Podcast: ServiceNow’s Melanie Lougee on Service Delivery, Covid and Lessons Learned

Service Technology

Transcript

Mark:

Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer.

My guest today is Melanie Lougee, the Head of Employee Workflow Strategy at ServiceNow. We’re going to talk about what ServiceNow does for HR, how businesses navigated the turn toward remote work during COVID, and what they’ve learned from the experience, all on this edition of PeopleTech.

Melanie, welcome. Managers are becoming more reliant on technology to do pretty much anything nowadays. Do you foresee a time when being technical or technically minded trumps people skills?

Melanie:

No, I don’t. I think that we need both, and that the technologies supporting people and managers is necessary to be able to produce insights and raise awareness so that we can have that more human side of interactions between managers and employees.

Mark:

Now, during COVID, a lot of managers, they worked remotely from their teams, and did they learn anything from that? Did employers learn anything from working that way?

Melanie:

I think they learned a tremendous amount. I don’t think that anybody really foresaw how productive employees were going to be outside of the traditional workplace for those employees that could be outside of the traditional workplace. But I think managers really were stretched because a lot of them were used to face-to-face interactions and awareness of what their team was doing because their team was present with them.

So managers ended up needing to figure out how to manage remotely, how to go from face-to-face meetings to making sure they were having frequent check-ins, from having maybe less confidence that things were getting done with having to find other ways to feel connected with their team. And they had to figure out how to do this with this team that was remote in a stressful time.

So they weren’t doing it under the best of circumstances. They were doing it in a pandemic. And they were doing it with a lot of other influences as well, political influences, climate change influences, a whole lot of stress that was happening at that time. And on top of that, managers then had to figure out how to keep their team productive, how to keep their teams engaged, how to keep their morale up, all of those types of things which may not have come naturally to them.

Mark:

And how did they do it?

Melanie:

So I think there was a lot of experimentation that was going on. And I don’t think that everybody did it well. I think that there were some practices that started coming to the forefront, more frequent conversations, more frequent check-ins as opposed to sort of periodic once a week, once every other week kinds of things. They also adopted technology in large scales too. So you saw employee experience come to the forefront.

So if you think about corporations that spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars on physical campuses, when everybody went home and those campuses were empty, those organizations realized they hadn’t updated their intranet or their service portals in 15 years, and processes were broken and people couldn’t find things, and they couldn’t get the help that they needed, and they had 20 different applications that didn’t talk to each other, and there was nobody to physically go to for help.

So I think that that’s what was one of the influences that really prompted this rapid growth and the importance of employee experience.

Mark:

Now, I just want to sort of shift gears for a bit and ask you, could you tell me a little bit about ServiceNow and what you do in the HR space?

Melanie:

Sure. So ServiceNow was founded in 2004 by Fred Luddy. The original vision of it was to have a platform that lets employees route work seamlessly throughout the organization. So the initial focus was IT, but we then grew into a lot of different ways. The business unit that I’m a part of is employee workflows. So our focus is really very employee-centric. So what we like to do is we like to try to break down the silos in between some of the traditional HR departments, if you will, and look at processes that really go across the organization.

So we liked to be able to connect those things so that there’s more fluidity and ease of use for employees to be able to get work done or be able to grow their careers or be able to do the work that they needed to do, whether that’s in HR, whether it’s in procurement, whether it’s in IT, and be able to bring all of that together for the employee so that it can be simple for them. Also, the managers is our new focus.

Mark:

Now, using that for context or as background, what did ServiceNow learn during COVID?

Melanie:

So we learned a lot during COVID. And for myself personally, I signed my offer letter in person and then didn’t see anybody for two years. So it was definitely being dropped into the eye of the storm. To be running strategy for this organization in this point in time was really quite an experience.

So if you look at some of the things that we do, employee service. We started with HR Help Desk, employees being able to get what they need, being able to get their tickets fulfilled, being able to buy things, being able to get help, get access, all of those things. And then also, if you think about employee workflows, like onboarding, well, everybody went home and everybody had to figure out how to ship laptops and how to connect processes. So in a way, we were definitely customer zero with a lot of the value that we produced.

And I will say that for me, I was literally the first class of ServiceNow employees to onboard remotely. And it happened seamlessly. They were able to pivot to doing everything remotely within days because they already had the infrastructure in place to be able to connect the processes and manage the processes across departments.

We also learned a lot because we were uniquely positioned around things like returning to work, around things like safe workplace, being able to very rapidly roll out new applications that allowed people to do their vaccination status, to be able to request a workspace, to be able to do all of those things that allowed organizations like Coca-Cola to be able to more safely start to reopen when it was time to do that.

So I really think that ServiceNow was very much at the forefront of innovation during the pandemic.

Mark:

And how did you, or how did the company pivot? I mean, I think that that’s the best way to describe what companies had to do because business really shifted. How did you do that?

Melanie:

So how did we do that? From a tactical standpoint, I’ll go ahead and share. When everything shut down, so when everybody went home, we in our organization literally pulled together the product team. So I’m talking about it from a product perspective, not an internal ServiceNow perspective. And we looked at everything we had on the roadmap. And we made some decisions around, okay, the world just changed, and we did this literally within weeks, what’s going to be more important now? And we reestablished our roadmap accordingly.

And we also introduced a two-week release cycle, which was something that was unheard of in the industry, in order to be able to roll out safe workplace, in order to be able to roll out the kinds of changes that our customers were going to need. So we entirely pivoted our business within weeks.

Mark:

And can you give me a little bit more in an operational sense of how you were able to pull it off? I mean, it doesn’t strike me as being a small challenge.

Melanie:

No. One of the reasons we were able to pull it off is just ServiceNow is a very agile organization. We pride ourselves on being able to change and being able to support our customers through change as well.

One of the reasons we’re able to do that is, of course, we’re built on a platform. We’re built on the ServiceNow platform, which allows rapid configuration, which allows the ability to tailor experiences, which allows for rapid development.

So it was not easy. It was definitely a challenge, all hands on deck, everybody had to row in the same direction that was opposite of the direction we thought we were going to. But because of the culture of ServiceNow and because we are a platform company that can do rapid development and agile development, we were able to pull it off.

Mark:

What areas of the corporation, not ServiceNow, but the corporation, what areas do you think are behind the eight ball on this whole transition? They may have muddled through the pivot, but aren’t particularly well-positioned in terms of technology for the future.

Melanie:

So among customers, I think that what’s happened with customers is, particularly within HR or other employee-facing organizations, they had to do some Herculean gymnastics to be able to get through the immediate period of disruption. So things that would’ve taken years before just to get approvals or funding, they had to figure out how to do every night and overnight. And you can’t do that without breaking some processes and doing some stop-gap measures and worrying about cleaning up the mess later. So what we’re seeing now is that a lot of processes that were manual because they had to be, we’re seeing now they’re looking more at how can they support these things with technology.

I think that there’s always kind of an adoption curve, if you will, of different organizations across industries and across geographies. So I think that organizations that are really forward-looking, that are building for that future agility are definitely looking at the changing roles that are happening in organization. And they’re accepting the fact that things have really changed forever.

So when we think about what I think is going to differentiate companies going forward, it’s really going to be about understanding the nuances about how the workplace has changed, how the workforce has changed, how the relationship between an employer and an employee has changed, and being able to stay agile and being able to keep employees connected at the same time moving forward.

If you think about it, one of the things that I think about is how do you balance this feeling of employee belonging and this need for personalization that employees have with the very real needs of a business for business continuity? How does the business keep going no matter what and still bring the employees along through what can be a rocky journey as we’ve learned now? So it’s really about being able to pull those two things together.

So I think organizations that aren’t looking very closely at the connection between business continuity and the employees are going to be struggling a little bit more. Does that answer the question?

Mark:

I think so.

Melanie:

Okay.

Mark:

And I think it kind of lets me tee up the next one, which is how do you think HR specifically… Has HR, first of all, has it been changed by the last two or three years? Are they operating differently in any way that you can see?

Melanie:

I believe they are operating differently. I think we’ve all been changed by what happened with the pandemic. But HR in particular, the visibility of HR within a broader organization really rose because so much happened during the pandemic that was focused on the well-being of employees, the mental well-being of employees, the physical well-being of employees. And then we, of course, are coming out of the period of the great resignation. We’re now at a tipping point past that. But because of the hyperfocus on employees, both the scarcity of employees as well as the well-being of the employees that you have and the need to retain them, HR really rose to the forefront.

I think also HR, because of the nature of the pandemic too, really needed to branch out from being just HR focused. So to solve some of the problems that happened during the pandemic, like return to workplace, for example, or how are we going to support employees that we’re hiring remotely, you can’t do that with HR alone. That takes HR, it takes IT, it takes workplace services, it takes legal, it takes all of these different departments working together. So I think that at least during the period of time during the pandemic, it also had HR and other organizations that are employee-facing working together more closely for the first time.

Mark:

So we started by talking about technology and managers and how close were they getting, how they interacted and all. I want to ask a very similar question about HR. HR sort of has this reputation as being a little bit backward in terms of technology. It’s not a reputation I think it deserves. But what do you think? I mean, do you think that HR as an entity or as a profession, are they leveraging technology as well as they could?

Melanie:

I think that they’re getting there. And it’s a large generalization. Every company has a different culture. Different companies place a different level of importance on technology. I do think that the pendulum is swinging right now. So to tie together HR and manager, I’ll tell you what I mean by that.

We’re coming off of a period of time where HR did a lot of buying of point solutions. And oftentimes, each department was free to go buy what they thought was going to be best. So recruiting went off and bought whatever recruiting solutions they needed, and benefits had a solution, and payroll had a solution. And then there was OKRs, and then there was learning five different systems in an enterprise maybe. So that was happening. But then, when everybody went away and had to try to string together a process, none of these systems talk to each other. There’s no ability to get insights.

So a lot of these decisions were made independently, not with the employee in mind. They were made to solve the individual problems of an HR organization, “I’m in charge of learning, I’m going to go out and pick the right learning solution for the organization.” But nobody ever asked the employee what they wanted or asked a manager what was easiest for them to use.

So now managers have, I don’t know, 20 different applications that they have to use to manage their employees. They recruit in one system, trying to do performance reviews across three different point solutions. Then they have to go somewhere else for purchasing. They have to go somewhere else to request IT access, all of these different things.

So I think that HR was making decisions in a little bit of a silo. And I think that the pandemic, it has been a wake-up call that you really have to look at it holistically and you have to look at it with the employee in mind. And you also have to solve for the manager that’s in between this ever-changing organization and this very unpredictable world that we’re living in now, and the very real individual needs of their employees that they are responsible for fostering, mentoring, coaching, advising. So there you have the manager stuck in between with 20 point solutions, and they really need one orchestrated way to work across that.

Mark:

Do you think that solutions providers here, like ServiceNow, but obviously there’s a whole group out there, are they taking managers seriously and giving them enough attention?

Melanie:

I think they’re starting to. I think they’ve been very overlooked in the past. So a lot of these manager tools that I was referencing, nobody asked a manager if they wanted 20 different tools. So they have just ended up with this accumulation over time. And I think now, particularly the pandemic has highlighted the fact that the managers, they need help. So not only are they managing all these different tools, but they’re managing employees that might be in the office, might be at home, might be at home in another country with very different rules and policies and ways of doing things. And they’re in the middle trying to figure out how to manage this very unpredictable and variable team that they have.

And through all of that investment in these various point solutions, one of the key indicators of an employee’s satisfaction or reasons that they might leave an organization is their satisfaction with their manager still. So I think that you really have to solve for manager in order to be able to solve for employee experience.

So I think to answer your question more succinctly, I think that manager has been very overlooked in the past, but I think that because of the pandemic they’re getting some more attention now than they have before.

Mark:

Well, Melanie, thank you very much. It was great to meet you and great to talk to you.

Melanie:

Sure. Thank you for having me.

Mark:

My guest today has been Melanie Lougee, the Head of Employee Workflow Strategy at ServiceNow. And this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of Recruiting Daily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs, visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.

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