There are two store apps for Employee Center

• ‍Employee Center: A multi-dept service delivery experience that starts with ITSM and then expands to HRSD, LSD, WSD, PSM & App Engine. This version enables employees to report issues creating incidents, request items/services, find service-related answers, complete to-dos like approvals, accept or deny incident resolutions, etc.In order to use the Employee center, an instance with the Rome family release or above is required. This package is recommended for all customers without EC pro license, since it's built-in platform, with no licensing cost.‍
• Employee Center Pro: Designed to expand to a multi-department destination site to consolidate portals & replace legacy intranet sites. This version apart from enabling service delivery, also enables employee communication allowing the employees to find someone, stay informed, access integration-based productivity apps, find cross-enterprise answers using AI search etc.

Employee Center Widgets & Pages

Employee Center comes with a bunch of new widgets, pre-configured across different pages on the Employee Center. The three pages that are most important to review in order to understand the Employee Center are the following:

1. Employee Center Home Page

Employee center ships with two home pages, one associated with Employee Center (base version) and another with Employee Center Pro. On this page the employee will have access to widgets showing shortcuts and quick access to items and other pages. Also, each time the employee clicks on the logo on the top left, the employee will be redirected back to the home page.

2. Employee Center Topic Page

The topic pages are dynamically created based on content tagged to the unified taxonomy associated with Employee Center. If needed the parent topics, or all the topics for each department could be set up with their own exclusive page layout, although it is recommended to have everything aligned for better maintenance.

3. Employee Center Profile Page

The profile page contains all of the employee's information.

In addition to the new widgets and pages, Employee Center comes with:

• ‍New Content authoring and publishing experience for non-tech users (Content Library): Content authors can design, edit, preview, and publish communications content within the same interface without having to move across different forms and modules. This capability is available with Employee Center Pro only.‍
• Improved Approvals experience: The approval experience on Employee Center is enhanced to ensure the approver has the required information to approve/deny the request. Also, the workflow is improved to ensure the requester is provided with comments in case of a rejection and/or approval, if needed. OOB no comments are required for approval, but it is possible to set it that way.

Key decision factors for deploying Employee Center

Decide on your portal homepage experience

Our recommendations:

• For organizations who have made no, or limited modifications to their existing portal (either Service Portal (/sp) or Employee Service Center (/esc)) — it is in best interest to start from the delivered OOB homepages and add/remove widgets as required. By doing this, and staying close to the delivered experience, the customer will have better leverage with future enhancements.
• For organizations who have a heavily customized Employee Service Center, or who are otherwise invested in their current Employee Service Center design — it is possible to keep the current homepage and add any of the new widgets delivered with Employee Center

Decide on your Curated Experience journey

Curated Experiences is a term used for a set of Employee Center capabilities that make content discovery more employee-centric (see the screenshot of Employee Center homepage above) It’s based on a new unified taxonomy and includes:

• ‍Dynamic topic pages, which are portal pages that auto-generate based on content tagged under the new unified taxonomy (e.g. knowledge articles, catalog items, and targeted content like portal banners or videos).‍
• Mega Menu, which is the top header navigation in Employee Center and allows employees to browse topics three levels down without multiple clicks.‍
• Popular topics, which are shown in a new homepage widget

Our recommendation:

• ‍Invest in building a comprehensive unified taxonomy. Start by using the delivered Employee Experience taxonomy and mappings. Build an internal, cross-departmental team to review, clone, and modify the delivered taxonomy before tagging content to it.
• Customers who are not ready to tag all their content to one unified taxonomy may want to start with a small set of topics and build curated experiences around them. These topics should be the ones that employees are most interested in, and the taxonomy will need to be cloned and modified accordingly.

Decide on your portal brand

After selecting a homepage and taxonomy journey, the Employee Center can easily be branded to align with your corporate brand. Decide which brand elements are most important for your organization and how those will be incorporated into your portal experience, for example:

• Company's Logo for the header (Shown top left on the images above) & for the footer
• Personalised icons for the topics, items & services
• Images & Videos to display on the available banners and video widgets
• Company's branding palette, to create your personal theme

Decide on your organizational change management (OCM) plan

Like with any new technology update, you need to have a robust OCM plan to drive adoption of your newly launched Employee Center. Ensure the OCM plan incorporates not just end-users (i.e. employees), but also business stakeholders such as content contributors across departments.

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About the author

Article written by Bryson León. Aloha consultant with an extensive expertise in ServiceNow Portals.