There’s not much that an airline pilot and a contact centre manager have in common. But they do agree about one thing: neither has much time in their working lives for completing tedious but vital HR processes. Nor do the holiday reps, childcare assistants, back-office managers and countless other employees who use SAP SuccessFactors at TUI, according to the travel giant’s HRIT digital adoption training lead, Laura Dean.
That was a problem for Dean, as the SAP software is part of a multi-year push by TUI to “globalise” its HR IT environment, which from September 30 will have shrunk from 40 discrete systems in 2017 to just one. The traditional training methods Dean used when the first SuccessFactors module was rolled out – including e-learning, user guides and videos – were starting to encounter problems.
“That was the point when we realised ‘this is going to be really challenging’. I’m the only person in my role, and our end-user population is around 42,000 people worldwide,” says Dean. “We’re using a brand-new system that will continuously launch more modules over the years. I’m delivering everything, writing everything, updating everything. And SuccessFactors goes through enhancements twice a year. So to try and maintain all that information and to keep it accurate for our end users, I just thought ‘how am I going to do this?’”
Dean’s task was made more challenging because many non-HR employees also need to use the tool – for example, hiring managers or staff looking for their next internal career move. They might only log in three times a year, and may forget where the form they need is located, leading to a surge in helpdesk calls. Others may only recently have become hiring managers.
“The biggest problem is we don’t know when they’re going to become a hiring manager,” says Dean. “You can’t predict that, so how can you train them in time?”
With employees working in different parts of the world according to their own timelines and schedules, there was an urgent need to deploy some kind of self-service tool to help them use SuccessFactors. “People are going to lose faith in the system if we can’t get to them and say, ‘Don’t worry, I can see you’re stuck, let me help you on to the next piece’,” says Dean. “People are so used to iPhones that you switch on and just work, when they go into a work system that is not that straightforward, they think, ‘What am I going to do?’”
In-app guidance
The solution was WalkMe, an AI-powered “digital adoption” platform that provides personalised guidance and notifications for enterprise software users, all in the form of easy-to-understand overlays. This includes in-app tips, important news updates, error alerts, and automated steps such as the filling in of form fields.
“The users get support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They have their own dedicated menu that they can access,” Dean explains. “We also create buttons, links, shortcuts, and notifications and place the information in other areas [of the software] so they always know that there’s help there for them.”
Deployment took three months, although Dean admits it would have been just eight weeks had the project not had to seek approval from the powerful company works council of employee representatives based in TUI’s German HQ. It was concerned about employee monitoring, and requested that an automatically generated User ID be removed from the deployment. That wasn’t a problem, as the value of the WalkMe analytics is in monitoring group behaviour rather than individuals, says Dean.
Freeing workers at TUI from manual toil
WalkMe assisted with deployment, building the initial round of content into the SAP overlays, and helping Dean understand how to optimise her use of the tool’s analytics features, she adds. Dean says the project has succeeded in its three primary goals: reducing travel time for the HR team; enabling staff to get help using SuccessFactors when they need it; and minimising training time in order to focus on process improvements. To that end, she claims TUI has been able to reduce travel costs for HR by 70% and IT support tickets by 50%. There has also been an 80% increase in employee self-sufficiency, with 99% of users interacting with WalkMe on a daily basis.
Because these users are spending less time on manual tasks, they can devote more of their working day to their teams. “We have a certain amount of automation set up within our content, which takes away those redundant clicks and speeds things up so that they can have a more positive and streamlined experience,” Dean explains. “They can focus more on the conversation with the person in their team as a manager rather than trying to do the admin, because that takes them ages.”
For HR teams, the impact has arguably been even greater: Dean has managed to reduce training time on SuccessFactors from a full day to just three hours per year. “These are the busiest people in our business at the moment, and they can’t afford to give up a day,” she says. The new system has also saved team members an estimated 500 hours per year in following up with end users who haven’t completed their HR tasks in the SAP software. TUI has seen a 40% increase in users doing so on time, Dean says.
Reporting and analytics insight help Dean and her team better understand what’s working and where users’ common friction points are in SAP. That means they can continuously improve the employee experience without needing to take users away from their work. The digital adoption platform is now an important part of TUI’s HRIT training roadmap.
“It’s our change manager for the bulk of the projects that we do,” Dean concludes. “When people ask what the value of the tool is, HR doesn’t make any money, so I can’t give them a number. But what I can tell you is it’s giving time back to people.”
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