Experience Packs are pre-configured packages that can be installed as a plug-in in the ServiceNow Platform. The packages contain a group of activities, tasks, and processes that enable end-to-end and multi-department HR fulfillment services such as onboarding, offboarding, promotions, medical leave, etc.

To have a better understanding of Employee Experience packages, let’s imagine the journey of an employee that needs to submit a request for parental leave.

1. In a legacy company without a digital strategy, the journey would be something like this: 

• Information regarding parental leave is either not available or difficult to find if it is, resulting in a poor employee experience and typically additional workload for HR.
• Having been unable to find the relevant information themselves.  The employee resorts to a direct email to the HR department to start the process.
• The Employee sends all the information that the HR team requires, medical reports, leave of absence, etc. 
• The HR department then reaches to their line manager to agree and approve the leave dates and collect the required information to process the request.

This Journey illustrates the lengthy journey that must be undertaken not just by the employee but the HR dept.  Such a disjointed experience results in multiple contact points and information flowing through emails, increasing the likelihood of information being misplaced.  This experience is likely to take an unreasonable length of time for the employee.

2. Now let’s imagine the employee journey with Employee Experience packages enabled.

• The employee wants to submit a request for parental leave.  The initial search provides a wealth of information in the company’s unified portal.
• Having read the information, the employee submits their paternal leave request.
• The request is submitted, and a set of pre-defined tasks and subtasks are auto generated, notifying the relevant fulfillers across the enterprise and guiding them on the rapid resolution of this request. The user can track the status of all the tasks until the request is complete.

Employee Experience Packages automate and orchestrate cross-departmental tasks and activities required to complete the HR services. It also can be integrated with third-party HRIS (Human resources information systems) like Workday to improve the employee journey. Sets of tasks and activities are also called Lifecycle Events.

You can download the Employee Experience packages from the ServiceNow store and install them as a plug-in in your ServiceNow instance. The complete list of journeys can be consulted here. 

EMPLOYEE JOURNEY MANAGEMENT

Employee Journey management is a set of tools that enables all users to develop their own journey. One important feature is to have the possibility to combine the power of complex flows of lifecycle events (multi department tasks) with the flexibility of quick journeys called Journey accelerators for example pre-defined welcome messages when the employee is in the onboarding process or adding to-do tasks for the employee on their 1st day of onboarding. Due to the ease of creating journeys, managers and HR specialists can create their journeys or collaborate and complement the existing ones without the dependency on platform specialists.

ServiceNow continues to give companies the tools and strategies that empower their employees to help them engage, increasing their loyalty and helping to mitigate the “great resignation”. If you want to know more about employee workflows, you can find them here.

***“Gartner study carried out in April 2022–(CEO’s Top 10 Strategic Business Priority Areas for 2022–2023)”.