Managers often wear many hats and incur several responsibilities. However, the hours they need to focus on high-level business strategies are often taken up by micromanaging employees and reviewing mundane and tedious tasks. This inefficient and poor use of time can cause projects to stall and organizations to lag behind competitors.
Businesses should consider ServiceNow Employee Workflow solutions to combat these challenges. These tools leverage automation to boost internal communication and collaboration to generate and deliver services or products.
This article briefly describes the concept of digitalized workflows pertaining to employees, lists key employee workflow benefits, and provides two sample use cases for consideration.
What is an Employee Workflow?
An employee workflow is a collection of interconnected actions and processes that allow team members to choose how they work and collaborate.
When firms employ ServiceNow software, automation tools, and other technologies to automate manual tasks and processes, employee workflows become digital. Companies can eliminate tedious tasks, minimize costs, improve essential business processes, and boost the overall quality of employees’ work-life balance.
ServiceNow Employee Workflows: Five Key Benefits
1. Increase Productivity
Through employee workflow automation, teams can save time on mundane, repetitive tasks such as crafting emails, updating information, and waiting for management approvals.
Team members no longer need to wait for authorization to proceed with their daily duties. Instead, they have access to workflow systems and can track their progress.
Employee workflows also empower team members to send tasks back to the coworkers involved in a previous step if data is missing or incorrect. Employees can also communicate contextually within the platform, providing insight into what data is necessary to complete the task.
2. Enhance Transparency and Accountability
ServiceNow employee workflows allow management to assign an owner to each phase of the process, including individuals responsible for providing input, approving, and rejecting items. These assignments improve information transparency and accountability in business operations.
3. Improve Work Culture
The number of daily emails and instant messages circulating among employees can be complex for organizations to monitor, particularly in a remote work setting. Employee workflow tools can aid in the organization and tracking of these communications, helping to keep employees on point and promote a goal-oriented and collaborative work culture.
4. Delivery of Top-Notch Service
Management can reduce the risk of service mistakes by monitoring and auditing end-to-end performance. Sluggish sales approvals, late payments, and even payments on goods or services never received are costly mistakes. Employee workflows can display the current condition of every task and help you avoid making easy errors.
5. Removal of Bottlenecks
Management can integrate existing data and apps, improve current process flows, and address new use cases and needs. Workflow tools allow businesses to identify the number of received, accepted, and rejected requests and determine how long team members spend on each. This analysis can help management pinpoint bottlenecks and work to eliminate them.
ServiceNow Employee Workflows Sample Use Cases
Two sample use cases that demonstrate the value of ServiceNow Employee Workflows are as follows:
Onboarding
Bringing on a new employee entails several inter-departmental processes. Many of those processes require human resources, but other departments – such as IT and facilities – may also be involved tonsure that all business functions work in tandem to streamline the employee onboarding process.
ServiceNow employee workflow tools automatically start every process concurrently. For example, human resources will typically need to conduct a background check to approve the hire. At the same time, IT will need to set up the necessary clearances and provide the correct equipment, and facilities must locate a workstation (for companies requiring physical offices).
ServiceNow can control these activities in one workflow rather than disseminating separate emails to a shared services inbox. The objective is to reduce the time necessary for a new employee to hit the ground running. When a new employee has a positive experience, the organization benefits from their productivity much more quickly and increases retention.
Offboarding
Offboarding is a delicate process that organizations should complete with care and diligence. It entails many moving parts, such as the return of equipment, removal of network access, and the payment of dues and benefits. A manual method (one relying too much on case-by-case human intervention) could leave the process open-ended and vulnerable to flaws.
However, automating the process via ServiceNow employee workflows makes the organization more likely to handle essential phases of employment termination correctly. Employee workflows can help management regulate issues and ensure a smooth handover of all critical items regarding offboarding. When the employee resigns, the tool alerts IT, Administration, and Payroll, allowing all departments to begin the exit process.
Cask and ServiceNow Can Help You Boost Employee Productivity
Whether significant events or routine requests, ServiceNow employee workflow solutions provide technology that improves internal interactions. They assist organizations in automating processes and promoting self-service to expedite task completions at critical times. These tools allow team members to do their jobs faster and easier, resulting in higher employee satisfaction and a smoothly run organization.
