infoTECH Feature

July 21, 2016

Keep Score to Boost Workplace Productivity Levels

By Special Guest
Dave Wright, Chief Strategy Officer at ServiceNow

We have at our disposal an ever-growing array of devices, applications and collaboration platforms to make our lives easier and more productive. On our personal time as consumers, we use these technologies to shop for clothes, order a car service, manage our finances and perform just about any other task in just minutes. No phone calls, no paper forms to fill out, no emails. And we can do everything in real-time. So why does today’s workplace lack many of these advances?  Why is our work life unable to keep up our personal lives? Are we actually becoming less productive?

New research points to the cause: we remain too reliant on time-consuming and inefficient manual processes in the workplace.  We fielded our annual State of Work survey to understand the digital divide between our work and personal lives, creating a Service Experience Index Score that the IT department can use to identify the policies and practices that hurt worker productivity levels throughout the organization.

If you’ve felt frustration over how all your meetings and paperwork keep you from more strategic work, you’re not alone. The U.S. Labor Department reports that productivity, which measures hourly output per worker, declined at a 3 percent annual rate in Q1 2016. That’s the biggest drop since the first quarter of 2014. Hours worked increased at a 3.3 percent rate, and companies hired more workers to increase output. Economists say that contributes to stagnant wages and lowers the economy's speed limit.

The Labor Department’s statistics reflect a trend we identified last year. The Internet has given rise to a huge number of online consumer services. We have enormously high expectations of these services – they have to be easy to use, offer the products and services we want and deliver almost instantly. But our research found just the opposite is true at work.

We asked managers whether there had been a similar revolution in the enterprise. Was requesting a workplace service – such as opening a purchase order or asking for IT support – as easy as buying a book online? The answer was a resounding “no.” Overwhelmingly, these services rely on manual, unstructured tools – rather than the efficient, easy-to-use technology found in leading consumer services.

The 2016 edition of our State of Work Survey builds on what we learned last year, and reveals a dramatic gap between the services we seek out in our personal lives and those we tolerate at work.

We polled 2,400 managers in Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, the U.S. and the UK. Respondents came from all working age groups and from a wide range of industries, business functions and companies. They were asked to what extent are workplace services automated – and is automation alone enough to close the gap?

Their responses confirm that despite significant technological advances that allow for delightful customer-facing experiences like those from Uber, Amazon and Airbnb, most companies do not integrate those capabilities into employee-facing services.

The survey found that interdepartmental services rated nearly three times slower than consumer services. Manual, email-driven processes directly affect managers’ productivity:

  • Ninety percent say they often use email to track the status of interdepartmental service requests status.
  • Sixty-nine percent say that manual interdepartmental services leave them less time for strategic initiatives, lower their productivity or cause them stress.
  • Seventy-nine percent say that monitoring email interferes with completing tasks, as they spend an average of four hours a day (three at work and one at home) dealing with work emails.  25 percent of email time occurs outside of work.

Those are the issues. Now, let’s examine how to close the digital divide between consumer and workplace services.

We used the survey results to calculate a simple metric called the “Service Experience Index.” It’s based on 8 key service characteristics including factors such as how service delivery times, how easy those services are to use and whether they’re accessible via a mobile device.

Not surprisingly, popular consumer services ranked 103 percent better than workplace services. Consumer services outpaced those at work in terms of ease of use, notifications and speed of delivery. Workplace services fell behind in every single category. Consumer services have a Service Experience Index of 63, whereas workplace services have an average Index score of 31.

Outdated technologies that drain productivity are the primary culprits behind this Service Experience Index score gap. Managers reported that they are five times more likely to use email, and five times less likely to use a mobile app. And the heavier an organization’s reliance on manual processes and tools, the lower its score:

  • More than a third of the companies surveyed said they use mostly manual services with email, phone, and meetings to get work done.  Their Service Experience Index shows a 2.5x gap with consumer services.
  • Only 19 percent say that these services are delivered quickly, as compared to 65 percent for consumer services – a 3x gap.
  • Only 43 percent managers say that these manual services are easy to use, as compared to 79 percent for consumer services- a 2x gap.

Injecting automation in workplace services starts to diminish the consumer services gap. Automation drove a 50 percent improvement in the workplace Service Experience Index. When a service is automated, 40 percent more managers say it is easy to request, and nearly 60 percent more say the service is delivered quickly.

However, it’s important to note that mostly-automated workplace services still contain a lot of manual work. As a result, they fall short of the benchmark set by consumer services. Only 32 percent of managers say that they receive notifications of estimated delivery times, as compared to 66 percent for consumer services. Nine in 10 say that they often or sometimes use email to find out the status of their service request status, even though three in 10 order these services online.

You can automate virtually any process – good or bad. Simply automating existing inefficient or shoddy fulfillment processes yields limited benefits.

What to do?

The good news is by consumerizing workplace services, an organization can dramatically enhance the service experience for service users – and for those who provide these services. Nearly every part of the organization provides workplace services, so the opportunity to increase productivity is immense. Closing the digital divide requires following these five steps:

  1. Improve interdepartmental collaboration: Identify work tasks that require coordination among employees or across departments. Target (News - Alert) those coordination activities that currently use email, team rooms or phone calls, such as employee onboarding and off-boarding.
  2. Formalize the coordination process: Outline the process step-by-step across the entire organization. Start by identifying the requesters, fulfillers and approvers, and then define the rules or logic that the process should follow
  3. Make it easy to use: The user interface is just as important at the back-end delivery of the service. Design an intuitive, frictionless interface that employees can use to engage with that workplace service in a natural, intuitive way. Then, enhance the experience with front-end consumer features such mobile device alerts.
  4. Copy consumer services: Tap into consumer-like techniques such as portals, work flows and catalogs. Firms should expose the right information and create a standard, consistent way for employees to request and fulfill services. This parallels the online portals, one-click shopping carts and online delivery tracking that employees enjoy in their personal lives.
  5. Track and analyze services: Service management software turns a coordination process into an automated service workflow that produces metrics on service delivery.

Just putting services on a webpage isn’t the answer. Focus on the front-end user experience. Create an intuitive self-service portal where managers can find and request the services they need. You should also create efficient back-end fulfillment processes – including well-defined service-level objectives and escalation processes – rather than just using automation to simply track existing processes. To do this, enterprises need to make the right automation technology choices, and then leverage these capabilities to their full potential.

To review all of the ServiceNow (News - Alert) 2016 State of Work Survey results and learn how to determine your organization’s Service Experience Index Score, download a copy of the report “Today’s State of Work: The Service Experience Gap.”




Edited by Alicia Young
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