What Does it Mean to “Focus on the Employee?”
I spend a good amount of time at trade shows and networking events speaking with IT and service delivery professionals. When I talk with people about the challenges and ideas in service management, I hear about things like ITIL best practices, change management, and other day-to-day, internal facing topics. Of course, I understand why these topics are on IT professionals’ minds; their days revolve around getting these things right. But in today’s environment, there’s an opportunity for IT leaders to do so much more. If we can all take a step back from that day-to-day mindset to look at how to improve the employee experience for everything they might need in an organization, I think it’s clear that we can extend these concepts outside of our teams to remove other organizational hurdles for employees. This is what it means when you hear thought leaders talk about “employee-focused” service management. Many of the elements are already there in IT. These best practices in the ITIL framework and processes like incident, problem, change, and release management are designed to create better working environments where employees get what they need from technology, with minimal disruption. Now ask yourself this: Is the organization, as a whole, using a similar set of best practices to ensure that employees get what they need? After all, they’ll have requests from HR for benefits changes, facilities for building access, and legal for contract reviews. Where do they go to place these requests? We’ve worked long and hard to combat walk-up, support line, and email requests in IT because they’re inefficient. It’s time to do the same everywhere else.Current State of Employee Services
According to HDI research, 56% of organizations use their ITSM tool outside of IT. That includes one or more of the following areas:- Facilities
- HR
- Customer service
- Training
- Finance