Exploring Employee Center

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated February 1, 2024
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Exploring Employee Center

    The Employee Center portal is a centralized platform designed to enhance employee engagement and simplify service delivery across the enterprise. Available by default to all ServiceNow customers, it consists of two applications: Employee Center and Employee Center Pro. The former focuses on multi-department service delivery, while the latter enhances communication and engagement, requiring additional licensing.

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    Key Features

    • Home Pages: Each application offers distinct home pages with widgets tailored for employee needs.
    • Curated Experiences: Provides a unified content discovery experience across various departments, accessible via the Now Mobile app.
    • Content Experiences Widget: Supports diverse content types and offers flexible layouts for announcements and events.
    • App Launcher: Centralized access to applications, including both SSO and non-SSO options, streamlining user experience.
    • Approval Experience: A unified task list that enhances productivity by simplifying internal and external approval processes.
    • Content Publishing: Enables creation and scheduling of various content types, utilizing a Rich Content Editor for easy management.
    • Enterprise Search: AI-driven search functionality for efficient information retrieval across the portal.
    • Employee Forums: Facilitate collaboration and engagement among employees, promoting feedback and idea sharing.
    • Kiosk Access: Employee Center Pro Kiosk provides deskless workers with easy access to essential services and information.

    Key Outcomes

    By utilizing Employee Center and Employee Center Pro, organizations can expect enhanced employee self-service capabilities, improved content discovery, and a more engaged workforce. These applications foster effective communication, streamline processes, and empower employees to manage their needs efficiently, ultimately driving productivity and satisfaction within the enterprise.

    Employee Center portal is a unified portal that helps connect systems across the enterprise to one destination site that provides a simple and centralized experience for employees with easy to configure options.

    Employee Center is a ServiceNow Store application that is available to all customers by default.

    Employee Center is one portal that is packaged as two separate store applications.
    • Employee Center: Multi-department service delivery that enables employees to report issues, request items or services, find service-related answers, and complete to-dos. This application and its capabilities are available to all customers by default.
    • Employee Center Pro: Application that extends the standard Employee Center capabilities along with employee communication and engagement. This application is used to enable employees to stay informed on news and events and find cross-enterprise answers. This application requires additional licensing.

    Employee Center and Employee Center Pro home pages

    Employee Center application provides best in class portal home pages with widgets that provide an employee-centric portal experience. The application has two default home pages for two separate subscriptions.
    • Employee Center - ec_home
    • Employee Center Pro - ec_pro_home.
      Note:
      Employee Center Pro is separately licensed and must be installed after purchase.
    Employee Center Pro extends the standard Employee Center capabilities and provides additional features, such as.
    • Actionable, targeted campaigns
    • Enterprise search
    • Employee communities

    Employee Center and Employee Center Pro functionalities

    While Employee Center gives you a multi-department and extensible service delivery experience, Employee Center Pro is the ultimate employee destination site. Employee Center gives you a modern self-service experience with curated content discovery. Whereas, Employee Center Pro provides tailored and personalized experiences with targeted communications, enterprise search, and integrated external systems.

    Curated Experiences

    Curated Experiences drive the employee-centric discovery experience across the portal. It offers a combination of widgets and portal pages that use a unified content taxonomy to drive content experience based on the employee needs. For example, you can have HR, IT, Legal, and Workplace pages as part of the same portal. Curated Experiences is also available on Now Mobile app to provide an enhanced content discovery experience. For more information, see Curated Experiences in Employee Center.

    Employee Center home page displays Popular topics, Recommended for you, and other widgets which are part of the Unified taxonomy.

    Portal pages that are dynamically configured using content tagged to a unified taxonomy across all departments. For more information, see Dynamic topic pages.

    Unified browse

    Delivers a unified content view for requests and articles that are associated to the topic and its child topics. A portal admin can feature any content under this feature.

    Unified browse experience with items

    Content Experiences widget (Employee Center Pro)

    Content Experiences widget is designed to support multiple content types, such as banners, announcements, videos, and events. It can be easily configured and adjusted to different layouts. This widget also acts as the unifying interface for multiple content types and announcement configurations for all shapes, sizes, and spaces on a given portal page. For more information, see Campaigns for Content Experiences.
    Figure 1. Content Experiences widget
    Content Experiences widget on portal.

    Integration-powered capabilities (Employee Center Pro)

    Access all your applications from a central location with a single click with App Launcher. View the entire list of both single sign-on (SSO) and non-SSO applications in one place. You can access the applications from the Employee Center home page widget in context from dynamic topic pages and through search. For more information, see App Launcher.
    Figure 2. App Launcher
    My applications displayed on the Home page and topic pages.
    Enable the approver with precise information to make informed and prioritized approvals. Improve productivity with a unified approval task list where you can manage internal and external approvals in one location. For more information, see Use approval experience.
    Figure 3. Tasks and approvals
    Tasks and approvals on the EC portal.

    Content recommendations

    Get the most relevant content like Knowledge Base articles, Service Catalog items, and Learning content chosen for you by popularity or by ML-based user metrics.

    Content Publishing (Employee Center Pro)

    Content Publishing allows you to create and publish a variety of content including rich content, news articles, tasks, notifications, surveys, and social media messages. Leverage reusable components, scheduling content, creating organization charts, and demo portals with Employee Center Pro. For more information, see Content Publishing.

    The Rich Content Editor enables content managers to create HTML-based content for the Employee Center Pro topic and portal pages using a visual drag-and-drop interface. For more information, see Rich Content Editor.

    The employee news experience comes with a dedicated New Center page, news article view page, and a News Feed widget. The news article content type combines content creation features from the Rich Content Editor with publishing methods that enable high volume content publishing to the portal and Now Mobile app to keep employees updated on company news and announcements. For more information, see News articles.
    Figure 4. News experience
    News experience on Employee Center Pro.

    Enterprise search (Employee Center Pro)

    Utilize the enterprise AI-driven search that enables employees to find critical information like leave balance, improve content discovery with search on topic pages and learning-based recommendations for self-solving minor issues, accessing and using SharePoint Online Search Connector with Employee Center Pro. For more information, see SharePoint Online Search Connector.
    Figure 5. Search results on the SharePoint Online Search Connector
    Search results on SharePoint Online Search Connector.

    Employee Forums (Employee Center Pro)

    Employee forums help your employees connect, engage, and collaborate with each other effectively. Use Employee forums to share business information, promote employee engagement, encourage ideas and feedback, and to give your employees a voice.

    Employee Center Pro Kiosk

    Employee Center Pro Kiosk enables all the deskless workforce with simplified access to information and services for self-serve and improved productivity.

    Using the kiosk portal, deskless workers can manage their time off, schedule, and requests. For more information, see Employee Center Pro Kiosk.