From the time a prospective employee looks at joining a company to the time they leave, their employee experience is integral to how they perceive their time at the company, how productive they are, and whether they want to continue to work there. Not only does the experience impact the employee’s happiness, but it also affects the company’s bottom line. In fact, companies that invest in the employee experience are up to four times more profitable than those that do not. This may be due partly to the fact that happy employees tend to work harder. According to research from McKinsey, employees put in close to 40 percent more effort at companies with better employee experience.
In a recent episode of The Distillery podcast, Erin Moore, director of employee workflows at Cask, talked about how ServiceNow’s Employee Center service portals can improve employee experience while also increasing the efficiency of organizational processes. Erin has 19 years of experience in customer service, as well as several years working in HR and managing day-to-day operations. She brings a unique expert perspective to human resources and employee experience and has a deep understanding of how ServiceNow’s platform introduces a new level of ease and efficiency to these areas. Here’s how Erin says ServiceNow’s Employee Center applications can improve companies' human resources operations and the overall employee experience.
What is the Employee Center?
Erin describes the Employee Center as many service portals brought together into one hub that can serve a variety of needs. It is a place where employees can go when they have a question or need assistance in any number of areas, such as pay stub information, how to download software, putting money on a cafeteria card, or even more complex human resources questions. The service portal is designed to quickly give employees answers to their questions through knowledge base articles and other easy-to-find information or direct them to the right resources for their needs.
Without a service portal, it is easy for employees to become frustrated if they do not know who to talk to about specific concerns. Often, their question may be raised to the wrong person and take a long time to get resolved, or it may even get forgotten about. With the service portal, they can often get answers within minutes, and they can even track the progress of their case and who is handling it when it comes to solutions that take more time.
Not only will employees have easy access to information, but that information can be curated to the individual so they get the right feedback for their specific role in the organization. “It just makes things so much easier for the employee to consume the information because they’re not having to weed through things that don’t matter to them,” Erin says. This curation allows for accurate results, as well as necessary privacy and security for different departments and management alike.
Organizational tools and benefits
The Employee Center provides major benefits from the employee side, but it also has several tools that can increase efficiency and productivity at the management level. Departments are often inundated with requests that can easily be answered with a knowledge base article or other resources, and these requests are quickly solved with the Employee Center service portal. The frustration employees feel when they don’t know who to turn to for help is also felt on the other side when managers try to resolve concerns that are directed down the wrong avenue. The service portal addresses these pain points but also saves time for all parties involved.
Manager Hub is a tool in Employee Center that streamlines processes and makes it easy for managers to find information and track progress on important tasks. One crucial area where the Manager Hub shines is tracking the employee lifecycle and what needs to be done by employees and management at different points on the employee’s path with the company. The service portal can give employees instant access to everything they need in their onboarding process when they start work for the company, and it shows managers where each employee is in that process.
During employees’ time with the company, the portal can help managers see which employees may need training and other requirements along the way—as well as small things that are vital to workers’ happiness, such as birthdays and anniversaries. Managers can also use the hub to dive into employee engagement surveys and look at ways to improve their employees’ experiences at the company. At the end of an employee’s journey with the company, managers can keep track of what needs to be done for offboarding, including exit surveys and ensuring retirement benefits are set up correctly. “It creates that [one-stop] shop just for the manager in and of themselves for all the things that they have on their plate,” Erin says.
Employee Center vs. Employee Center Pro
The ServiceNow Employee Center consists of two separate platforms: Employee Center (EC) and Employee Center Pro (EC Pro). Erin says the companies deciding between the two platforms should determine the needs of the business. Both applications provide companies with a service portal to serve the needs of a multitude of areas, such as IT and HR. A key difference with Employee Center Pro is the ability to include more analytics. Not every business will need these analytics to begin, and starting with a more simple approach with Employee Center could be the best choice. “For organizations that are new on their technology journey, or maybe they haven’t gotten into advanced analytics yet, Employee Center is a great place to start, and there’s no harm in starting there,” Erin says.
For companies that are ready to dive into more analytics, Employee Center Pro may be the best option. EC Pro can give the business insights into what help articles employees are reading and how many people are using certain features. It can also show where employees turned after reading knowledge base articles and whether they continued to have questions. This information can give the organization the ability to provide better information to their employees and have a better understanding of pain points in the employee experience.
According to Gartner, a staggering 46 percent of employees wish their companies did more to address employee feedback. As organizations become more responsive to employees’ questions and needs, they also build trust with them. With the ability to analyze data, businesses will have more tools to improve the effectiveness of the service portal and perhaps provide more resources and information to employees to help prevent some common questions and concerns before they arise.
Employee Center is an incredible tool that can vastly improve the employee experience as employees are able to obtain fast, consistent, and reliable answers to questions and concerns. With this application, organizations can see higher productivity and satisfaction at every level.
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We’re with you for what comes next
You're working in a rapidly shifting environment.
Global dynamics, AI advancements, heavy competition–the only certainty is change.
We get it. And we’re here to help you harness the full potential of ServiceNow to simplify transformation.
Let's navigate the future together.
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