IAG digitises staff movement processes

IAG has improved, and in some cases digitised, process workflows for onboarding new staff and "cross-boarding" or offboarding existing employees.

The insurer made the changes in its Radius HR platform, which is powered by ServiceNow's employee center product.

Radius is used by IAG employees to search HR knowledge articles, raise a service request, chat directly with a HR consultant and complete various safety and wellbeing forms and checklists.

A spokesperson for IAG told iTnews that the upgrades to onboarding, cross-boarding and offboarding process management were set live in April.

For onboarding, the spokesperson said the change "has provided a consistent and digitised journey for new starters into our organisation and guides them and their leaders through essential steps that need to be completed to onboard successfully."

Meanwhile, "the digitised cross-boarding and offboarding capability prompts employees and leaders on the tasks and activities that need to be completed to successfully transition employees to new roles or when exiting the organisation," the spokesperson added.

The upgrades are the latest "iterative" improvements made to the ServiceNow platform, which the ASX-listed insurer deployed as part of a HR upgrade dating back to 2016.

The aim of that program was to both “optimise and digitise” its people and culture (P&C) service offerings and better support the company’s global staff, executive manager of digital services David Lahood said at the time.

Speaking at a more recent ServiceNow event, Lahood said that HR was the first internal function to adopt ServiceNow, but the use of the software had since expanded internally beyond HR, and could now be found in areas such as IT and risk.

Lahood remarked that was likely a different path than most organisations took, where ServiceNow might typically be deployed in IT first, before fanning out.

He said recent work internally had focused on creating a more "enterprise approach" to the evolution of ServiceNow; this is aided by the existence of a central ServiceNow team in IAG's tech function that Lahood said had a dual purpose of "working with us to build things quickly, and keeping that enterprise mindset front-of-mind when we're building everything else out."

HR improvements

Talking specifically about what ServiceNow had brought to the table with respect to HR process improvement, Lahood said one of the key benefits is “transparency”.

“[Prior to using ServiceNow] we had information everywhere," he said.

"There was no cataloguing or indexing or anything like that.

“We always used to get feedback that people couldn't find what they were looking for."

Lahood said the knowledge management capabilities of ServiceNow's Employee Center product had proven particularly useful, and if IAG had its time over, it would invest even more into this.

He said IAG could now see "what people are looking at" and had gained analytics into how different knowledge articles are being received.

"Even just with the case volumes, for the first time, we could actually tell how many calls were coming in, whether people are using chat, and how are our people are wanting to engage with us," he said.

"We weren't making assumptions anymore - we were using data to actually drive those channels."

The flexibility of having ServiceNow integrated with the company's human resource information system had also proven valuable during the pandemic, Lahood said, where the company used ServiceNow to spin up " a lot of forms" much faster than it could have through its HR information management system.

Lahood said that while traditional HR tools are “data rich”, “there's not a lot of flexibility that you can have with those systems.”