salesforce.com: An Integrated HR Community and KCS Program Launched in Record Time

Setting the Stage

At salesforce.com, it is always a sprint, never a marathon, and the #dreamjob central initiative was not going to be any different. In February 2013, the Human Resources organization began building “#dreamjob central,” an integrated community and knowledge environment designed to be a onestop shop for salesforce.com employees to find information they need. After five months of preparation and hard work, the initiative went live globally in July 2013.

Prior to implementation, salesforce.com employee information resources were scattered and disparate. In addition, Employee Success specialists handled inbound inquiries through many different channels including phone, Salesforce Chatter, and walk-ups. This scenario proved challenging to manage and required a quick resolution to prepare for thousands of new employees onboarding in the months ahead.

With the introduction of #dreamjob central, inbound employee questions are now all managed in a single place. If salesforce.com employees are not able to find the answer to their question, they pose it to the community, where it can be answered by anyone. If the community does not respond to the question, a case is created and assigned to an Employee Success specialist for resolution. After an answer is provided, the case is resolved and posted as a community thread for reuse. A successful organization transformation relies on several critical success factors.

Solve a Business Challenge

From the beginning, the #dreamjob central initiative was consistently aligned as a means to meet specific business goals. During implementation, heavy focus was put into listening and mapping to business needs. For example, the director of Employee Success wanted to see a single source of truth for new employees to find answers to their questions. Every effort was made to convey the benefits of this implementation within the context of business needs.

Raise Awareness While Keeping it Simple Before #dreamjob central, there was essentially no awareness of KCS methodology within the Employee Success organization. Thus, time and efforts were dedicated to raising awareness and to train all levels of the organization, including an implementation team. The foundation for this initial awareness campaign was the KCS Practices Guide and knowledgeable KCS implementers. The final slide deck was kept concise and adapted to include HRspecific examples and terminology. It was designed to be delivered in 90 minutes or less. Keeping it concise enabled the message to be delivered to over a hundred team members in six to eight weeks worldwide.

Goal

• Build an integrated HR community and knowledge environment for salesforce.com employees

Guiding Principles

• Pay close attention to larger business objectives and goals
• Present the KCS methodology in the context of the business challenges it solves
• Be demand driven when seeding knowledge
• In an HR context, focus on questions and answers instead of policies

Benefits

• 87% adoption rate among 13,000 employees
• 524 out of ~900 articles created “justin-time”
• 10% linking/reuse rate
• Baselines for employee sat and access to information/knowledge

Key Decisions Impact Ramp Up Time

Rather than starting from scratch, salesforce.com utilized an existing KCS Style Guide previously adopted by another member of the Consortium for Service Innovation. This saved many hours of discussion and thus quickened ramp up time. In addition, the decision was made that everyone would be able to contribute content immediately after training concluded. For those who wanted to publish, there was a lightweight publisher training course and exam to complete.

Another critical decision was made to leave existing policy documents in their current location and not migrate them. Instead, all new questions concerning these policies would be answered in #dreamjob central and would include a pointer to the original full policy document.

The 50+ members from various teams within salesforce.com utilized a demanddriven methodology to identify and pre-seed #dreamjob central with 300 high value articles. This was sufficient to get started and saved huge data migration efforts.

Nine months after implementation , #dreamjob central has been successful. Since it launched, salesforce.com has added 5,000 new employees with existing staffing levels within the Human Resources organization. About 13,000+ employees utilize #dreamjob central daily, using about 900 articles, of which 65% were published just-in-time. Without a doubt, this implementation demonstrates that the KCS methodology helps meet business goals within a Human Resources setting.

In five months, salesforce.com Employee Success successfully launched #dreamjob central: an integrated community and knowledge environment where employees find information they need.