What are the biggest obstacles to digitizing your employee experience? 

The formula for sustainable, upward-trending organizational health is deceptively simple: happy employees are productive, driven, profitable employees. To work at their best, your employees need to have access to an intuitive office environment that works for them. Yet creating and sustaining a truly employee-centric working environment is a complex task. 

Implementing digitized workflows to connect your employees across multiple channels, networks, and protocols is vital to crafting an employee-centric workplace. This requires complex elements to work in sync: IT, HR, FM, and Legal, as well as efficient feedback and input channels for employees, and strategic technology investments to boost the company’s longer-term ROI.   

As you might imagine, there’s room for potential pitfalls in such a major project. But with the right digital tools in your belt, creating efficient digitized workflows can become a straightforward, manageable process for your organization.  

Below, we’ll take a closer look at potential obstacles to enhancing your employee experience. We’ll also explore how leveraging ServiceNow can keep the process expertly on track!  

Want to find out more about the benefits of creating a digitized, employee-centric workplace with ServiceNow first? Read up on the subject here.  

Obstacle 1: Suboptimal user experience design that hinders digitized workflows 

Great user experience design is key in creating employee-centric digitized workflows. Badly designed employee experience applications are the perfect recipe for your employees ending up even more frustrated and demotivated than before you introduced a supposedly employee-centric change! 

To avoid this, design for your employees just like you would for your customers. Both are groups of consumers at the end of the day — and if your employees are satisfied and motivated, they’ll be better able to keep your customers happy, too.  

Working with ServiceNow enables you to create a consumer-like experience for your employees. Let’s take Facility Management as an example: “We built DXC’s Facility Management application Ask James on ServiceNow to improve user experience, and increase adaptability for employees to change their working area to suit them,” says FM Application founder Jan Korlaar.  

The benefits run throughout your digitization as a whole, too. With ServiceNow, organizations are able to fully tailor the user experience on their internal portal, to align everything from organizational tone of voice to automations for employees.  

“With ServiceNow, we’re able to steer away from the tempting option of simply rebuilding a client’s old tools, as this limits the advantages you can gain in terms of user experience,” Jan adds. “Instead, we bring user experience experts into our projects to help clients define their new employee-centric interface. This ensures the ServiceNow setup not only benefits their end user employees, but also their internal ServiceNow administrators.” 

Obstacle 2: Digital tools don’t deliver employee-centric ease of use 

Encouraging employees to adapt to new digitized workflows requires careful change management. If your employees feel that new tools and applications are too complex, they could reject them as even worse than the tedious manual alternative they’re used to.  

For this reason, it’s vital to provide your workers with the right support, training, and guidance they need to adopt new digitized workflows into their daily patterns. This is especially key if most of your employees are being onboarded to new workflows remotely, as they’ll miss the usual office camaraderie of ‘We’ll get the hang of this together!’ 

As a result, employers should put real thought into ensuring this onboarding process is smooth, detailed, and tailored to provide the best introduction to these new working methods. After all, first impressions count!  

“When it comes to employee-centric change management, it helps if the new tool itself is primed for usability,” advises DXC’s Jan Korlaar. “If the new digitized interface looks good and is easy to use, that helps to bring employees on board — especially if it makes their work life easier. 

ServiceNow’s mobile-first aspect is vital here, too. This allows organizations’ fresh digitized workflows to be truly employee-centric, responding to the needs of modern remote workers who aren’t tied to a desk all day.  

For optimal ease and effectiveness, employees need access to crucial information whenever and wherever. For forward-thinking employers, ServiceNow is the answer to putting a mobile-first spin on enhancing their employee experience. 

Obstacle 3: Teams stuck in silos, unable to enhance the employee experience 

If you’re creating digitized solutions to enhance your employee experience, where’s best to start? Diving into the detail of the processes, systems, and entrenched standards that frustrate, hinder, and demotivate your employees.  

The usual culprit? Delays, miscommunications, and downright errors caused by teams operating in separate silos. This piles up wasted time and complexity for your workforce, and reduces overall capacity for accurate oversight, accountability, and transparency.  

Fortunately, there’s a solution. ServiceNow is able to unify your various systems — both updated legacy tools and new tools —  to create a single destination where your employees can resolve issues, or find the information they need.  

It’s a one-stop shop for employees: a personalized digital workplace experience that levels up interactions across company and corporate services.  

One area where this is especially powerful for enhancing employee experience is Facility Management. “There are lots of smaller applications out there that perform well in one aspect of FM, such as workplace management. However, they aren’t able to provide the full capabilities of a proper Facility Management Information System (FMIS), and aren’t seamlessly integrated with HR and IT applications within the ServiceNow platform,” explains DXC’s Jan Korlaar.  

“With Ask James on ServiceNow, we’ve created an FMIS that covers almost all aspects of Facility Management, from reserving rooms and workplaces, requesting catering and cleaning, and raising incidents to preventive maintenance and building, space, and facility asset management. All workflow-driven, and through one interface.” 

Interested in how ServiceNow can help you clarify your options when it comes to software solutions for digitizing employee-centric workplaces? Read more here.  

Obstacle 4: Making too many digitized, employee-centric changes at once 

Ensuring your employees have all the tools, resources, and guidance they need to perform at their best is a fundamental requirement for organizational health. But biting off more than you can chew when creating an employee-centric workplace is a pitfall to avoid.  

Opting for a full-blown waterfall approach where your organization implements sweeping changes in one go is the wrong tactic, explains DXC’s Jan Korlaar. “It’s vital that organizations don’t implement too many workflows at once, to avoid employee overwhelm. With ServiceNow’s adaptable toolbox setup, it’s easy to digitize new features per part of the organization or per location, for example.”  

“With FM in particular, we often advise our clients to digitize one building or one country at a time, starting with a pilot project. This allows adequate headspace to fully optimize one workplace, setting a clear precedent for wider roll-out.” 

Remove the obstacles to digitizing your employee experience with ServiceNow  

Now that you’re clued up on the common roadblocks to avoid, why not explore our guide to getting started with employee experience digitization? You can find it here. 

To find out more about how ServiceNow can enhance your employee experience, you can download our whitepaper Enhanced employee experience: the key to a successful workplace here.