There has been a sea change in our workplace and workforce. It is necessary to address this fundamental shift to support employees, customers, and your organization. Today there are about 62% of people who are actually working from home. Cask has heard from a variety of our clients that they’re seeing as much as a 30% increase in productivity, as well as a decrease in absenteeism when people are working from home. In addition, Forbes also just came out with an article and stated that about 60% of people still would prefer to work from home in the future.
The silver lining of COVID-19 is that it’s allowed organizations to reframe their focus and put the people in the center. It’s created a fearless workforce, but a workforce that also expects flexibility and options when it comes to where, when, and how they’re working. In order to support employees returning to this new dynamic environment, ServiceNow has created a suite of applications that enables long term agility, flexibility, and monitoring.
A Deep Dive into the Return to Work Apps
The suite of applications includes four applications that support employees returning to the workforce and the workplace. Employees returning to the workforce are current employees that have continued to work for their company and will be returning back to the workplace. Whereas employees returning to the workforce are previous employees who have been furloughed or laid off due to the pandemic and their company is working on bringing them back into the workforce.
The suite of applications is supported globally with multi-languages and will leverage language packs. The following eight initial languages will be supported: Portuguese, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.
All four of these applications, plus an integrated dashboard on the workforce safety, which is really about helping employees. It’s the first two applications you see there on the left it’s employee readiness surveys, which helps us understand how the employees feel and understands any of their underlying concerns. All of these applications were built with the employee right at the center.
Employee Readiness Surveys: This application helps organizations understand how the employees feel and identifies any of their underlying concerns.
Employee Health Screening: This application ensures compliance with entry requirements like temperature reading PPE equipment, and allows organizations to understand if employees pass or fail those entry requirements.
Workplace Safety Management: This application manages all of the PPE equipment. You can have a view of each of those by facility or by location, and you can also get real time inventory management of everything that you have.
Contact Tracing: This application manages distancing, reserving of available workspaces, and scheduling sanitation. A real time view of all of your cleaning tasks, along with the dashboard, will take all of that information at a high level and allow you to see those trends and what’s happening holistically across your entire organization.
Frequently Asked Questions About ServiceNow’s Safe Workplace Apps
What is the difference between configure and customize within the Safe Workplace Apps?
ServiceNow is a highly configurable platform, and the Safe Workplace Apps are no exception. Configuration, such as changing the name of a field, is something you can do yourself without putting yourself at risk or breaking anything. However, when it comes to customizing unique elements within the platform, such as changing how a field works within the application or running a script that needs in the background, it gets a little tricky to do without the help of a partner like Cask.
Does the Employee Health Screen App see personal health data?
One of the main aspects of the Health Screen App is taking someone’s temperature to see if somebody should be able to enter the building or not. So, while the app does use this information, it does not store it in the system.
What is the difference between the ServiceNow Safe Workplace Applications and some of the other solutions that are out there?
There are several solutions out there and you’re not only choosing a solution, you’re choosing a path for the future. The ServiceNow Safe Workplace Apps have some incredible strengths. They’re available right now and you can purchase them as a suite, so you don’t need to buy the apps independently. Anyone can own these apps, whether you’re a current existing customer, or you’re a brand new customer. Most importantly, they can tie into your overall employee experience. So they can be part of your larger servicenow portfolio or digital transformation strategy. These are huge benefits moving forward, because you don’t want to just install these and then disregard them a few months from now.
Are these apps meant to be temporary or long term?
These apps are incredibly relevant today and incredibly important for our employees and for the companies as they begin to resume operations. However, these apps are a long term solution that allow organizations to maintain a flexible and dynamic workplace and enable the workforce of the future.
COVID-19 is not going to go away. There are other seasonal clues and other disruptions that are going to occur. Many organizations were not prepared when COVID-19 struck, but moving forward, people are going to continue to enter buildings, facilities, venues, or hospitals and health screenings are going to be important moving forward.
Companies will also need to maintain an agile, flexible environment. They’re going to need to track PPE equipment and track a variety of other things they’re going to need to continuously survey employees, as well as customers. Also, they’ll want to keep track of high level trends to ensure that they’re not caught off guard in the future and are much more responsive moving forward.
How long does it take to implement the safe workplace apps?
These apps can take anywhere from one day to get up and running out of the box to up to three weeks. It is recommended that organizations do this work in phases and work with a partner who has done these types of implementations before.
What version of the NOW platform are the apps supported on?
Whether you’re an existing customer or you’re brand new to the platform, you can have these applications. So if you’re a current customer, you don’t need anything, you just have to install the apps. If you’re a brand new customer, you’ll need to have the core configuration installed. This application is available from Madrid to the current Orlando release. If you want the latest dashboard, you will need Orlando.
The next one is what do I need from a licensing perspective to purchase these apps?
You don’t need anything other than the core integration.
Do these apps work through SMS and/or NOW mobile?
Yes. Especially with the current conditions, everybody is going to be tied to their laptop. So it does work with the out of the box service now, SMS feature and it also fully supports the NOW mobile feature through push notifications.
Is ServiceNow expanding and building on these applications? How supportive are they?
ServiceNow is always taking customer feedback and improving their solutions. They’ve already started on adding the language pack and now they’re looking into doing visitor packs. This will account for visitors, contractors, or anyone else that needs to enter and be screened that is not an employee.
As organizations begin bringing their employees back into the workplace, they need solutions that will work quickly and efficiently. The future is unknown, but we do know that there are going to be other things that these applications can support, so it is necessary for organizations to incorporate some of this new posture into their own digital transformation initiatives.
