At MuleSoft, we often talk about the power of integrating data and leveraging APIs to build connected customer experiences. But as we talk to CIOs and business leaders, they equally stress the importance of building connected employee experiences. In fact, 84% of IT leaders say improving employee technology is a critical initiative for their company. In reality though, only 50% of IT leaders are increasing their investment in employee-facing technology.
Why is there such a large gap between the percentage of leaders who say they should invest in employee experience and the percentage that are actually making that investment? It’s because building employee applications is challenging. Employees expect applications to be responsive, intelligent, and personalized. And those applications need to be connected and powered by data from systems across your business. Your teams need to seamlessly integrate these systems with the app and with each other to build that connected experience. And since the average business process now crosses more than 35 systems, there’s a lot to integrate. The sooner businesses rethink their strategy and start building connections with reuse in mind, the less time will be spent writing and rewriting custom code, allowing teams to focus on delivering innovative employee experiences.
While Salesforce is proud to be on the World’s Best Workplaces list, we were facing the same challenges as our customers. Over the years, with steep growth and numerous acquisitions, our employee information was spread across a number of back-end systems. Payroll, benefits, employee info, and more were all siloed, meaning our HR teams were having to switch between systems and manually update to consolidate information. The silos between these systems were preventing us from building connected employee applications. This meant that even starting on day 1, our employees were not getting the connected experience we had hoped they would. In fact, 36% of our new hires at Salesforce weren’t getting all of the equipment they needed on their first day of work, causing them to give our Day 1 experience a rating of three out of five.
To continue to be a top place to work, Salesforce needed to rethink the employee experience and transform how employees were being onboarded. This meant reimagining our integration strategy and seamlessly connecting our back-end systems so that we could build end apps that were actually connected and powerful — enter MuleSoft and an API-led approach to connectivity.
Through an API-led approach, Salesforce was able to surface data with System APIs unlocking multiple systems and instances like HCM data from Workday and badge data from Lenel. By combining System APIs and adding business logic, the team developed Process APIs, ultimately creating a reusable Worker 360 API.
With the data surfaced, we were able to meet our employee’s expectations and use experience APIs to build connected applications that improve various employee activities, and we started with addressing our onboarding challenge.
The Salesforce team built the New Hire Wizard on Salesforce Lightning Platform. The app helps streamline new employee provisioning and onboarding, so managers can focus on welcoming their new hire and building a relationship instead of logistical tasks. Since the New Hire Wizard is powered by all the relevant data managers need that was previously siloed, it has an impressive usage rate of 96%. Ultimately, improving the onboarding and provisioning experience with the app aided in improving our Day 1 rating to a 4.6 out of 5.
And more importantly, the app is built with APIs, so developers can discover and reuse the employee data through MuleSoft to save time on future projects instead of rewriting custom code. Because of reuse of the Employee 360 API and other APIs, Salesforce teams have cut delivery time of new HR projects by seven months, which has freed developers’ time to innovate and build other apps, such as a new training app, to ensure Salesforce remains one of the best places to work.
Learn more about how Salesforce surfaced data with MuleSoft to build a transformative employee app on the Salesforce Platform.
