Let’s face it, the pandemic turned the workplace upside down. And with Gen-Z entering the workforce, traditional ways of working just won’t cut it anymore. Ignoring these changes is a risk that no business can afford to take and that’s why you need a dynamic employee experience strategy to fulfil what your staff really needs and retain the best talents.  

Why do we need a digital employee experience platform? 

Repetitive admin tasks can eat up a lot of our time. A centralised platform comes in handy by streamlining these processes to save us time and hassle. It also provides easy access to useful information and optimises touchpoints with your staff, so your employees can feel that they are being heard and cared for.  

• Enable remote and hybrid working 

More companies are shifting away from the 9-to-5 in-office work model and the hybrid or remote way of work is becoming the new norm. Data from September 2022 shows that around 1 in 5 workers worked at least one day from home every week. The new trend undoubtedly gives employees more flexibility, but it also poses challenges to staff management given that face-to-face interactions are substantially reduced.  

To stop your employees from feeling isolated in the absence of in-person conversations, a well-designed employee platform can connect them by providing the latest company news, product updates and strategic plans all in one centralised portal. Whether you’re in the office or at home in your pyjamas, you’ll have an organised view of task assignments and whatever materials you need to stay connected even if the team is physically apart. 

• Engage your employees 

Boring admin tasks are the bane of everyone’s workday. In fact, employees often spend nearly half of their hours working on these repetitive yet necessary duties. limiting the actual output that keeps the business running. An employee service centre will be able to streamline and automate trivial tasks such as invoice management and holiday applications, giving some time back to your staff so that they can work on something more important.   

The platform is also an extra channel to give voice to your employees. Common functionalities of an employee portal like surveys and questionnaires enable staff members to share honest feedback comfortably, helpful for getting an idea of how your employees genuinely feel about working at the company.   

• Encourage company-wide collaboration 

If you have felt like you’re working on your own island and have no idea what’s happening in other departments, you are not alone. It’s a common issue for large enterprises, especially when it comes to frontline workers who don’t always work at the office and have no access to the company intranet. The lack of cross-functional communication may lead to delays and errors in work processes, potentially endangering business efficiency or even workplace safety.  

That’s why many employee experience platforms have incorporated instant messaging tools to allow members of staff reaching out to anyone at any time. Setting up push notifications is one of the many options to alert employees of important matters. Some employee experience solutions also allow sending customised content to users, like benefit enrolment and quarterly CEO updates, which is a good way to add a bit of a personal touch to corporate messages.

• Capture data for better management 

Improving employee experience is a tough nut to crack, more so if you haven’t got enough data to analyse. What’s good about an employee portal is that every click and entry on the platform will be recorded and monitored, giving HR and managers a gold mine of data to study with. 

With this wealth of information, management can get a bird’s eye view of employee satisfaction and make necessary policy adjustments to bridge any gaps, while HR can also assess the performance of any internal campaign. 

At the end of the day, employee experience is all about putting your team first, and an employee experience platform, which is designed to help you engage your team and learn more about them, is the tool that can make reaching that goal much easier. Prioritise employee experience to let them feel heard and valued, as it will accelerate the growth of your business in the long run. 

Introduction to the ServiceNow Employee Center 

As good as it may sound, we must be honest that a project like this may take a good amount of time and cost. Meanwhile, your HR team is probably having a full plate already and therefore cannot take up any additional workload.  

Don’t worry though as the ServiceNow Employee Center has got your back. Offering a wide range of functionalities, it is a low-code and highly customisable platform made to adapt to your unique business needs at an exceptionally low maintenance cost. 

• Manager Hub 

The ServiceNow Manager Hub enables managers to catch up with what’s happening with the physically dispersed team without having to message each member one by one individually. The hub shows team leaders an overview of action items, team stats, pending open requests and important dates. It also includes useful information for managing remote workers such as local time zones, number of active employee journeys and list of members on leave.  

Managers can also curate personalised “Journeys” for each employee, supporting them with specific resources and tasks for different stages of their careers. You may also dive deeper into the insight section to better understand your employees’ progress on them and if they need any additional support. 

• Targeted Campaigns 

Present employees with customised content based on their locations, roles and job types to avoid information overload. The feature is beneficial to enhancing employee engagement by keeping them interested in the materials they see and ensuring it’s straight-forward for them to find what they need.  

• AI-driven Search 

The search function backed by Artificial Intelligence will provide users with relevant content according to their backgrounds and precious queries, assisting employees to retrieve related results out of the broad library of documents and data stored on the employee portal.  

• Employee Forums 

A dedicated space for your employees to ask questions and submit feedback. Your staff members will be given the opportunity to share their thoughts on everything work-related and discuss with other colleagues, without having to do so on external social media which may lead to security risks. 

The forum helps to collect comments from staff members, guiding the business to further optimise their internal campaigns and operations. Employees may also get the answers they are looking for through their peers without having to reach another department, saving time for the more important tasks. 

Better still, all of these can be integrated into your existing ServiceNow instance and workplace platform such as Microsoft Teams to keep it consistent and visible for every part of the company. 

How has ESC Transformed Businesses?

A lot of our clients are long-term ServiceNow users and have always been at the forefront, looking for new features and aligning them to their latest business strategies. ESC is one of the initiatives that grabs their attention and they love seeing what the solution has to offer to help simplify operations and save cost.

Unifii, an expert in the area, guides our clients through intuitive workshops, just so that businesses can know exactly what they are paying for and how the migration can potentially rejuvenate the entire employee journey. We're here to provide accessible help and advice whenever needed and lead organisations through a seamless implementation.

Engaging all your stakeholders in this new project can often be the most challenging part. ESC aims to merge various ServiceNow products into a single-pane view, which includes ITSM, SPM, HR and Finance. Its success depends on decision-makers across departments and a company-wide adoption is the key for the portal to work at its best.

We recently helped one of our customers consolidate their employee journey by integrating disparate channels, like manual emails, phone calls and traditional portals, into a unified and self-service ESC. The result? A 70% reduction of administration effort just by eliminating the repetitive task of redirecting requests. With automated request assignments and synced information, employees can now get what they need in no time.

If that piques your interest, you can start by gathering insights into routine requests and looking at how you can deliver those in a self-serve way. This includes defining the necessary data for each request and the possible configuration of grouping them into one portal, possibly accessible through mobile channels as well for a better user experience. Starting from scratch may seem daunting, but Unifii is here to guide you through every step. Get in touch with us for a free strategy session and we will demonstrate how our team can make it works for you!