How HR leaders can sell the C-suite on reinventing the employee experience.
Simone de Beauvoir once observed that, “In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.”
And yet, just as businesses face a host of unprecedented obstacles, I have been witness to some serious organizational stubbornness. So much that leaders throw up their hands, frustrated by their inability to clear a path through the internal challenges and detractors.
In organizations that haven’t started their digital transformation journey, the fear of missing out is sometimes overpowered by the fear of change. The result is a poor experience for employees and customers alike.
Change is inevitable—someone just has to take the first step.
gettyOn the employee experience side, talent leaders have been the historical drivers of change—and when they stop advocating for improvement, it should be a big red flag for the entire company. That’s why giving up, even in the face of intractable obstinance, simply isn’t an option.
Don’t avoid the pressure
When I meet with HR leaders and observe stalled innovation around their employee experience, the most common explanation is that their existing processes mostly work so there’s no real appetite for change. This, coupled with a lack of pressure from other executive leaders, leads to a stagnation within the employee organization.
Granted, it’s rare for a CFO to suggest taking the time to reinvent onboarding, much less trade the network of boutique systems they’ve invested in for a single employee experience platform. Unless processes are so thoroughly botched that the CEO’s inbox is packed with angry employee emails, CFOs tend to stick with the systems they have—regardless of how inefficient or unscalable they might be.
But what if the CFO took a bit more interest? What would that person find?
When ServiceNow commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct the multi-customer Total Economic Impact ™ of ServiceNow HR Service Delivery study, it found that ditching spreadsheets and niche systems can achieve an ROI of 254% with $7 million in savings over three years.
That kind of hard dollar savings can be used to fund additional projects. And that might get their attention.
To find out more, I sat down with Corey McNair of Forrester Consulting to discuss the findings of the study. We discussed the costs and savings associated with transforming an HR organization, and the future of the employee experience.
[You can watch the full webinar here.]
Ditch the patchwork
When an HR team feels their system works—regardless of slow and opaque it may be—the desire to take on any internal strife to change that system diminishes. It’s a case of not knowing how bad something is until you discover how good it can be.
Let’s look at employee onboarding and departures. These can be messy processes, made messier when there are poor lines of communication between departments. Securing a desk for a new hire or shutting down access when an employee might be as easy as sending an email—but when that email has to go through multiple departments, it can easily get lost in the shuffle.
Niche solutions to manage employee transitions may solve immediate needs, but they come with major long-term drawbacks, including an inability to integrate with other single-problem systems and a dependence on tedious customization.
Slow onboarding can leave employees waiting and productivity plummeting.
gettyIdeally, onboarding should be supported by digital workflows that connect the entire organization on a single platform. This boosts productivity by simplifying the management of key employee moments like new-hire orientation, offboarding, internal mobility, leaves of absence, returns to the workplace, and more.
Get IT on board
Much of the savings around digitizing employee workflows comes from automating mundane, repetitive tasks so your workforce can be freed up for higher priority issues.
The organizations surveyed in the Forrester TEI study saved 10,000 hours over three years by offering self-service options for up to 80% of repeat requests. That’s an impressive number—but to get there, HR needs to partner with IT.
Together, HR and IT can find the right HR service delivery product; ideally, one that provides employee experience templates, low-code development tools, and the ability to connect workflows to departments throughout the org. Templates can slash development time. Low-code capabilities put app development into the hands of “citizen developers” who are also HR experts. The Forrester TEI study found that these tools can lead to a $2.5 million in time savings—and that’s just with their IT team.
Make the case for change
No hurdle to progress is insurmountable. And while digitizing employee workflows on a single platform can’t solve for internal political issues, the data-backed benefits can offer CHROs a strong argument for change.
After all, proven savings and productivity improvements make it hard for a CFO to ignore. You just have to take the first step to get your foot in the door.
