Srikanth Baki
A robust HR knowledge base is an effective way to reduce HR case volume, and to improve employee experience.
ServiceNow HR Service Delivery contains powerful Knowledge Management that organizations can use together with Case Management and unified Employee Service Center to streamline HR Service Delivery. By strategically introducing a HR knowledge base, organizations can make useful information on topics like benefits, travel, expenses policies, and training instantly available to their employees.
Without a strategy focused on reducing HR cases however, your new HR Knowledge base can do more damage than good. The following are some steps have greatly benefited our clients implementing HR Knowledge.
Start small
The success of HR Knowledge depends on the trust HR team members have in it. HR team members must see value in publishing articles.
A quick starting point with short and easy articles should help HR teams to get comfortable publishing Knowledge articles. Begin building the catalog based on the most common employee inquiries. This will ensure the HR teams are able to realize the benefits of Knowledge Management due to reduced cases.
Complicated inquires can later be published based on feedback from fulfillers as these articles usually require additional review from experts.
Simplify
HR articles should be structured with brief answers to answer employee questions quickly and up front. Use subheadings to help employees easily navigate to the specific information they are looking for. Make a conscious effort to cut down irrelevant details to make the articles impossible to misunderstand. Using attachments is also a great idea to shorten main articles and get right to the point.
It is also important to ensure that the language in HR articles is clear, concise, and free of jargon. It is a good idea to have someone outside HR proofread the articles before publishing on the Knowledge base.
Remember that HR Knowledge is a component of your employee experience; make sure the articles reflect the culture, tone, and voice that would reinforce your desired employee experience.
Prioritize content
HR teams should actively publish new articles with focus on continually reducing cases. Topics for new articles can be solicited from case workers to identify common HR inquiries they receive from employees.
New articles should be prioritized based on the number of HR cases they can potentially reduce, or ones that are high priority and risk. With ServiceNow, HR teams can run reports to identify frequently logged or highly important cases. Once the topics are identified, they should be broken down into brief answers to employee inquiries.
You will, however, still need to have some long form policy documents. You should distill policies and procedures into short articles that will answer typical employee queries and provide links to formal policy document knowledge articles.
Make it easy for employees
It is possible to significantly enhance employee experience through HR Knowledge articles. While writing articles, try to minimize effort for employees; include quick instructions, links to relevant tools and to additional information.
With ServiceNow, you can also direct employees to the appropriate self-service forms and any other HR platforms integrated with ServiceNow. ServiceNow also allows HR caseworkers to attach Knowledge articles to HR cases, encouraging employees to use Knowledge in the future. Learn more about ServiceNow HR.
While publishing new articles, take time to identify alternate terms that your employees use to search for information, for instance Holiday, PTO etc. for time off policies. Add them to the meta tags of the article to ensure that they find it. You should also categorize articles into buckets to make it easy to browse information, in addition to search.
Use data to improve
To get the most out of your HR Knowledge base, it needs to constantly evolve. Articles should be refined based on usage patterns, information should be current, and old articles should be retired. Assign owners to review articles periodically. Overall ownership and leadership of the Knowledge base is a role that should also be determined.
Use feedback from employees to report broken links, outdated information, and incorrect answers. Decide if you want to allow for end user ratings and feedback on articles and use the responses to continue to refine.
ServiceNow provides a variety of data insights you can leverage to improve your Knowledge base. If you already have Employee Service Center and Case and Knowledge Management implemented, run reports in ServiceNow Knowledge to identify what people read before logging a case. If they read an article and still log a case, it means the article was not helpful and needs edits.
As your Knowledge base continues to mature, the focus must be on the main goals of building a HR Knowledge base, deflecting cases, delivering answers as quickly as possible, and improving employee experience.