Companies today have recognized the future of work is here, and they’re embracing the new digital-first, success-from-anywhere world.
This has major implications on the employee experience. Hallway conversations have been replaced by messaging apps; in-person whiteboard sessions have given way to new digital collaboration tools; IT support is now delivered remotely.
When employees can work from anywhere, the digital tools and technologies they use suddenly matter more than ever – and it turns out employee success is directly tied to business success. Companies that prioritize employee experience see almost double the revenue growth compared to those that do not.
When Salesforce launched Work.com last year, it was focused on helping companies reopen safely. Since then, Work.com has evolved to focus more broadly on employee experience, with products that increase productivity and deliver fast and secure technology support. For example, the following are generally available today:
- Employee Workspace gives employees a single, connected space to access the apps, resources and information they need to work productively and connect with colleagues.
- Employee Concierge is an intelligent help desk that lets employees find answers to questions quickly, with access to knowledge articles and AI-powered recommendations.
- IT Service Center, developed in partnership with Tanium, empowers IT agents to quickly resolve problems and keep devices secure and compliant, ensuring employees stay productive from anywhere.
To learn more about how Work.com empowers employees and IT teams, we sat down with Patrick Stokes, EVP & GM of Platform at Salesforce and Orion Hindawi, co-founder & CEO of Tanium.
Q. How has Work.com expanded since its launch?
Patrick: As the initial pandemic lockdowns began to lift, businesses were focused on how to reopen and operate safely, while many essential businesses had to continue operating throughout the year. We created Work.com in May 2020 to help organizations meet that challenge. At launch, Work.com included apps for manual contact tracing, employee wellness checks, shift scheduling, and a command center to help leaders visualize data and make informed decisions.
Since then, the world has evolved – and so has Work.com. With the transition to remote and hybrid work, our customers asked for new ways to help their employees be productive from anywhere, while continuing to support their health and wellbeing. That’s why we expanded Work.com beyond its original focus to help employees succeed from anywhere.
Q. Can you tell us about Tanium and how you’re working with Salesforce?
Orion: Tanium helps organizations stay secure by providing instant visibility and control over their endpoints — computers, laptops, servers, virtual machines — at any time, wherever they exist. We allow IT teams to know exactly how many endpoints they have, what applications are running, quickly push a patch update or run an audit.
Nearly half of the Fortune 100, top retailers and financial institutions trust Tanium to help them manage asset performance, detect and respond to threats and ensure compliance across their operations. Our platform decentralizes data collection, aggregation and distribution down to the endpoint delivering real-time visibility, comprehensive control and rapid response.
Tanium was founded on the principle of preparing businesses for the proliferation and distribution of endpoints; something that is happening even more rapidly today as companies go fully remote and migrate to the cloud. I couldn’t agree more with Patrick — the way we work has forever been changed. We are thrilled to be on this journey to reimagine employee service management with Salesforce in an increasingly remote working world. By bringing our platforms together, we’re able to empower IT to make better, faster decisions with accurate, real-time data so employees can get the help they need.
Q. Tell us about the new employee experience solution that Salesforce and Tanium built together.
Patrick: We partnered with Tanium to create IT Service Center (ITSC), a critical tool that helps IT teams better support employees from anywhere. This is an incredible cross-team, cross-company initiative leveraging Tanium’s real-time asset management capabilities, Service Cloud’s case management technology, and the power of the Salesforce Platform for automation, integration and personalization.
Employees these days can’t simply stroll over to the IT help desk to get what they need, and IT teams are struggling to deliver support at scale remotely. ITSC lets employees work productively from anywhere, while giving IT teams visibility into employee devices. It’s a powerful offering — especially now when we’re working remotely.
This means speedy resolution time for IT teams and minimized downtime for employees, keeping everyone productive, supported, and engaged – wherever they’re working.
Orion: Over the past year, we’ve all learned what it’s really like to work from home full-time. We need tools built for this new reality, recognizing that productivity and access look drastically different from just 12 months ago.
We’re thrilled to partner with Salesforce to create the new IT Service Center, the next generation ITSM solution built with the employee top of mind. Salesforce’s platform plus Tanium’s accurate, real-time data creates a streamlined help desk workflow that translates to a better end-user experience for employees, and IT departments. ITSC reduces the number of steps IT teams take to resolve tickets, automates tedious workflows and enables proactive remediation of issues. This is truly a game changer for IT service management.
Q. How does employee experience impact a business’ bottom line?
Patrick: Organizations with high employee engagement have 22% higher productivity. When employees feel connected to their workplace, 62% say their work positively impacts their health. We also know that highly engaged teams see 21% greater profitability.
If we adopt new technologies to automate IT support – eliminating wait times and helping employees get back to work quickly – imagine the amount of time your employees would get back. Imagine the amount of frustration that would be eliminated. With Work.com, Salesforce has built the technology to make this a reality.
Q. Security is at the forefront of everyone’s minds right now. How are Salesforce and Tanium working together to solve today’s pressing security challenges?
Orion: Companies are struggling to deliver on the tech needs of their distributed employees, causing security risks for the entire org. Their IT teams lack accurate, contextual data and aren’t able to answer really important questions about their endpoints: what applications is the user running, have they been compromised, are their devices up-to-date on patches and compliant?
Often, the tools IT teams leverage for different parts of the service management workflow are connected through brittle integrations offering outdated or stale data. This creates more work for already overburdened IT teams, demanding they toggle between tools to solve even the most basic employee needs. To top it all off, there is no easy way to proactively identify and remediate issues across the enterprise. The IT service desk is being forced to focus on remedial tasks that zap time and provide a poor employee experience.
We knew we needed to do something different. With Salesforce, we realized that we could build a product together that created a vision for employee service that was remote-first. One that prioritized self-healing, self-service and automation — all capabilities that are, we believe, now standard for companies to deliver an optimal, employee-first service management experience.
Our customers have seen this in action already. Eddie Nieves, director of information technology at Zemax, LLC., shared, “Salesforce’s IT Service Center solution powered by Tanium gives me a one-stop-shop to improve our employee experience by allowing agents to manage, secure and report on my entire fleet of endpoints, in real time. Even better, I can get performance and hardware/software metrics and it knows how and where to look for the answers I need. It’s like having a team of skilled IT professionals who know everything about every server, workstation and device I am responsible for, and they never need a break.”
Q. How do you see employee experience changing in 2021?
Patrick: At Salesforce, we know there’s never been a more important time to prioritize the employee experience, and IT management is a key element of that.
Now more than ever, employee success depends on having the right technologies and tools. As a result, HR is no longer the sole team responsible for the employee experience: IT plays a critical role in building an employee engagement strategy, in partnership with HR, that gives workers the tools they need to succeed from anywhere. IT teams must innovate fast to meet the ever-changing needs of the business, and do so securely and at scale.
Orion: Over the past year, we’ve learned how resilient both employees and organizations can be. This partnership, and the entire Work.com ecosystem, puts the focus on the employee as the customer — critically important as more and more organizations move to an all-remote or partially remote workforce. This is the future. We’re energized by the opportunity to partner with Salesforce to continue to tackle IT service management and employee experience challenges in the era of distributed IT.
Head here to learn more about Work.com.
