Exploring employee journeys in ServiceNow HRSD

With employee engagement declining, how can you deliver the modern workplace experience your people expect? Well, thanks to employee journeys in ServiceNow HRSD, you can re-engage and revitalise your workforce and keep your people where they belong – with you.

It’s never been more competitive to hire – and retain – skilled workers.

But employees now demand much more from their employer, seeking an experience that not only offers good pay and benefits but also a focus on career growth, wellbeing and a supportive workplace culture.

A recent Randstad survey found that 54% of employees would leave their workplace if they didn’t feel they belonged there. So, if you can’t provide a working environment that keeps people engaged, healthy and productive – they’ll leave.

But help is at hand; ServiceNow’s HR Service Delivery (HRSD) platform has been purposely designed to help you deliver this modern employee experience.

A key element of HRSD is its ability to manage employee journeys, providing a range of tools and workflows to keep your people engaged and support them at every step of their journey with you.

In this blog, we’ll explore what ServiceNow’s employee journeys are, why they’re important and how they’ll help you cultivate a truly engaged and productive workforce.

What is an employee journey?

Put simply, an employee journey is the whole time an employee spends with your organisation.

It’s the lifecycle of that employee – all of their touchpoints with your organisation, including promotions and training opportunities, as well as every interaction with HR, managers and colleagues.

Each employee journey will be different, as career paths become ever more fluid and dynamic, but generally, there are seven key areas you’ll need to consider when adopting a more ‘holistic’ approach to the employee experience:

• Attraction and recruitment
• Onboarding
• Employee learning and development
• Engagement and retention
• Employee support and wellness
• Internal mobility and career progression
• Offboarding

Understanding how your employee journeys play out across each of these areas is crucial to creating a more ‘complete’ experience that engages and supports your people from start to finish.

Why are employee journeys important?

A positive employee journey contributes to higher employee satisfaction, increased productivity, and improved retention rates, all of which are vital for your organisation's success and growth.

But a study by Gallup found that a staggering 90% of the UK’s workforce feels disengaged at work. You’ve likely seen or encountered symptoms of this disengagement mentioned in articles that talk about ‘quiet quitting’ or the ‘Great Resignation’. So, creating a consistent and personalised employee journey is now imperative to keeping your people happy and ensuring they feel valued.

To do so, you’ll need the right tools in place to help you manage and measure the impact of your employee journeys – else you’ll just be guessing and your employee experience will be patchwork at best.

By investing in a platform to manage your employee journeys, you’ll be able to identify what is and isn’t working, as well as provide a personalised and efficient experience that boosts retention and helps establish you as a destination employer.

Key benefits of employee journeys in ServiceNow HRSD

Let’s explore some of the key benefits employee journeys in HRSD can bring to your employee experience, helping you cultivate a more engaged – and more productive – workforce.

Simplified onboarding for a stellar first impression

First impressions are everything. Having made it through various rounds of interviews, the last thing you want your new team member to feel is uncertainty.

Having an efficient onboarding experience goes a long way towards building a good relationship with your people. They’ll be nervous, but hopefully enthusiastic, about joining and you want to make them feel welcome and provide everything they need to settle in and hit the ground running.

This is even more important in our new age of flexible working. No matter where or when they’re logging in, you need the relevant information front and centre where they can find it.

HRSD’s Employee Centre Pro portal plays a key role in this (and throughout the employee journey). It offers an easy-to-navigate, single space to find resources and manage interactions with HR and their manager.

Managers can manually set relevant articles or resources to surface on the home screen, or ServiceNow’s AI can auto-populate based on the typical articles a new starter might need.

These could include new starter forms, knowledge articles on company processes, or required training that needs to be completed before they can begin.

Empowering employees through self-service

The self-service capabilities of the Employee Centre Pro portal are a game-changer when it comes to empowering employees.

Whether it's updating personal information, requesting time off or accessing benefits details, employees can effortlessly manage HR-related tasks at their convenience, fostering a sense of autonomy and efficiency.

What’s more, these tasks are easily located in an employee service catalogue and can be fully automated with workflows.

This improves the experience for everyone – employees feel in control and have a clear process to follow and your HR team avoids having to click through multiple systems to complete repetitive requests.

A perfect parental leave process

Managing parental leave can be a headache for many HR teams – but it’s a common and highly valued part of the employee journey.

Very often, the employee will know you offer parental leave, but be unclear on how much time is available, when a request needs to be submitted, or how the leave will affect their pay and benefits. All key concerns for a parent-to-be.

HRSD allows you to create dedicated parental leave knowledge articles and workflows that are easily accessible from the Employee Centre Pro portal. These can be provided as templates for you to use or modify to suit your own processes.

This gives them a step-by-step walkthrough of the process and what’s required at each stage. The employee can also submit their leave request right from the article. Then, the automated workflows process the request and notify the relevant departments – cutting out piles of paperwork and lengthy email chains.

It also sets the stage for the return to work process, helping the employee settle back in with automated requests and relevant articles after their leave ends.

Enhanced performance management for employee growth

HRSD’s employee journeys make it a heck of a lot easier for managers to, well, manage. Particularly with employees now regularly working from multiple different locations.

Using the Manager Hub, managers can set goals, create development plans, provide feedback and track the performance of their team members all in one place. It also helps them track things like employee birthdays, work anniversaries, or new hire join dates.

This helps your managers add a personal touch to their team interactions and home in on the needs of each individual – so employees feel like their needs and performance both matter and are recognised.

Seamless transitions between departments and roles

Careers rarely follow a straight line anymore and your employee journeys need to account for this newfound fluidity.

Providing opportunities to move between departments and roles is a good way to retain talented people and offer flexible progression paths.

The Journey Accelerator templates found in Employee Journey Management enable the creation of customised plans that support internal transitions and growth.

This helps to visualise and plan out employee development journeys. If they can see where and how they can grow, there’s more incentive for them to invest in both themselves and a future with your organisation.

And, in the event an employee wants to progress an opportunity, HRSD’s Internal Mobility feature streamlines the application process, making career transitions smoother and boosting employee retention.

Personalised learning and development plans

Personalisation is a big win when it comes to learning and development. No one wants to sift through irrelevant training or resources that don’t apply to their role.

HRSD’s employee journeys offer a completely tailored learning and development experience to your staff, based on their unique journey.

Managers can assign mentors and surface AI-powered suggestions for role-relevant articles, announcements and training opportunities in Learning Posts. These Learning Posts can curate content from across Udemy, YouTube, Cornerstone, Saba, Pluralsight, SumTotal and more.

Via the Manager Hub, managers can approve and track training requests and progress. Personalised messages (or ‘nudges’, as ServiceNow calls them) can be sent to both managers and employees for overdue tasks, approvals on requests, or to leave comments in the employee's preferred workspace, such as Slack or Teams via Virtual Agent.

This keeps the conversation moving around an employee’s development – avoiding anything getting stuck awaiting approval or simply becoming ‘out of sight, out of mind’. That way, employees feel like their progression is tangibly linked to their day-to-day and not just a conversation that comes up once a year in an annual review.

Continuous feedback and improvement

It’s a strong trust signal to your people if you’re actively asking them to help in improving your employee experience. Even more so if they then see changes happening as a result of their feedback.

And, after all, who’s better placed to say what is and isn’t working than the people on the receiving end?

HRSD’s Listening Posts are purpose-built to gather feedback from employees, whether that’s about something specific or a regular pulse survey to get a sense of how your people are feeling.

You can then dig into average scores, trends and response rates to get a better understanding of any pain points across the employee journey that need to be addressed.

Over time, you should see improvements in employee satisfaction as issues are resolved and the employee experience becomes a shared endeavour that both you and your people are invested in.

Conclusion

Your people have high expectations of the relationship and experience they have with you, so keeping them engaged and happy is now essential to your longer-term success.

By understanding and actively looking to improve your employee journeys, you can overcome dated HR processes and create meaningful, personalised interactions between managers and their teams.

Using ServiceNow HRSD and its employee journey tools, you’ll gain the portals, workflows and data to support a more engaged and productive workforce – encouraging professional growth and creating an employee experience that’s mutually beneficial for you and your people.

If you’d like to know more about HRSD and how to create a truly employee-centric experience, get in touch with us and we’ll walk you through employee journeys in action.

Key takeaways

• Employee engagement has been steadily declining in recent years – improving the employee experience is now key to attracting and retaining talented people.
• ServiceNow’s HR Service Delivery employee journeys play a key part in providing a complete and engaging employee experience.
• With Employee Journey Management, you can map and measure each step of the employee journey and offer highly personalised training and development opportunities.
• It also makes interactions with managers and your HR team simpler and more efficient through self-service and automated workflows.
• By giving your people more autonomy and focusing on their development and career needs, they’ll be more invested and engaged in both their future and that of your organisation.