2022 HR Tech: Employee Portal Transformation with ServiceNow Employee Center Pro

Last week, I had the privilege of speaking twice in the ServiceNow booth at the HR Technology Conference about how one of our customers recently transformed their employee portal experience using ServiceNow’s Employee Center Pro. This was also the first week that felt like a normal conference, with face-to-face meetings and seeing old colleagues for the first time in nearly three years. As I reflect on my time at the conference, I wanted to provide a recap of the story I shared.

For more than two and a half years, we have worked with a large health care organization to improve their HR Service Delivery configuration and operating model. With our “Review and Recommend” service offering, we pointed them back to “true north” with their ServiceNow HR Case Management solution, directed them down the path of onboarding for their IT group, and deployed dozens of enhancements to their HR services and catalog items.

With that success in their rearview mirror, the focus for 2022 switched to portal consolidation. What was once eight separate destinations for HR, IT and six other areas of their business is now combined into a unified, curated portal experience by way of ServiceNow’s Employee Center Pro.

From the onset, they made six critical decisions for the new portal experience to ensure their workers would visit their employee center day after day.

1. Their employee center aligns to a new, fresh corporate branding, with a new logo and color scheme. They also intentionally timed the project and internal communications around the relaunch of their brand.

2. They were mindful of the language they used by avoiding HR, IT and other “business speak” with their employee center topic structure, while retaining common acronyms specific to their business. This ensured a browsing and search experience that is familiar, but better organized and easier to navigate.

3. They decided early on that Content Publishing would be an important part of the user experience by providing page banners, upcoming events, videos and quick links that are relevant to the teammate based on what ServiceNow knows about them. As for configuration, ServiceNow has designed the product so that content is configured by HR users – no coding required!

4. They used the configurable flexibility of Dynamic topic pages so that their topics function as mini “homepages,” by delivering topic-specific banners, videos and upcoming events. For instance, Payroll and Benefits, two important areas of services, were able to provide specific content so that items related to employee pay and timekeeping, health and wellness, retirement and leave benefits didn’t get lost.

5. They moved from standard search to AI Search that leverages the new topic taxonomy to improve the search experience and provide more relevant results for their users.

6. Finally, they are collecting employee center usage data via ServiceNow’s User Experience Analytics to better understand the employee experience, and create more intuitive journeys for them.

There is much more to this story, but any or all of the items above can be applied to nearly any implementation, regardless of the industry.

When we are able to design with our fellow workers in mind, we have a much better chance of engaging them in ways we have only imagined with other technology.

If you’d like to chat about the Employee Center and how it fits into your organization's digital transformation, drop us a note at aloha@theanti.com.