What is ServiceNow HRSD?

ServiceNow HR Service Delivery (HRSD) is a module on the ServiceNow platform that digitalizes, organizes, and streamlines a wide array of HR services on a single, uniform web portal. ServiceNow HRSD is the antidote to siloed back-end HR systems: it has an extensive range of HR functionalities and is designed to integrate with your existing HR technology landscape. HRSD additionally acts as a bridgehead for a unified experience and service delivery across departments, and it promotes self-service as much as possible. Let’s take a look at what ServiceNow HRSD can offer your employees.  

First and foremost, ServiceNow HRSD has an Employee Center that gives employees an intuitive and attractive Employee Experience by providing them with a virtual one-stop-shop portal containing all essential HR services. Its Case and Knowledge Management functionalities allow employees to make queries and service requests through a single, virtual point of contact. With the Employee Center, your employees will always know where to go when they have a question or problem, allowing your HR staff to focus on valuable activities.  

The platform’s Onboarding & Transitions functionalities guide users through their Employee Journey in a systematic and straightforward way. ServiceNow HRSD has workflows with fit-for-purpose modular elements; it is, in other words, inherently flexible and can be configured to match your organization’s internal policies. This means you can design your own onboarding program with customized tasks and checklists. There are also functionalities relating to transitions like parental leave requests, promotions, and job changes.  

Who is ServiceNow HRSD for?

ServiceNow HRSD is meant for three groups of people: HR staff, employees, and gig workers. Your HR department profits from ServiceNow HRSD because the platform makes their work flow in an organized way. HRSD automates a lot of previously manual work, leading to increased productivity and, in turn, a smaller HR department that does value-added work.  

ServiceNow HRSD also boosts your employees’ productivity. Because HRSD is a single engagement layer containing all HR services, your employees will not have to go on a wild goose chase across multiple systems to find the answer to a query or the solution to a problem. The platform, in short, improves and simplifies Employee Experience.  

Gig workers, who form an increasingly large part of the workforce, are the last group that can make use of ServiceNow HRSD. HRSD gives gig workers access to important employee services and enables them to perform managerial tasks.  

What are the advantages of ServiceNow HRSD?

ServiceNow HRSD’s strong suit is its combination of Knowledge Management, workflow capabilities, intelligence, automation, and low-code/no-code configurations. Let’s flesh these elements out a bit.  

In the preceding paragraphs we’ve already noted that HRSD makes employees more productive because of the platform’s self-service capabilities. ServiceNow HRSD was designed with the employee in mind; its philosophy is that an excellent Employee Experience is all-important. The Employee Center lets employees search for information across your company, and its service functionalities give employees an identical service experience from each department. This has significant benefits: apart from taking up a lot an employee’s time, siloed departments cause confusion and frustration. An increased service experience is therefore paramount to increasing employee engagement and happiness.  

Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a big part in ServiceNow HRSD’s intuitive user experience. Its portal has a virtual agent – or AI chatbot – with workflow capabilities. The chatbot is infused with Predictive Intelligence and linked to a knowledge bank. This combination of a knowledge bank with AI and Predictive Intelligence is unique for an Employee Experience Platform. It gives the chatbot the ability to reply to an employee’s query with a suggested workflow, making their journey to a service or knowledge article much smoother. Solutions to frequently asked questions are automated, which has the further consequence of not burdening HR staff with frequently asked questions – instead, the AI takes care of those. 

The last advantage we should mention is the platform’s easy configurability. ServiceNow is a low-code/no-code platform that can be configured by people with no programming knowledge. This means HR staff can manage their own digital environment without the aid of people from IT. They can create applications and workflows without any teething problems and update and improve those on their own accord.  

ServiceNow HRSD's available modules

Case and Knowledge Management

ServiceNow HRSD’s Case and Knowledge Management is all about giving employees an excellent service experience. HR and shared services teams can use the platform’s Case and Knowledge Management functionalities to search for information and knowledge from any point of an organization, and share it with employees that need it. Employees can also be supplied with the right context and instruction to swiftly and effectively deal with their queries. Announcements, knowledge, and services can be made available on the employee’s device of choice.   

The main benefits and features of Case and Knowledge Management 

• An HR Agent Workspace that functions as a single-pane view for managing service requests
• Employee Relations for managing complex employee cases 
• HR Knowledge Management that provides a searchable knowledge base consisting of HR policies, procedures and articles 
• Knowledge Blocks that simplify the creation and consumption of knowledge 
• HR Centers of Excellence to organize HR data, services, and processes 
• Visual Task Boards that provide a real-time view of all cases, SLAs, and agent workloads to track against performance 
• A Service Catalog that lets employees access an array of services 
• Intuitive HR dashboards and reports to view metrics on employee satisfaction, case trends, and SLAs  

Employee Center

The Employee Center allows employees to find information and access apps on a single interface. As we’ve already written about the Employee Center earlier in this article, we’ll now provide you with more extensive list of its benefits.  

The main benefits and features of the Employee Center 

• AI Search that facilitates effective, enterprise-wide searches  
• Universal Request that supports a consistent, multidepartmental service experience 
• Content Delivery to create and send content to employees through various channels. Content can be tailored to an HR profile or a user’s stage in the employee lifecycle  
• Content Automation for creating timed content campaigns and targeted communication  
• Content Analytics that measure and track the engagement with your content and communications, enabling you to improve employee experience continuously 
• Employee Forums where employees can connect with their colleagues 
• Employee Live Chat to talk with agents in real-time  
• Employee to-dos to boost productivity by assigning to-do tasks 
• Employee Org Charts to view or look up employees   
• View Requests with a complete view of employee requests  
• A Site Builder that can adapt the out-of-the-box portal to your brand’s look and feel  

Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions

You can use Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions to guide your employees through the big moments (onboarding, maternity leave, promotion) and small moments (requesting a new laptop or workspace) in a smooth, straightforward way. Instead of employees having to hop across various siloed systems, ServiceNow HRSD gathers all the big and small moments of the employee journey on a single platform.

Journey Accelerator

The Journey Accelerator helps managers become more effective by providing them with configurable role-based employee plans. These plans can be configured and tailored to an employee’s need. Managers can, for instance, remove stages from a plan or pair an employee with a mentor to help them along.  

Document Management

Document Management first and foremost facilitates you going paperless. It is a secure, easy-to-navigate virtual storage-room that contains all employee documents. You can use this module to access, store, and tweak the retention and security policies for every employee document. Furthermore, Document Management supports compliance through the ability of auditing and automating the removal or deletion of documents.

A concise ServiceNow HRSD case study

A large player in the banking sector approached us because their HR department worked in a very unstructured way. They had no ability of communicating cross-departmentally and no overview of pending HR questions and requests. Moreover, they did not have the ability of communicating with employees in a centralized and structured manner.  

Through ServiceNow HRSD’s self-service web portal, we gave employees the ability to search for information, submit common queries, and ask frequently asked questions to the chatbot. The results were significant. The employee satisfaction score increased from 6.4 to 7.0. Through Straight Through Processing (STP) and a lessened reliance on assistance through email, the HR operations team could be shrunk by 30%. Because ServiceNow HRSD gave the company more insight into the size of the HR case load, the amount of HR Service Desk staff was able to be aligned with demand, resulting in reduced costs and increased MTTR.  

Frequently Asked Questions about ServiceNow HRSD

Is ServiceNow HRSD a separate ServiceNow module? 

Yes. ServiceNow HRSD is entirely fit-for-purpose for HR Service Delivery. It is not a variant or extension of other modules like ServiceNow ITSM, but a dedicated product that has its own unique workflows and functionalities. HRSD at the same time fully leverages the capabilities of the ServiceNow platform and it is able to integrate with other ServiceNow modules out of the box. 

Does ServiceNow HRSD replace the core HR system of records (e.g. Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Peoplesoft)?  

No. ServiceNow is an employee experience platform that complements your core HR system. It gathers a wide range of HR services on a single portal and enables you to integrate underlying systems and standalone solutions into a one-stop-shop. 

Does ServiceNow HRSD only offer Case and Knowledge management functionalities? 

No. ServiceNow HRSD is an end-to-end solution that helps you shape the entire employee journey. Its Employee Center is a unified one-stop-shop that supports multidepartmental service delivery. Among other things, the Employee Center offers functionalities for Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions, Case and Knowledge management, and Document Management.  

Can I use ServiceNow HRSD for other things than HR? 

Yes. ServiceNow HRSD’s Employee Center portal supports IT, Workplace, Finance, and Legal services. This means employees don’t have to navigate through a maze of disparate back-end systems anymore, but can instead go to a single place to access any service they need.

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