How Learning Care Group Transformed Employee Experience with ServiceNow

Sean Dawson: Hello, and welcome to the Cask Distillery podcast once again, where we unlock the full potential of ServiceNow with expert insights and practical strategies really only here on the Cask Distillery podcast. I have with me today a very special guest: Jeff Spaude, who is the senior VP of information technology at Learning Care Group.

Jeff, thank you for joining us today. Really appreciate the time. And for those listening, we asked Jeff to come on to talk to us from a customer viewpoint. So Jeff is a client of Cask. And wanted to hand it over to Jeff to tell us a little bit about the organization you work for so it frames it for the listeners and they understand.

Jeff Spaude: Sounds good. Happy to be here. Good afternoon, Sean. And thanks for the invite. Excited to spend a little bit of time here for you. As you said, my name is Jeff Spaud. Greetings. I’m here in Novi, Michigan. So we’re in the throes of the winter here. 

Sean Dawson: So it’s warm?

Jeff Spaude: Yeah, exactly. At least we see some sun today.

As you mentioned, I’m the senior vice president of IT. I work at Learning Care Group. I’ll celebrate 10 years here at Learning Care Group in February. So we’re on the heels of a milestone anniversary, and I’ve had the opportunity here at Learning Care Group to see the company grow tremendously and go through quite a bit of change. So looking forward to talking to you a little bit about that. 

For those out there that may not be familiar with Learning Care Group (or LCG), we are the second-largest child care provider in North America. We also offer employer-sponsored solutions. So, helping those working parents and their employers that may offer on-site care.

We are headquartered in Novi, Michigan. Our community is now well over a thousand schools—closer to 1,100. And we’re still growing. So we provide quality care and learning across all of those schools really for children as early as six weeks, all the way through 12 years. We do operate 11 unique brands. So some of your listeners may not recognize Learning Care Group but may recognize something like Child Time, La Petite, Children’s Courtyard. And we operate across 40 states. 

Sean Dawson: And from a ServiceNow standpoint, how long has the organization been on ServiceNow, and what did the initial implementation kind of look like?

Jeff Spaude: Yeah, shall we? Twelve years. So we’re a longtime ServiceNow customer. I think when we implemented back in 2013, we were on the Calgary version. So a while back. Our initial implementation, we were really focused on a single use case. And that use case was very IT-focused. And it was “How do we better track and measure what’s happening in support? And how do we get that from a single spot?” So ServiceNow was a great fit for us and really was an important tool for us in IT. But it really didn’t span beyond IT at the time that we implemented and some years after that. 

And as we continue to use more and more, and the needs of the enterprise continued to grow, that vision has really changed over the years. And we see ServiceNow much more of an enabler of business across LCG. And it really has become a critical tool for us across the enterprise. 

Sean Dawson: And you mentioned something actually I was going to get into next with you is—you mentioned vision, and I kind of wanted you to describe how you’ve gone about defining and sharing your vision and what has worked and what hasn’t in relation to working with business stakeholders.

Jeff Spaude: Yeah, I can pass. 

Sean Dawson: Big subject. 

Jeff Spaude: Big subject. Yeah. So I think I would start by saying we are really good about reviewing our company’s vision every month. So as we go into our all-hands meeting with IT and beyond that, one of the first things we do is we review our vision together. And that vision really is to have a positive impact on every child that we serve, their families, our teachers, and in the communities that we operate. And then within IT, we look at delivering on that mission by being a competitive business asset of innovation. So, first, when we think about vision for anything, whether it’s ServiceNow or anything that we do to enable our business, we put it through that filter.

But for us, you’ll often hear me say in conversations with some of our business executives, our teams will talk about “What is the problem we’re trying to solve?” And it seems like a really simple question. But oftentimes, when you start to dig into that, there’s not always an easy answer. And I think for us, as we define the vision for ServiceNow and how it enables our business, we started by really talking about what the problem was that we were trying to solve. And then more importantly, why. Why are we trying to solve it? And those two things allow for us to get pretty good executive alignment.

So you always talk about a vision and the importance of buy-in from the top. And there’s varying levels of success doing that. I think we’re really successful in that because we know what we’re trying to solve and why we’re trying to do that. And then we work really hard to get that executive alignment. If we don’t have it, we don’t move forward. And that’s what’s been really successful in us defining this division and the thing that works for us. 

One of the other things that we do from a vision perspective that I love and may be sometimes a little bit uncomfortable for folks, but we talk a lot about our elevator pitch. So we challenge our folks, right? “Hey, if you happen to be in the elevator with our CEO or one of our board members, and they ask you, ‘Tell me about ServiceNow.’ What’s it all about?” We practiced the 20 seconds. What is the vision? How do you describe it in 20 seconds? And whether that’s one of our developers or one of our leaders in the organization. So I think really cascading that vision down and practicing those things makes that vision real. 

And then I think the final thing I’d say about vision for us is we really employ a process where we deliver incrementally. And what I like about that from a vision perspective is it’s really easy to talk about vision and the really great things you’re going to do and throw a bunch of really important buzzwords out there. But when people can see it, and they can feel it, and they can touch it, and they can experience it and give feedback, it makes that vision more real, and it gets people excited for more. Right? So this idea of “We’ll give you a little bit; we’re able to give that to you pretty quickly. It’s not the full thing, right? It’s some working software for you, but we’re going to keep building on it.” I think that makes the vision a reality and helps us to continue to invest and drive more enhancement to it. 

Sean Dawson: That, that’s really unique, the elevator pitch. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before. That is so good. Cause I’m huge into—you mentioned the why. It’s so awesome to know the why, but if you can know the why, but if you don’t practice this stuff and apply it and make it so everybody sees it, it’s part of the DNA. And actually, speaking to the DNA a little bit here, I wanted to get your opinion, at least from Learning Care Group’s standpoint, on talking about the pace of change and how the culture at LCG impacts that.

Jeff Spaude: Yeah, absolutely. So being a growing company, pace of change is fast, right? And we talk about pace of change a lot. I think, to your question, pace of change is so correlated to the culture that you have. And a culture can either support that pace of change, or you can have cultures that kind of fight against it, and then you quickly get left behind.

One of the reasons that I’ve been here at Learning Care Group and I’ve kept me here for 10 years is our culture that supports that pace of change. I think that there’s a few things that are kind of core to our culture that support that pace of change. One of them is failing fast. And it’s something that we really talk about a lot and really encourage our folks to do that. So I think the key is if we want to try something, it may not always work exactly like we need it to, but it’s okay to fail fast as long as we learn from it, and then we move forward pretty quickly. And there’s been a number of different things that we’ve done over the years where there may have been a small failure, and we’ve learned so much from it and built on top of it. So I think that’s one of the key things about our culture. 

The other thing that you’ll see pretty prevalent in our culture is the openness and transparency. We talk a lot. We talk about change a lot. We talk about why it’s important. And as I mentioned earlier, we talk about why we’re making the change. And sometimes we may not all completely align to the change, but I think understanding the why helps folks to continue to keep going with that pace of change. 

And I think the last thing I’d say about our culture is focus, right? So knowing what we should be working on, knowing what’s important right now, and maybe what’s important later, right? And staying pretty focused. I think about the nature of what our teachers in our schools do every day. No single day is the same, right? You could have a child that comes in that has different needs. You could have weather or something passing through. So every single day is different for them. And it’s so important that what we do from a support perspective, we’re supporting that change and we can embody that ability to embrace change as well. 

Sean Dawson: And then tying off from, I guess, more about vision. You talked about the wine. So that gives you a lot of demand. And I imagine there’s a lot of demand coming in. Plus you have the fail fast. People want to move fast and the great culture to do that in. But what does platform governance look like for you today? Because that could get messy. Kind of curious what your thoughts are with that.

Jeff Spaude: It does, right? There’s no shortage of demand. One of the great things about having a really good tool as well as a really good team of folks that are looking to do great things. So, I think the first thing from a governance perspective that was really important to us was the identification of an owner. And when we think about something like ServiceNow, it is core to the employee experience. So we have an HR leader who is the business owner of the overall ServiceNow platform. And that was a really important step for us to ensure we identified who that person was. And that person is able to help prioritize and set the business road map and make sure that it aligns to the things that we’re trying to accomplish and, importantly, also aligns to what our expectations would be around an employee experience. So I think that’s the first important piece of any governance is making sure that we’ve got someone that we can partner with to prioritize the right things at the right time, because the list is long. And the more great things you do, the more things come your way. So number one. 

I think number two, then, we have strong ownership on the IT side where we really set  that technology road map. Make sure that it aligns from an overall scalability/supportability perspective, making sure that we keep that application—the road map—fresh and supporting our folks and what they need. And part of that is we’ve got a really strong architect in our governance model. Really good, strong product ownership. And then the last piece of that governance, I would say, is the utilization of strategic partners. So our organizational model here at LCG and IT is a hybrid model. So what that means is we have a smaller but really strong team of IT folks that work for us. And they fill roles like architects and project managers and product owners. And then we would leverage strategic partners like Cask who help us on the development side or who help us on the configuration side or help us with that deep expertise and how do you take something like ServiceNow and implement those best practices aligned to what you’re trying to do.

So I think those are the key components to our governance along with, as we talked about earlier, strong executive alignment and continued investment there. 

Sean Dawson: All right. So pivoting just a little bit, let’s talk—well, at least, I wanted to talk a little bit about what’s next for Learning Care Group on ServiceNow? What’s the next thing for you? 

Jeff Spaude: Yeah, 12 years. Right, Sean? So what’s coming next? Really big things, actually. It’s a great time to be talking about ServiceNow. So I was excited to talk to you. Also, we are really in the middle of a pretty large implementation—the next iteration of ServiceNow—where we are rolling out ServiceNow to our entire 22,000 employee base and really rethinking and modernizing that support experience for them as well as how they consume information on a daily basis.

So, there are a few different entry points for support. Not just IT support, whether it’s employee support or support from some of our compliance teams. So that all will go through a new and improved modernized ServiceNow experience. And in fact, we branded that as LCG Now. So it’s really kind of that single stop for employees where they go to get everything they need. Part of that is we’re taking the step into live chat, something that we haven’t done in the past, but we’re ready for our folks to do that. 

And I think even beyond that is self service, right? So as you look at as we continue to grow our workforce and have folks that really expect that, right? They want to be able to go get answers to their questions quickly. And if we’ve got a great spot for them to go do that, and they get answers quickly, they can go back to what they need to do and that’s taking care of kids and, and the family.

So we’re right in the middle of that really exciting time. And we just see it continue to grow. And as you said about demand, there isn’t a week go by where there isn’t a functional leader coming over and saying, “Hey, how do I get in on this excitement?” So it’s gonna be an exciting 12 months.

Sean Dawson: That is exciting. So what’s the big—you’ve been on the platform for a long time. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned in your ServiceNow journey? 

Jeff Spaude: I think, Sean, we’ve talked about a few of these things throughout here, but I’ll simply say and then elaborate a little bit. I go slow to go fast.

You might say, “Well, Jeff, you’ve been on the platform for 12 years. You’re not going fast.” But I think as we saw our business grow, we saw a continued need to leverage an important asset that we had. And one of the things that was important is we could have said, “Okay, we’re going to go,” as mentioned, like, “We’re going to go put every function on this. We’re going to put every support function on this. We’re going to take all self-service, and we’re going to put it in here. We’re going to take all these disparate things.” And we talked about that, right? And, and certainly there was some support for doing it that way. 

But as we really looked at it, we thought about this, we’re like, “We get one chance, right?” Just like anyone else, right? If you call and you have a bad support experience the first time, that’s what you’re going to remember. So we wanted to make sure that when our folks think about this new experience, that that first experience is great or at least good, right, and then gets better and better. So we were deliberate about going a little slow at the beginning so that we could go faster and we can scale and bring folks on additional functions and additional functionality and much quicker once we establish that. 

Early on, we got really great user feedback. We established some qualitative/quantitative metrics that we were looking at that allowed us to make some real improvements. And I’ll tell you, using trusted partners like Cask to who can say, “Hey, we’ve seen this and we’ve seen some of that feedback. And here’s how you can shift some of that,” has been great as well.

Sean Dawson: So thinking about the shiny new objects and the things that are coming out from ServiceNow, what are some things that you and Learning Care are keeping your eyes on in regard to upcoming ServiceNow features? And what is it that you’re looking at? 

Jeff Spaude: Right. So I think probably most could guess I’m going to say AI, but you can’t talk about platforms or IT things without talking about AI or, really, business performance. But in all honesty, AI is really important to us. And there’s some, I think, really interesting things that ServiceNow is doing already and more and more that we’re really anxious to see what they’ll do. For us, we take a pretty realistic view on AI. It’s not really just a buzzword. We look to our platforms to use AI to help us figure out how our folks can work smarter, right? And how do they make that customer journey easier? So it’s not necessarily about removing those interactions and using AI. But it’s about making those interactions more meaningful and more valuable. And for us, it’s really about how do we also take advantage of some of those things to minimize business disruption. 

So we envision a day that maybe using data that’s already out there and pretty rich data around all the support that’s coming in. Maybe there’s some opportunities to anticipate the issue before it happens, right, or allow us to more quickly address the issue so that we can minimize those business disruptions. 

And then we also think about how we support our folks and how we support our people. AI can take and help us with some of those repetitive tasks that may not be so exciting for some folks and redeploy some of their time to do more exciting innovative things.

So that’s what we’ll continue to watch. That’s what we’ll continue to talk to our ServiceNow folks about and figure out how we can take a realistic view around how we make those things happen using some of the features that come with AI. 

Sean Dawson: Great. Well, thanks for the time, Jeff. We really appreciate it. I know we went through a couple of reschedules dealing with sickness and all that. So thank you so much for coming on. It’s just a pleasure to have you here. 

Jeff Spaude: You bet. Thanks, Sean. Appreciate it. 

Sean Dawson: So for the listeners, hey, if you got anything that you want to see from us, please let us know in the comments. Like and subscribe, however you’re consuming this podcast. And again, thank you for joining us, and we’ll talk to you soon. Take care. Bye bye.