The purpose of Philips Domestic Appliances (Philips DA) is simple yet powerful: helping people to turn their houses into homes. Their goal is to improve the lives of people at home through meaningful innovations. Last year, Philips announced the sale of its Domestic Appliances business to focus on their overall ambition to be a health technology solutions provider. September 2021 marked the start of Philips DA’s new journey as a stand-alone company.
Can you imagine the major transformation the company had to go through? It affects everything: from HR technology to HR policies and processes. You will read about the challenge in this case.
The challenge: to quickly find a replacement for the HR ServiceNow portal
With the separation from Philips, the biggest challenge for the HR team of Philips DA was that they would lose control over the HR portal in ServiceNow. This portal was used to communicate HR policies and procedures to 8.000 employees worldwide. As of September 2022, they would lose access to it. You can imagine that there was quite some pressure to quickly find an alternative solution to host HR information for DA employees. The information in the previous ServiceNow portal was not presented in a logical manner. They spent a lot of time searching for the requested information. Therefore, one of the criteria for the new platform was that it should make HR information more accessible and easier to find.
“You knew the information was out there, but it was pretty hard to find as the navigation in our HR portal was not intuitive at all”.
– Alvin Lin, Rewards Lead APAC
Another criteria was the transparency of information across regions. In the HR ServiceNow portal, this was very restricted: HR employees could only access policies for their own region. Which was very ineffective, as the HR team performs a lot of cross-border reporting. Therefore, they expressed the wish to, at least, briefly understand local policies from other countries.
Due to the scope of this project, we’ve divided it into two phases.
Phase 1: bring scattered HR information together in one SharePoint site
As SharePoint was already widely used within Philips DA, moving information from the HR portal to SharePoint was a logical choice. However, the HR team was a bit hesitant that it would become ‘just another SharePoint document library’. Therefore, they reached out to HR Future Proof to help with building an attractive SharePoint site.
The first step in the project was to bring all scattered global HR information together into a global People Hub. This appeared to be quite a challenge. Each day, the project team would run into another HR-related SharePoint site: one for onboarding, one for culture, one for learning, one for inclusion and diversity. Having so many different sites doesn’t make sense from an employee’s perspective. That’s why we merged all information into one central place: the Global People Hub.
“It is really helpful that everything related to HR is now accessible through one place. It was very easy to get lost in different SharePoint sites. Now I only have to remember one site and I can find everything I’m looking for.”
– Yashi Edelijn, HR Manager & Project Manager North-Europe
Phase 2: Enrich Global People Hub with regional information
The second phase of this project was the most challenging. The goal was to enrich the Global People Hub with information regarding local HR policies and procedures. This meant that we had to create eight different regional hubs, and they needed to be integrated logically within the Global People Hub. In the first phase of the project, HR Future Proof took care of creating all the SharePoint pages. But, for the regional information, we heavily relied on the participation and commitment of the local teams to build the pages.
“The first step was to have an intake conversation with all the regional HR Leads to understand how their countries, businesses and HR information is structured. In this call a regional project lead was assigned and this was our main contact point for the regional People Hub”.
– Alvin Lin, Rewards Lead APAC
After the intake calls, a Team environment was created in Microsoft Teams. This Team was used to communicate with the regions. The first assignment for the eight regions was to check all local HR information, and determine if it should be incorporated. HR Future Proof created eight sites with, more or less, the same navigational themes and a similar look and feel as the Global Hub. From an employee’s experience, it would therefore look like one single platform.
Subsequently, the real work for the local content owners began. A challenge, because they needed to create the SharePoint pages on top of their day-to-day work. To support this process, HR Future Proof offered guidance in the form of SharePoint training and walk-in sessions (not literally, although we would have loved to visit Singapore! 😉). Furthermore, everyone gained access to our ´SharePoint for HR Academy´ and could consult the short instruction videos.
“For me as local content owner, it was quite intuitive to work with SharePoint. It was very satisfying to directly see the result”.
– Yashi Edelijn, HR Manager & Project Manager North-Europe
Effective communication and collaboration in Teams
Throughout the second phase of the project, Microsoft Teams was used to collaborate and communicate with the regions. All the regional project leads and content owners (50+ people worldwide) were invited to this Team.
“The Teams environment that we used to run this project was actually one of the highlights for us. It made it very easy for us to communicate to the regions and keep them informed on what’s happening. Each region had a dedicated but public channel in the Team. That allowed others to see what issues other regions had and to learn from that as well”.
– Alvin Lin, Rewards Lead APAC
“I really appreciated that whenever I needed answers from the global team, I could get it easily through Teams”.
– Yashi Edelijn, HR Manager & Project Manager North-Europe
Although the project is finished, the Team is still going strong. It allows everyone to connect regarding the maintenance of the People Hub.
Strict deadline and heavy workload for local teams
The deadline for this project was very strict, because of the closure of the HR portal in ServiceNow in September 2022. The project for the Global People Hub started in January 2022, which meant we only had 7 full months till implementation. To achieve this, collaboration and determination was needed from all involved. We launched the Global People Hub in March 2022 and kicked off the regional phase in April 2022. Now the regions really had to set through, and they did! The majority of the regions managed to reach the deadline. An incredible success and achievement!
“The biggest challenge in this project was the workload for the local teams. Luckily they knew it was going to be worth their time. The Global People Hub already gave them a view on how it would look like at the end of the day. They experienced how easy it was to navigate and to find information. We are very grateful for their commitment”.
– Alvin Lin, Rewards Lead APAC
The result: a central point for HR in Microsoft Teams
All Philips DA employees around the world can access the People Hub through the navigational menu in Microsoft Teams. They don’t have to search for the Hub or remember the site URL; they can find HR information without leaving their digital workspace in Teams.
The final result is a so-called SharePoint ‘hub site’. This enables the organization of an (HR) intranet by associating multiple sites together. In this case, employees will see two navigational menus. The top menu is for global HR information and the menu below relates to the specific region. This allows employees to easily navigate back to the global level and avoids getting lost in different SharePoint sites.
“People really like having the People Hub, and the main reason is that it’s really easy to navigate. The topics are structured in a logical way, and this helps you to quickly find information. They also like how modern it looks. It is really a step forward compared to our previous HR Portal in ServiceNow”.
– Alvin Lin, Rewards Lead APAC
The People Hub isn’t just used for information regarding HR policies and procedures. It also became a place to communicate news and announce events, new employees, and policy updates.
“There’s a lot going on in our HR organization. Before the People Hub we communicated frequently via email. Now, I can easily direct employees to a newly created page or news item on our regional hub”.
– Yashi Edelijn, HR Manager & Project Manager North-Europe
Looking forward: user adoption and maintenance
Instead of reaching out to HR by mail or phone, employees can take ownership in finding the answers to their questions online. But… this behavioral change doesn’t happen overnight. Employees need to get used to a new platform and it is up to HR to actively educate people.
“I notice that employees do their best to consult the People Hub before they reach out to me. Sometimes, specific information is missing and then I know I need to update a certain page. But it is a good sign that people try to find it themselves. And for us as HR, it is important to keep referring back to the People Hub and to ensure it is up-to-date at all times”.
– Yashi Edelijn, HR Manager & Project Manager North-Europe
Now that the project is finished, the ownership of the People Hub lies completely with the HR team. We, as HR Future Proof, offered basic SharePoint education and gave guidance on how to best maintain the platform in the future.
Also interested in a SharePoint HR intranet?
Do you also struggle to communicate and share HR policies and news with employees worldwide? And are you wondering what a People Hub would look like for your organization? You can schedule a free demo here.
