Digitization starts at home

What I mean with this is that digitization in an enterprise may well, first and foremost, be about developing the right habits across your employees.

Many of us have had access to employee portals for years. But how effectively has this resource been tapped? It’s true, via our mobile phones, most of us have learned to shift our planning, checking, and communications “online.” But when it comes to the work environment … is the option still there to call IT… HR… suppliers? Change is hard, as we all know, and, like water, we will follow the easiest path.

I dove into some of our SSON Analytics metrics this morning, to get some hard reliable data on this topic. I thought I would take as my reference point SSON’s Top 20 Most Admired Shared Services – a list which sources shared services data from 20 of the world’s leading SSOs, reflecting all of their centers (thus covering 73 different centers’ metrics).

Our data shows the extent to which employees are logging into – accessing information or submitting a request – employee self-service portals. The percentages differ across regions.

Taken globally, 42% of SSCs confirm their employees’ adoption of self-service portals to be above 80%. That’s not bad – but not amazing, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

In addition, nearly 30% say they either don’t have a self-service portal at all (15%) or their adoption is below 40%.

North America shows a slightly better scenario, with 50% of centers showing an 80% or higher adoption of employee self-service portals, and a quarter of respondents at adoption levels below 40% (none of the respondents claimed not to have a self-service portal).

In APAC, similarly, half the respondents say their rate of adoption is above 80%, and only 8% claim to not have a portal (zero say their adoption is less than 40%).

In EMEA, the story is less encouraging: Only 25% of top 20 SSCs say their adoption of employee portals is above 80%, and half the respondents say they either don’t have a portal (25%) or the adoption is less than 40%.

Lots of percentages, but I hope you follow. The take away is that EMEA appears to be least successful in either encouraging the use of a self-service portal for its employees. If you’ve lived in Europe or are familiar with the various cultures there this may perhaps not be that surprising. Old habits die hard.

But the data concerns me because of what it says about our habits overall. If we can’t get employees to log into a portal to manage their personal issues then how can we expect them to transition to a digital way of work? I imagine, as we take a more granular look at demographics, we will naturally see shifts in behavior. Millennials already make up the largest demographic at work and have been brought up as so-called digital natives. The zillennial generation after them doesn’t much rate face-to-face conversations, let alone phone to phone, so I am certain self-service portal use will rocket. But for today, which is where we find ourselves, pushing the digital transformation agenda should start at home: with your employees.

Find out more in SSON Analytics’ Metric Benchmarker.

Note: the data reflects shared services that have implemented self-service portals for their employees (there was an option to opt out via “we do not have a self-service portal”).