Introduction to Employee Center

[Allison French]

This guide will help you get up to speed on Employee Center and is a great place to come back to as our product evolves.

Table of Contents

• Employee Center Basics
• Release Details
• Employee Center Widgets, Pages, and Capability Overview
• Key decision factors for deploying Employee Center

Here's a brief Introduction to Employee Center and how you could realise value out of Employee Center through its omni-channel experiences, employee communication capabilities and features that intend to increase employee productivity. 

Watch the exclusive recording of 'Getting Started with Employee Center' for in-depth overview of Employee Center Capabilities. Agenda covers following scope:

1. Introduction to Employee Center (Video Duration 8:25 to 20:38)
   1. What is Employee Center? Goal of Employee Center
   2. Key Attributes of Employee Center
   3. Employee Center Licensing and Packaging
2. Employee Center Features including walkthrough of Demo instance (Video Duration 20:40 to 50:40)
   1. Unified Search and Browse Experience (Video Duration 21:40 to 37:59)
   2. Employee Communications (Video Duration 38:00 to 44:24)
   3. Personalised Tasking (Video Duration 44:25 to 50:40)
3. Additional Resources for further reference (Video Duration 50:45 to 56:26) 

For Getting Started with Employee Center session, refer to the slide deck in attachments. 

Employee Center Basics

Employee Center is ServiceNow’s new standard, multi-department, dynamic portal for service delivery and employee engagement. It provides an experience that easily scales from a service delivery portal to an employee destination site or a modern intranet.

Technically, Employee Center is enhanced, rebranded, and re-packaged Employee Service Center (i.e., /esc from Quebec and before).

See these FAQs on Employee Center basics for more information.

Release Details

Employee Center store apps follow a quarterly release cycle. Please refer to Employee Center release notes.Employee Center and Employee Center Pro are delivered via the ServiceNow Store. This allows the apps to be updated more rapidly and enables customers to get the newest features between major family releases. To use Employee Center, an instance with the Rome family release or above is required.

Employee Center Widgets, Pages, and Capability Overview

Employee Center comes with a bunch of new widgets, pre-configured across different pages on Employee Center. There are three pages that are most important to review to understand Employee Center:

1. Employee Center Home Page: Employee center ships with two home pages, one associated with Employee Center (base version) and another with Employee Center Pro.

1. Employee Center Topic Page: The topic pages are dynamically created based on content tagged to the unified taxonomy associated with Employee Center. This is part of the Curated Experiences capability of Employee Center.

3. Employee Center Profile Page:

In addition to the new widgets and pages, Employee Center comes with:

• New Content authoring and publishing experience for non-tech users (Content Library😞 Content authors can design, edit, preview, and publish communications content within the same interface without having to move across different forms and modules. This capability is available with Employee Center Pro only.

• Improved Approvals experience: The approval experience on Employee Center is enhanced to ensure the approver has the required information to approve/deny the request. Also, the workflow is improved to ensure the requester is provided with comments in case of a rejection.

Watch our Employee Center Overview video for additional details. (Note this video is based on our September 2021 release which does not cover the latest features, but it is still a great resource for a deep dive on Employee Center.)

 For additional feature details, including those about the latest features, refer to Employee Center Features and Functionality FAQ

 Key decision factors for deploying Employee Center

 
Both Employee Center and Employee Center Pro ship with pre-configured home pages that are designed based on our research to provide a framework for a leading practice employee experience.

1: Decide on your portal homepage experience

Our recommendations:

• For organizations who have made no, or limited, modifications to their existing portal (either Service Portal (/sp) or Employee Service Center (/esc)) — it is best to start from the delivered homepage and add/remove widgets as required.
• For organizations who have a heavily customized Employee Service Center, or who are otherwise invested in their current Employee Service Center design — it is possible to keep the current homepage and add any of the new widgets delivered with Employee Center

Note that customers who stay close to the delivered experience are better able to leverage future enhancements. Use this guide to ensure you are making business smart customization decisions, as necessary.

 2: Decide on your Curated Experience journey

Curated Experiences is a term used for a set of Employee Center capabilities that make content discovery more employee-centric (see the screenshot of Employee Center homepage above) It’s based on a new unified taxonomy and includes:

• Dynamic topic pages, which are portal pages that auto-generate based on  content tagged under the new unified taxonomy (e.g. knowledge articles, catalog items, and targeted content like portal banners or videos)
• Mega Menu, which is the top header navigation in Employee Center and allows employees to browse topics three levels down without multiple clicks
• Popular topics, which are shown in a new homepage widget

Our recommendation:

• Invest in building a comprehensive unified taxonomy. To do so, start by using the delivered Employee Experience taxonomy and mappings (see this FAQ for more information on installing the delivered mappings) and build an internal, cross-departmental team to review, clone, and modify the delivered taxonomy before tagging content to it.
• Customers who are not ready to tag all their content to one unified taxonomy may want to start with a small set of topics and build curated experiences around them. These topics should be the ones that employees are most interested in, and the taxonomy will need to be cloned and modified accordingly.

Visit this FAQ and watch the Curated Experiences  Academy session for in-depth information about curated experiences.

 3: Decide on your portal brand

After selecting a homepage and taxonomy journey, the Employee Center can easily be branded to align with your corporate brand. Decide which brand elements are most important for your organization and how those will be incorporated into your portal experience.

 4: Decide on your organizational change management (OCM) plan

Like with any new technology update, you need to have a robust OCM plan to drive adoption of your newly launched Employee Center. Ensure the OCM plan incorporates not just end-users (i.e. employees), but also business stakeholders such as content contributors across departments. For guidance, check the OCM planning guide on our Customer Success Center.

Refer to Employee Center Community Forum for additional resources, new release updates, and implementation guidance.