Scale your team with a People Service/Support Desk & Online Knowledge Base Library
Your People & Experience Team should act like a professional support team for your internal customers - the employees at your company. In line with that goal, we implemented an Online Service/Support portal and a Knowledge Base library. It has not only helped our team to scale by offering a better self-service model and by managing and improving our own work using response time KPIs and reporting.
ONLINE KNOWLEDGE BASE
SPEED AND EASE
Great organizations scale cultures by making the organization feel smaller than it really is. Our company is almost 200 people, but we want it to feel like a 50 person company when it comes to getting things done, and done well. This means less red tape and rules, but more rigor and guardrails to help people organize faster.
Want to order a book? Just submit a request and it will be on your desk in 48 hours. Need to travel? Want to schedule a team strategy offsite? All information is readily available and requests can be submitted easily.
SCALE
Say an employee requests noise-cancelling headphones.
[Request auto-assign rules speed things up] Firstly, the request is automatically assigned to a member of our People Team. Our People Team Service Desk centralizes requests so when a member on our team is on leave, we can proactively change the workflow to assign certain request types to another team member, so fewer requests go unanswered.
[Questions are answered without human intervention] Secondly, our Service Desk provides instant responses to questions people have, like "how much can I spend on headphones?" or "what type of headphones do you recommend?" As soon as people start typing a request, knowledge base articles pop up with relevant information.
[We build a library of responses to avoid re-doing work] If we can avoid it, our People Team shouldn't be answering the same question twice. So when employees have a question related to - for example - a policy or a workplace order, we will respond via email once. But, we also immediately create a knowledge base article so our response can be resurfaced by another employee who has the same question.
[We become more efficient over time] Back to the headphone request example. We decided to use an appropriate response time KPI on every request type. In this example, the headphones should be ordered within 48 hours of the request coming in. Reporting allows us to measure our own efficiencies, which creates a starting point for improvement over time.
[We spot resourcing or performance issues] If one member of our experience team always responds to request late, it can mean two things: performance isn't strong or there is a resourcing issue (maybe the person has too much on their plate). Either way, having all request managed through Service Desk rather than email, it allows us to spot and act on those issues.
SMART BUDGETS = FREEDOM
We love team outings - so much so that we added it to our Manager Service-Level Agreement (SLA) as a key goal for every team to have regular outings per quarter. We also ensured we have budget for the events. Managers have $75 per team member per month to spend on social outings. A budget seems restrictive, but it actually makes it easier and faster for managers to not have to ask their superiors for approvals. Managers can simply request an activity through Service Desk - and the rest will be taken care of by our Experience Team.
