Why a successful organisation needs satisfied employees

For many HR leaders, creating a people-centric workplace where employees feel valued and empowered to do their best has always been a priority. With the pandemic having intensified the war for talent, the need to rethink strategies that create a better work environment and culture becomes arguably more critical.

Organisations can start by evolving the employee experience holistically by creating a great digital workplace experience, suggested Gerald Pang, Director, Solution Consulting, Employee Experience, APJ, ServiceNow.

He told HRM Asia, “A combination of an influx of a new generation and the pandemic has propelled the workforce into a mode where digital is the base expectations of the employee. Think of the ‘experience gap’ employees have when interacting with top-grade consumer applications in their personal time like Amazon and Grab, versus basic and rudimentary office applications like emails and helpdesk hotlines when trying to get work done.”

A digital-first approach can benefit both employees and organisations, particularly those who are 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 understand and adapt quickly to the changing needs of the workforce, organisations are starting to prioritise technology that can make a difference quickly to their organisation and employees.

Going live in 17 weeks with the ServiceNow HR Service Delivery as their new global HR employee experience platform, DXC Technology was able to retire its legacy HR support systems and saved twice its annual system support costs.

ANZ Bank, launching a global centralisation programme based on a workforce portal supported by ServiceNow and SAP SuccessFactors, has been able to centralise many of their HR systems over the past 18 months.

For an organisation that hires around 6,000 staff and 8,500 contractors globally each year, this “speed to value in the first drop” has been a key enabler, said Darrin Burke, Head of Technology for Corporate Experience, ANZ Bank.

“Speed is the word. Equipped with new technologies and agility, HR now can rewrite the playbook and adapt for the future,” Pang added.

Delivering personalised and unified employee experiences

“In a world where digital solutions can enable flexibility, the number of apps, sites, and tools employees must navigate has sprawled out of control. According to a 2021 Okta study, the average large organisation typically deploys around 175 systems and applications,” said Pang.

“With systems are disconnected and siloed, organisations struggle to drive the seamless employee experiences needed to support flexible workers from anywhere.”

In response, ServiceNow’s Now Platform integrates existing systems with a unified experience that is personalised to serve employees in the way they prefer to work and provides meaningful and actionable engagement to meet employee’s diverse and dynamic needs.

Pang elaborated, “Through the channels employees are comfortable with, be it 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 one single place to access services across departments and functions, so the ability to drive multi-department service delivery across HR, IT, workplace services, finance, and more is an essential element of a modern intranet.”

Creating meaningful experiences in the employee journey

“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 American memoirist Maya Angelou’s quote, ServiceNow continues to focus on moments that matter in an employee’s journey because, as Pang explained, employees are the heart of any business.

“Organisations are discovering that understanding the employee experience may be just as essential as understanding the customer experience.”

Describing the employee journey as a concept borrowed and adapted from tried-and-true customer journey analysis, Pang emphasised the need for organisations to have an accurate view of the various steps and touchpoints employees experience to achieve personal and organisational goals.

“Organisations are discovering that understanding the employee experience may be just as essential as understanding the customer experience.” – Gerald Pang, Director, Solution Consulting, Employee Experience, APJ, ServiceNow

“By mapping the employee journey in much the same way that organisations map the customer journey, HR helps businesses work to improve employee satisfaction and loyalty.”

Organisations also need to recognise that each employee may be on a unique path in their career journey, ranging from onboarding, returning to work, setting up remote workspaces, transferring to another department, or being promoted.

Employee Journey Management is a digital capability available to organisations to support employees with personalised resources and tools that connect all the departments they will be interacting with.

ServiceNow also works with organisations to improve the employee experience, increase employee satisfaction, decrease turnover, and reinforce company culture, including with 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 creates a unified organisational experience.

The onboarding tool, for example, streamlines tasks and guidance across departments onto a single platform, creates an accelerated path to success with curated content and early access to information, and provides managers with tools to assign tasks easily, conduct training, and mentor employees.

To demonstrate the focus on putting employees at the centre of everything to create meaningful experiences, ServiceNow has also recently acquired Hitch Works, an AI-powered skills-mapping and intelligence company that focuses on the importance of skills in the flow of work.

Pang shared, “As Josh Bersin noted in his article, there is a proliferation of HR tools trying to manage skills and most companies want to tie this together. So, line managers, supervisors, and regional teams must build onboarding, training, and various applications fast – they can’t wait for the core HR functions to adapt to their needs.”

“Leveraging AI-powered skills intelligence to bring learning systems together allows companies to have unprecedented, real-time visibility into the skills of their internal workforce.”

This enables companies to tap into 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, making their work more meaningful,” Pang concluded.