Integrated Workforce Experience Case Studies Workforce Services: My Paid Time Off Application Executive Summary Executive Summary The new My Paid Time Off application allows me to manage my time off with ease; now the task is as simple as setting up a meeting on your calendar. Mark Allard, Business Analyst, Manufacturing, Collaboration Centre for Excellence The My Paid Time Off application is phenomenal! It saves me time and greatly minimizes the number of clicks it takes me to enter time off. I LOVE it! Felicia Brych, Manager, Marketing Communications, CorpComm-Integrated Comms Strategy The My Paid Time Off application in IWE is a best practice example for Cisco WebEx Social, providing a seamless user interface. Point, click, request. Cool! IWE User U.S. Employee Key Benefits: Ease of use Time savings Increased productivity Enhanced visibility Better paid time off management Business Value: Speed and Productivity: saved ~ 2 minutes per request with potential savings of 5833 hours, based on the number of paid time off requests in 1 year Flexibility: employees can review paid time off balances, track the request status, and use categories for more flexible management Replication: easily replicated for other teams, groups, and functional areas Cisco Workforce Services (WFS), a cross-functional group that came together to redesign and integrate employee services, wanted to transform the Cisco employee paid time off (PTO) request experience, as well as the manager s approval process. Whether paid time off is for a well-deserved vacation, your child s school outing, or an emergency, the process of securing the time off should be quick and easy, according to the group. Workforce Services, a Cisco program based on a partnership across human resources, finance, IT, and workplace resources, is working to deliver employee services as a cohesive user experience across functional boundaries, while moving away from functional-specific services. The group s vision is to create innovative workforce applications and services that deliver relevant, actionable information through a personalized, simplified, and intuitive user experience in a single workspace. There, each employee can easily select and access his or her personally relevant or role-based services from human resources, finance, IT, and workplace resources. WFS decided to begin with the paid time off process based on surveys of user needs. Today Cisco Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE), powered by Cisco WebEx Social, enables the streamlined paid time off process with a personalized user experience in a collaborative environment capable of integrating and supporting a wide variety of future services from WFS. With the new application, U.S. employees, as well as all employees in the future, can review paid time off balances, submit a request, track the request status, and use categories (jury duty, for example) for more flexible management. The entire process for requesting paid time off is easier and faster; the steps required to simply request paid time off went from 15 to 4. Managers, too, are able to quickly review and approve the request in his or her personalized My View within IWE. Within three months of deploying the IWE-enabled My Paid Time Off application, there was a minimum of ~2 minutes time benefit per request, or 80 hours in realized time savings based on the number of requests. The potential productivity gain was an estimated times savings of 5833 hours, based on the number of requests in a 12-month period. The group estimates that even more savings in time can be realized with less experienced users. With this successful deployment of the paid time off application in IWE, the group is evaluating the longer-term integration of other employee services from each of the four groups.
About Workforce Services Cisco Workforce Services delivers the applications, services, and information necessary for supporting business operations for employees, managers, and executives. To deliver employee value through integrated solutions, WFS began with discovering and exposing high-usage, high-value employee activities and information to better understand employee needs. For employees, the WFS vision includes organizing information and activities according to user-based personal categories, such as personal information, work information and location, and career management, as well as by role, for example, manager, new hire, and executive leadership. WFS realized that moving from a department-centric to a user-centric delivery of services required process improvements where: The workflow focuses on the experience. Current manual processes that are difficult to use are fixed, while compliance with legal requirements is maintained. Business owners are assigned to manage the processes that could potentially span across functions. The immediate opportunity for WFS was to transform the paid time off experience to become: Services oriented Engaging and streamlined Today the new My Paid Time Off application is one of many IWE deployments with 180 portlets/applications under way at Cisco. About Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE), Powered by Cisco WebEx Social About IWE Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE) is an internal Cisco collaborative initiative, encompassing business process, culture, and technology. IWE allows you to more effectively connect, communicate, and collaborate with people and communities, as well as share information to help accelerate growth, encourage innovation, and create sustainable productivity. In addition, Cisco WebEx Social, the underlying platform for IWE, is our very own product, which is being sold to customers and partners. IWE, powered by Cisco WebEx Social, is a comprehensive collaboration environment and platform, including social, content, process, and communication capabilities. In Cisco WebEx Social enabled communities such as IWE, user collaboration is powered by context and is always actionable, thus improving productivity and speeding results. Groups can benefit from integrated content management and open social solutions, with future plans for embedded policy management. With a fully customizable interface, teams can easily access enterprise-level, highly available social solutions (directory profile, blogs/wikis/forums/posts, social tagging, search, dynamic communities, micro-blogging, activity feeds/notifications) and unified communications (click to call/im/cisco WebEx, presence, visual voicemail, web communicator, video, and third-party integrations). Each member of the team can create a linked, personalized workspace with a dashboard to facilitate role-based and personal activities such as requesting paid time off using the integrated My Paid Time Off application, as well as team- and group-based communication. See Figure 1.
Figure 1: Relevant, Personalized Workspace: IWE, Powered by Cisco WebEx Social Business Situation and Challenge For employees, quickly finding a necessary employee service can be challenging in terms of searching, navigating, and locating information, applications, and tools on the corporate intranet. Once in the right location, employees must review options and content not necessarily relevant to them. For a new hire, for example, this process can be especially difficult. The Cisco application for requesting paid time off is a very frequently used employee application. The existing paid time off process, however, required some 15 steps to simply request time off. WFS wanted to deliver user efficiency, productivity, and satisfaction by decreasing the steps and eliminating the emails and calls usually necessary for the paid time off process. The group also needed to streamline the approval process for managers who must approve time off for many individuals. In future revisions, the team could see the application evolving to enable, for example, automatic notifications to other team members about personal time off. Solution and Benefits Today, Cisco employees have the ability to easily access and manage their paid time off requests and balances within IWE. The My Paid Time Off application resides in a space on IWE called My View, which is a personalized workspace for each employee (Figure 2). The employee selects the My Paid Time Off application and simply drags it into the space for immediate usability and easy entry of the request (Figure 3). The new user interface has streamlined the process for securing paid time off (4 steps rather than 15). It also allows users to view paid time off balances, preview calendars based on their history of time off, make and submit the request, and track the status of the request (Figure 4). It offers an equally easy process for manager approval. Managers can approve or disapprove requests without using the My Paid Time Off application by simply going to their action item view within their IWE My View (Figure 5).
Figure 2: My Paid Time Off Application within IWE My View Workspace Figure 3: Paid Time Off Request Template by Day in My Paid Off Time Application
Figure 4: Paid Time Off Request Status Including Manager s Approval in My Paid Off Time Application Figure 5: Manager Approval of Paid Time Off as an Action Item within IWE My View Workspace In addition to approving the time off, managers can see 14 other notifications that automatically feed into their My View, such as: Absence for non-u.s. employees Remote Worker Agreement Change Manager/Department for Employees Work Location Change Change Manager/Department Bulk update (Employee or Contingent Worker) Work Hours Change Termination
Contingent Worker Extension Mass Contingent Worker Extension Bulk update Learning Course Approval Business Impact/Metrics As part of the deployment, WFS assessed the application success both qualitatively and quantitatively. By enabling a productivity tool within a collaboration environment and decreasing process latency, employees improved productivity and management of paid time off. The IWE-enabled application also provided enhanced visibility. Speed: Employees found the tool easier and faster to use. The convenient location in IWE My View saved time in searching and simply moving around the corporate intranet. The steps to completion of a paid time off request also went from 15 to 4. Productivity savings: Within three months of deploying My Paid Time Off, there was an approximate 2 minute time benefit per request, or 80 hours in realized time savings based on the number of requests. The potential productivity gain was an estimated savings of 5833 hours, based on the number of requests in a 12-month period. Flexibility: Employees can view paid time off balances, submit a request, and use categories (jury duty, for example) for more flexible management of time off. Replication: Similar IWE applications can be easily replicated for other teams, groups, and functional areas. Looking Ahead WFS is in the process of identifying employee applications within finance, human resources, IT, and workplace resources that could be integrated into IWE, as these departments move toward integrated service solutions with relevant, actionable information and personalized, simplified, and intuitive user experiences in a single workspace. Best practices from the experience can help customers realize business impact and value faster than the group s initial deployment and use of this solution. To capture exponential value from IWE collaboration, the IWE group recommends investing in change management and building a systematic, comprehensive deployment plan, including an end vision architecture, a corporate standard, and a roadmap. For more information about how you can benefit from IWE collaboration, powered by Cisco WebEx Social, and achieve your business benefit and value, please log into IWE at iwe.cisco.com, and visit: http://iwe.cisco.com/web/iwe program/about iwe. For additional information regarding My Paid Off, please log into IWE at iwe.cisco.com, and visit http://iwe.cisco.com/web/iwe-help/mypto. The application is currently available to all Cisco U.S. regular employees, including Scientific Atlanta. Availability will be announced to other Cisco theatres in the future.