Meet with employees

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights obstacles that companies have never encountered before completing their work. Distributed teams that have to rely on digital tools to stay productive are more aware of the barriers that isolated systems and lack of access to information can create when you are not close to your colleagues than ever before.

Throughout the enterprise market, we see collaboration tools aligned with core enterprise applications to make the workflow of employees working from home easier. For companies that recognize that the world of work will not return to “normal” soon in the context of the COVID-19 economy, the employee experience has now become their top priority.

With this in mind, Facebook’s ServiceNow and Workplace today announced a new partnership in which the two cloud providers will introduce many new integrations to “meet their location”.

ServiceNow has established a partnership with Microsoft Teams, which shows that the vendor is seeking to integrate more closely with popular digital collaboration platforms. As a company dedicated to redefining work processes in a digital enterprise, ServiceNow can choose to cooperate with suppliers that are critical to employees’ work experience, which makes sense.

ServiceNow and Workplace from Facebook already have existing virtual agent integrations that allow employees to request support, receive updates on ongoing requests, and establish contact with real-time agents when the virtual agent cannot help-all without leaving Workplace. Based on what was announced today, the partnership will now include:

• ServiceNow Workplace Employee Movement from Facebook -By integrating ServiceNow Employee Campaigns with Facebook’s Workplace, HR and other departments can create an omni-channel service experience for employees. For example, HR can now disseminate relevant content directly through Workplace, such as information about its diverse and inclusive culture, and the upcoming open enrollment for welfare and return to work procedures.

• Facebook Integration Spoke’s workplace -Now, customers can use ServiceNow IntegrationHub to create additional workflows to meet the employee experience requirements beyond the ready-to-use integration listed above.

Integration Spoke is particularly interesting because it allows customers to freely determine their own use cases to understand how to continuously perform work through Facebook in Workplace.

The two companies also emphasized that they share many common customers, including Sun Life Financial, Petco and Telenor. Barbara J. Mitchell, Senior Vice President of Sun Life Financial Services Management Experience, said in the announcement:

We are long-term users of Workplace and ServiceNow respectively, so we are very happy to hear about the deeper cooperation between them.

We expect to use their new integration to simplify communication, automate internal processes, and ultimately help improve our employee experience.

For employees to choose

We were fortunate to talk to Gretchen Alarcon, vice president and general manager of service delivery for ServiceNow HR, about the integration announcement of Facebook and Workplace. She explained that the COVID-19 pandemic has indeed changed people’s thinking about how to do employee work digitally. enterprise. she says;

What I want to say is that we have learned a lot during the COVID-19 crisis. One thing that is obvious is that there is a lot of friction in the experience of employees. And one of the very important things is to make sure that we will meet the employees where they are. Employees will work in Facebook workplaces, so adding ServiceNow to this feature means that now they can ask important questions and get answers without having to exit the workflow. Therefore, this is a very important step in integrating these two platforms and helping employees increase their productivity.

What I want to say is that Workplace and ServiceNow have something in common [customers]. But, I want to say again, this is an opportunity to reach employees, no matter what channel they use. Therefore, our intention is actually to make it available so that ServiceNow can integrate across different channels. Therefore, it may be Workplace, it may be your phone, it may be using your internal intranet-no matter how the correct channel reaches your employees, we want to make sure you have the opportunity to access ServiceNow there.

The Integration Spoke announcement particularly attracted the attention of Alarcon because it will give customers the freedom to determine their own use cases and highlight how the company considers work across distributed teams. she says:

When you consider how customers typically use integration, there will always be obvious ideas that people have-you know, such as “open admissions” in the US or other factors (such as diversity). But I think it’s possible for a company to say that I need a better way to collaborate between these two functions to serve other use cases, but you can’t always predict this situation. Therefore, instead of using the company as the creator of the content, they can use Integration Spoke and develop it further. Maybe this is because they want to go beyond the HR function provided and use the campaign for other purposes (such as targeting IT information) or things related to resuming work.

Finally, Alarcon pointed out that although ServiceNow has entered the field of collaboration-this is a significant advancement, considering its roots are the ITSM market-its foreseeable focus is to give customers the opportunity to build digital workflows on all platforms, thereby increase productivity. she says:

Our focus is actually on digital workflow. How can we help transform the older, more manual way of working? That is our direction. Therefore, collaboration is certainly part of it. But I think our focus is actually more on how to use our platform to break silos? In order to make the whole enterprise lack a better tenure and carry out the work process.

I take

It is important to view this announcement in the broader context of the corporate market. This is how companies need to speed up their digital plans to maintain productivity and improve the way they work, to show that employees can work in a distributed manner. When people can walk to the human resources, IT or finance departments and solve work problems themselves, people are much more tolerant of data, system and structural islands in a physical office environment. This is no longer the case. Enterprise suppliers have realized that no matter what channel or environment they work in, they need to merge these silos, and employees need to be able to perform tasks quickly.