CBA has built a “digital concierge” for its internal HR self-service platform Sidekick that – initially – is helping staff to claim extra days of paid leave.
Sidekick is a 14-year-old self-service resource for the bank’s 55,000 staff globally. It underwent a “massive redesign” in 2021, and the backend was switched to ServiceNow’s HR Service Delivery (HRSD) Professional a year later.
The bank’s approach to building out Sidekick has always been user-centric, but the focus has traditionally been on directing staff to it whenever they have a question or issue.
Now, CBA is starting to change its approach, with the aim to bring Sidekick to staff in the form of the concierge – what senior change manager Rahini Haran said was like having “a HR business partner in your pocket”.
The bank said in a slide deck that the concierge offers “automated, just-in-time HR support – before you knew you needed it.”
“For digital concierge, it was about accelerating employee speed to outcome with their HR activities, so bringing HR to them rather than having them reactively go into the system and try and search for information themselves,” Haran told the ServiceNow World Forum late last year.
The first use case for the concierge is to help staff claim ‘Life Leave’, a years-old initiative that offers up to five days of additional leave per year to staff that meet certain criteria.
“The premise is: take your full annual accrual, by your anniversary date, and that your balance is less than 20 days,” Haran said.
“Three data points — should be easy to calculate what you’ve got to do to get there, but it really wasn’t.
“The amount of confusion and frustration that our people were feeling trying to unlock that benefit was significantly greater than we could have possibly imagined.”
To help staff navigate their way to the extra leave benefit, the bank’s HR and HR technology team built a calculator that gave staff a personalised view of how much annual leave they had, and when they needed to take it by, in order to qualify for Life Leave.
This unmasked the behind-the-scenes complexity in calculating entitlements: “[Instead of being] three data points I mentioned earlier, it takes 70 data points to serve that up,” Haran said.
HR tech crew lead Mark Richardson said that the case of an engineer who was set to miss out on the extra entitlement showed the complexity in determining eligibility.
“We [would] look at things …[to] two decimal points, and then I get an engineer that shows me four decimal points and says he didn’t get his Life Leave because of a 0.002 error, because he was on leave without pay, and his work schedule changed.
“That gives us a healthy challenge — if you’re going to be that detailed, we’re the ones actually granting this entitlement, we need to be that detailed.”
That led the bank to incorporate many more data points into the eligibility calculator.
“What if your work schedule changed during the year? What if you went on leave without pay? What if you did certain other things? We had to calculate all of that with a way of providing almost a behavioural economics nudge to these employees to say, ‘You’re close but you’re not quite there’,” Richardson said.
“The frustration we were trying to avoid was, ‘You mean if I took five days [off], I get five [extra] days. Why didn’t you tell me?’
“If I get within that window [of being eligible for extra leave], I absolutely want to know without having to go to Sidekick.”
Haran said that employees can subscribe to receive proactive emails, notifications and nudges that aim to help them maximise their leave entitlements.
This was done in recognition that staff are generally busy and unable to keep close tabs on when they might be approaching eligibility – or alternatively, when they might come close to missing out.
“If I’m busy flying to different states and supporting my customers, I’m not always thinking about this, but I want to get that advance notice, so we picked out certain data points, certain criteria, and made sure that the system would email you and tell you,” Haran said.
The bank also started offering “top tips and insights” to staff on what they could do to maximise their extra leave entitlements, based on their individual circumstances.
“We have 35 different potential tips and insights that can be served up to you based on your data profile,” Haran said.
Ry Crozier travelled to ServiceNow World Forum Melbourne 2024 as a guest of ServiceNow.