Gerald Pang, Director, Solution Consulting, Employee Experience, APJ, ServiceNow, shares how to create more meaningful employee experiences.
For many HR leaders, creating a people-centered workplace where employees feel valued and empowered to do their best is always a priority. As the pandemic intensifies the war for talent, the need to rethink strategies that create better work environments and cultures becomes more critical.
Organizations can start by evolving the employee as a whole by creating digital workplace experiences, suggested Gerald Pang, Director, Solution Consulting, Employee Experience, ServiceNow.
He said HRM Asia, “A combination of the influx of a new generation and the pandemic has pushed the workforce into a mode where digital is the primary employee expectation. Think of the ‘experience gap’ that employees have when interacting with top-grade consumer applications in their personal time like Amazon and Grab, compared to basic and basic office applications like emails and helpdesk hotline when trying to get work done.”
A digital-first approach can benefit both employees and organizations, especially those vying for the best candidates in a highly competitive environment. “Delivering a first-class employee experience is a big part of the strategy of attracting and retaining the best talent,” said Pang.
To quickly understand and adapt to the changing needs of the workforce, organizations are beginning to prioritize technology that can rapidly transform their organization and employees.
Going live in 17 weeks with ServiceNow HR Service Delivery as their new global HR employee experience platform, DXC Technology was able to phase out its legacy HR support systems and save twice as much on annual support costs in the system.
ANZ Bank, which is launching a global workforce portal-based centralization program supported by ServiceNow and SAP SuccessFactors, has been able to centralize many of its HR systems over the past 18 months.
For an organization that hires around 6,000 staff and 8,500 contractors globally every year, “speed to value in the first drop” has been a key enabler, says Darrin Burke, Head of Technology for Corporate Experience, ANZ Bank.
“Speed is the word. Equipped with new technologies and agility, HR can now rewrite the playbook and adapt for the future,” added Pang.
Delivering personalized and unified employee experiences
“In a world where digital solutions can enable flexibility, the number of apps, sites, and tools employees must navigate has gotten out of control. According to an Okta study in 2021, the average large organization typically deploys around 175 systems and applications,” said Pang.
“When systems are disconnected and siloed, organizations struggle to drive the seamless employee experiences needed to support a flexible workforce from anywhere.”
In response, ServiceNow’s Now Platform integrates existing systems with a unified experience that is personalized to serve employees the way they want to work and provides meaningful and actionable engagement to address diverse and dynamic employee needs.
Pang explained, “Through channels that employees are comfortable with, whether desktop, mobile or through a collaborative platform like Microsoft Teams, we create an enhanced and unified multi-channel employee experience that meets employees where they are and what they want.”
He added, “Employees are also looking to have a single place to access services across departments and functions, so the ability to drive service delivery across multiple departments in HR, IT, services workplace, finance, and more are an essential element of a modern intranet.”
Creating meaningful employee travel experiences
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Drawing inspiration from a quote by American memoirist Maya Angelou, ServiceNow continues to focus on the moments that matter in an employee’s journey because, as Pang explained, employees are the heart of any business.
“Organizations are discovering that understanding the employee experience can be just as important as understanding the customer experience.”
Describing the employee journey as a concept borrowed and adapted from tried and true customer journey analysis, Pang emphasized the need for organizations to have an accurate view of the various steps and touchpoints. that employees experience to achieve personal and organizational goals.
“Organizations are discovering that understanding the employee experience can be just as important as understanding the customer experience.” – Gerald Pang, Director, Solution Consulting, Employee Experience, ServiceNow
“By mapping the employee journey the same way organizations map the customer journey, HR helps businesses improve employee satisfaction and loyalty.”
Organizations also need to recognize that each employee may be on a unique path in their career journey, from onboarding, returning to work, setting up remote workplaces, moving to another department, or being promoted .
Employee Journey Management is a digital capability that organizations can use to support employees with personalized resources and tools that connect all departments they interact with.
ServiceNow also works with organizations to improve the employee experience, increase employee satisfaction, reduce turnover, and strengthen company culture, including Bristol Myers Squibb, a global biopharmaceutical company.
An employee service portal and a digital onboarding tool powered by ServiceNow Lifecycle Events provide access to the resources employees need, and create a unified organizational experience.
The onboarding tool, for example, streamlines tasks and guidance across departments on a single platform, creates an accelerated path to success with curated content and early access to information, and provides manager tools to easily assign tasks, conduct training, and mentor employees.
To reflect its focus on putting employees at the center of everything to create meaningful experiences, ServiceNow recently acquired Hitch Works, an AI-powered skills-mapping and intelligence company focused on the importance of skills in workflow.
Pang shared, “As Josh Bersin said in his article, there is a proliferation of HR tools that try to manage skills and most companies want to tie it together. So, managers of line, supervisor, and regional teams must develop onboarding, training, and other applications quickly – they can’t wait for core HR functions to adapt to their needs.
“Using AI-powered skills intelligence to integrate learning systems enables companies to gain unprecedented, real-time visibility into the skills of their internal workforce.”
It allows companies to tap internal capacity, focus on upskilling and reskilling, promote and develop employees based on merit, and deploy the right people to the right projects.
“Ultimately, employees see that they are getting those opportunities, which makes their work more meaningful,” Pang concluded.