Integrated Workforce Experience Case Studies  Workforce Services: My Paid Time Off Application

 

  

Executive Summary  

Executive Summary  

“The new My Paid Time Off application allows me to manage my time off with ease; now the task is as simple as setting up a meeting on your calendar.”

Mark Allard, Business Analyst, Manufacturing,

Collaboration Centre for Excellence  

“The My Paid Time Off application is phenomenal! It saves me time and greatly minimizes the number of clicks it takes me to enter time off. I LOVE it!”

Felicia Brych, Manager, Marketing Communications,

CorpComm-Integrated Comms Strategy  

The My Paid Time Off application in IWE is a best practice example for Cisco WebEx Social, providing a seamless user interface. Point, click, request. Cool!

IWE User U.S. Employee

  

Key Benefits: ● Ease of use

● Time savings ● Increased productivity

● Enhanced visibility

● Better paid time off management  

Business Value: ● Speed and Productivity: saved ~ 2

minutes per request with potential savings of 5833 hours, based on the number of paid time off requests in 1 year

● Flexibility: employees can review paid time off balances, track the request status, and use categories for more flexible management

● Replication: easily replicated for other teams, groups, and functional areas

  Cisco® Workforce Services (WFS), a cross-functional group that came

together to redesign and integrate employee services, wanted to transform

the Cisco employee paid time off (PTO) request experience, as well as the

manager’s approval process. Whether paid time off is for a well-deserved

vacation, your child’s school outing, or an emergency, the process of

securing the time off should be quick and easy, according to the group.  

Workforce Services, a Cisco program based on a partnership across

human resources, finance, IT, and workplace resources, is working to

deliver employee services as a cohesive user experience across functional

boundaries, while moving away from functional-specific services.  

The group’s vision is to create innovative workforce applications and

services that deliver relevant, actionable information through a

personalized, simplified, and intuitive user experience in a single

workspace. There, each employee can easily select and access his or her

personally relevant or role-based services from human resources, finance,

IT, and workplace resources.  

WFS decided to begin with the paid time off process based on surveys of

user needs. Today Cisco Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE), powered

by Cisco WebEx Social™, enables the streamlined paid time off process

with a personalized user experience in a collaborative environment capable

of integrating and supporting a wide variety of future services from WFS.  

With the new application, U.S. employees, as well as all employees in the

future, can review paid time off balances, submit a request, track the

request status, and use categories (jury duty, for example) for more flexible

management.

The entire process for requesting paid time off is easier and faster; the

steps required to simply request paid time off went from 15 to 4. Managers,

too, are able to quickly review and approve the request in his or her

personalized My View within IWE.  

Within three months of deploying the IWE-enabled My Paid Time Off

application, there was a minimum of ~2 minutes time benefit per request, or 80 hours in realized time savings based

on the number of requests. The potential productivity gain was an estimated times savings of 5833 hours, based on

the number of requests in a 12-month period. The group estimates that even more savings in time can be realized

with less experienced users. With this successful deployment of the paid time off application in IWE, the group is

evaluating the longer-term integration of other employee services from each of the four groups.

About Workforce Services  

Cisco Workforce Services delivers the applications, services, and information necessary for supporting business

operations for employees, managers, and executives. To deliver employee value through integrated solutions, WFS

began with discovering and exposing high-usage, high-value employee activities and information to better understand

employee needs. For employees, the WFS vision includes organizing information and activities according to user-based

personal categories, such as personal information, work information and location, and career management, as well as by

role, for example, manager, new hire, and executive leadership.  

WFS realized that moving from a department-centric to a user-centric delivery of services required process

improvements where:  

● The workflow focuses on the experience.  

● Current manual processes that are difficult to use are fixed, while compliance with legal requirements is

maintained.

● Business owners are assigned to manage the processes that could potentially span across functions.

The immediate opportunity for WFS was to transform the paid time off experience to become:

● Services oriented  

● Engaging and streamlined  

Today the new My Paid Time Off application is one of many IWE deployments with 180 portlets/applications under way

at Cisco.  

About Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE), Powered by Cisco WebEx Social  

IWE, powered by Cisco WebEx Social, is a comprehensive collaboration environment

About IWE   

Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE) is an internal Cisco collaborative initiative, encompassing business process, culture, and technology.

 IWE allows you to more effectively connect, communicate, and collaborate with people and communities, as well as share information to help accelerate growth, encourage innovation, and create sustainable productivity.

 In addition, Cisco WebEx Social, the underlying platform for IWE, is our very own product, which is being sold to customers and partners.

and platform, including social, content, process, and communication capabilities.

In Cisco WebEx Social–enabled communities such as IWE, user collaboration is

powered by context and is always actionable, thus improving productivity and

speeding results. Groups can benefit from integrated content management and

open social solutions, with future plans for embedded policy management. With

a fully customizable interface, teams can easily access enterprise-level, highly

available social solutions (directory profile, blogs/wikis/forums/posts, social

tagging, search, dynamic communities, micro-blogging, activity

feeds/notifications) and unified communications (click to call/IM/Cisco WebEx®,

presence, visual voicemail, web communicator, video, and third-party

integrations). Each member of the team can create a linked, personalized

workspace with a dashboard to facilitate role-based and personal activities such

as requesting paid time off using the integrated My Paid Time Off application, as

well as team- and group-based communication. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: Relevant, Personalized Workspace: IWE, Powered by Cisco WebEx Social                                 

 Business Situation and Challenge

 

For employees, quickly finding a necessary employee service can be challenging in terms of searching, navigating, and

locating information, applications, and tools on the corporate intranet. Once in the right location, employees must review

options and content not necessarily relevant to them. For a new hire, for example, this process can be especially difficult.  

The Cisco application for requesting paid time off is a very frequently used employee application. The existing paid time

off process, however, required some 15 steps to simply request time off. WFS wanted to deliver user efficiency,

productivity, and satisfaction by decreasing the steps and eliminating the emails and calls usually necessary for the paid

time off process. The group also needed to streamline the approval process for managers who must approve time off for

many individuals. In future revisions, the team could see the application evolving to enable, for example, automatic

notifications to other team members about personal time off.

  Solution and Benefits

 Today, Cisco employees have the ability to easily access and manage their paid time off requests and balances within

IWE. The My Paid Time Off application resides in a space on IWE called My View, which is a personalized workspace for

each employee (Figure 2). The employee selects the My Paid Time Off application and simply drags it into the space for

immediate usability and easy entry of the request (Figure 3). The new user interface has streamlined the process for

securing paid time off (4 steps rather than 15). It also allows users to view paid time off balances, preview calendars

based on their history of time off, make and submit the request, and track the status of the request (Figure 4). It offers an

equally easy process for manager approval. Managers can approve or disapprove requests without using the My Paid

Time Off application by simply going to their action item view within their IWE My View (Figure 5).

 

Figure 2: My Paid Time Off Application within IWE My View Workspace                                

 Figure 3: Paid Time Off Request Template by Day in My Paid Off Time Application

 

  

Figure 4: Paid Time Off Request Status Including Manager’s Approval in My Paid Off Time Application  

                         

Figure 5: Manager Approval of Paid Time Off as an Action Item within IWE My View Workspace                           

 In addition to approving the time off, managers can see 14 other notifications that automatically feed into their My View, such as:

 ● Absence for non-U.S. employees

● Remote Worker Agreement

● Change Manager/Department for Employees

● Work Location Change

● Change Manager/Department Bulk update (Employee or Contingent Worker)

● Work Hours Change

● Termination

● Contingent Worker Extension

● Mass Contingent Worker Extension Bulk update

● Learning Course Approval  Business Impact/Metrics  

As part of the deployment, WFS assessed the application success both qualitatively and quantitatively. By enabling a productivity tool within a collaboration environment and decreasing process latency, employees improved productivity and management of paid time off. The IWE-enabled application also provided enhanced visibility.

 ● Speed: Employees found the tool easier and faster to use. The convenient location in IWE My View saved time in

searching and simply moving around the corporate intranet. The steps to completion of a paid time off request

also went from 15 to 4.

● Productivity savings: Within three months of deploying My Paid Time Off, there was an approximate 2 minute time

benefit per request, or 80 hours in realized time savings based on the number of requests. The potential

productivity gain was an estimated savings of 5833 hours, based on the number of requests in a 12-month period.

● Flexibility: Employees can view paid time off balances, submit a request, and use categories (jury duty, for

example) for more flexible management of time off.

● Replication: Similar IWE applications can be easily replicated for other teams, groups, and functional areas.   Looking Ahead

 WFS is in the process of identifying employee applications within finance, human resources, IT, and workplace resources

that could be integrated into IWE, as these departments move toward integrated service solutions with relevant,

actionable information and personalized, simplified, and intuitive user experiences in a single workspace.  

Best practices from the experience can help customers realize business impact and value faster than the group’s initial

deployment and use of this solution. To capture exponential value from IWE collaboration, the IWE group recommends

investing in change management and building a systematic, comprehensive deployment plan, including an end vision

architecture, a corporate standard, and a roadmap.  

For more information about how you can benefit from IWE collaboration, powered by Cisco WebEx Social, and achieve your business benefit and value, please log into IWE at iwe.cisco.com, and visit:  http://iwe.cisco.com/web/iwe‐ program/about‐iwe.

 For additional information regarding My Paid Off, please log into IWE at iwe.cisco.com, and visit

http://iwe.cisco.com/web/iwe-help/mypto. The application is currently available to all Cisco U.S. regular employees,

including Scientific Atlanta. Availability will be announced to other Cisco theatres in the future.