One of our founding principles at ServiceNow is to bring the same experiences we all enjoy as consumers to the workplace. Just as positive interactions with online merchants create customer loyalty, great employee experiences bond them with their companies. This helps with talent retention and that’s why we use our own Now Platform^TM to consumerize our staff’s service experience—starting with onboarding.

We all know you only get one chance to make a great first impression, so onboarding needs to be done well. It’s also key to helping new hires quickly acclimate and become productive. It is not uncommon for an onboarding process to be manual, time consuming and error prone.  We were no different. Much of the burden fell upon our staffing coordinators to send emails, complete documentation, and coordinate activities so that everything from building access and workspaces to email accounts and computer equipment was ready on day one.

ServiceNow® Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions has completely transformed our own new-hire experience for the better. Now all activities—including coordination and communication among HR, IT, facilities, and other groups—are automated, digitized, and managed by the solution.

Entering new employee data just once

New-hire data is entered once to auto-populate forms, documents, and databases. Notifications and tasks are triggered automatically to streamline communications, orchestrate each step in the process, and create a more seamless experience. But consumerizing onboarding is about more than automating checklists.

Our Employee Service Center (ESC) provides an easy-to-use, personalized one-stop shop for new hires. Prior to day one, new hires can access the ESC (see screenshot), view their action items, and complete onboarding tasks. Progress is tracked, so they know what’s done, due, or overdue.

An orientation guide tells new staff everything they need to know and do on day one: where to go, what to bring, the day one agenda, and more. Mobility support makes the experience even better, giving new hires easy access to the ESC anytime, anywhere, from any device.

ServiceNow Enterprise Onboarding has delivered significant, measurable benefits:

• 94% acceleration in the time to provision IT resources for new hires
• 4,000 hours saved annually by automating onboarding activities
• 86% employee onboarding satisfaction
• $325,000 saved each year in HR service delivery costs

Also, beyond these quantified benefits, we’ve realized value in three strategic areas:

• Enhanced Experience
  Studies show that employees decide within their first six months whether to stay at a company. Providing new hires with a great onboarding experience makes a positive impression that sets the tone for the days ahead. It also drives satisfaction—on average, employees give their onboarding experience 4.3 out of 5 points. Hiring managers, HR, IT, and facilities colleagues now spend far less time on administrative tasks and can focus on onboarding priority number one: making employees feel valued and connected from the get-go.
• Accelerated Time to Value
  By making onboarding smooth and positive, new employees can come up to speed more quickly, get to know ServiceNow, and become productive contributors. Over the past two years, the time to provision IT resources—laptops, phones, applications, logins, network access, etc.—has been cut from three days to only four hours. And the Employee Service Center can be easily reconfigured to meet changing needs. In fact, HR can make changes themselves without having to go through IT.
• Better Insight
  HR dashboards give staffing coordinators a real-time view of onboarding activities and other key metrics, which helps them stay on top of things and make faster, better informed decisions. Surveys are integrated into the platform, so HR can measure how they’re doing and learn how they can continuously improve service delivery.

Our Now Platform is helping us—and can help any company—give new hires and all employees the kind of great “consumer” experiences that they expect and will build corporate loyalty and satisfaction.

For more information, please visit: www.servicenow.com/hr

More Now on Now stories are on the way! Stay tuned.

Chris