What You Need to Know
We hear much about advocating for, protecting, improving, and optimizing the employee experience. The groundswell of voices has been building for a long time. Gallup began tracking industrywide employee engagement levels in 2000. This focus on a positive employee experience as the rightly presumed origins of many strategic aims in human capital management is long-established: improving retention, attracting the best talent, maximizing productivity, catalyzing innovation. And, at times, an employer’s deployed technology itself is the main obstacle or bridge to a positive employee experience. The lack of a proper ticketing system, for example, can beset HR with a heavy administrative and forensic workload in the department’s attempts to track and understand employees’ inquiries and make recommendations moving forward to support continual improvement and see to it that the same issues do not arise repeatedly. In this Analyst Insight, we look at factors such as these and how they drove a user to turn to ServiceNow, an important piece of the puzzle in supporting engineers’ productivity and innovation through an improved employee experience. A large, global company in the high technology market space, the customer of ServiceNow highlighted in this report asked to remain anonymous.
People Experience and Operations
In speaking with leaders in the industry this year, 3Sixty Insights has unearthed an accelerating trend. Employees are becoming people in the eyes of their employers and their employers’ software vendors. Specifically, vendors of people-oriented software for the enterprise and the employers that use these applications are using that term, people, to refer to what they used to call their employees, their staff, their workforce, or whatever other term they previously used.
The user profiled in this report is a recent example that 3Sixty Insights has encountered in these industry discussions. 3Sixty Insights spoke with the company’s senior director of people experience and operations, who began working in this role when she joined the company. This was in September 2020. In describing her responsibilities related to the people experience there, she says, “Think of everything from defining and articulating what a north star vision would be for your employee experience, plus the mechanisms to bring that to life.”
Her team oversees planning for all HR, strategic planning, tracking, headcount, budget, and other enablement-related activities. “I have an employee experience team that is looking at research, looking at data, and figuring out how to share that information in a way that can be easily consumed around the employee experience.” She and her team work with key stakeholders to set goals for what they want the experience to be. “We operate in a user-centric way, taking best practices from the consumer development side of our business, and bringing them into how we operate all the way through.”
As for people operations, when employees at larger organizations have work-related needs or questions, they tend to start their search for the information or answers by looking internally (i.e., on an intranet) or on the Internet. If they can’t find online what they’re seeking, their query escalates. This is where and when an HR shared services team of agents comes into play, and if that doesn’t resolve the issue, the ticket usually goes to somebody local and HR. If that doesn’t work, then it goes up to a specialist. “My team owns all of that model. We own working with the other HR teams to determine how to work together effectively, to make that model work.”
As for the senior director of people experience and operations interviewed here, she directly oversees “what we call tier one and tier two.” These are the above-described agents who are geographically agnostic, as well as the team that is spread out geographically on the ground to meet the needs of any given team in proximity to them. “What should that people experience be, and how can we bring it to life? These are the questions that brought us to ServiceNow,” she says.
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