ServiceNow, Inc. (NOW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

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Welcome, and thank you so much for joining us today in our panel discussion to hear from the leaders at ServiceNow and also our valued customer, CommonSpirit Health, about how workplace service delivery and HR service delivery are enabling the future of workplaces and employee experiences. My name is Jordan Waechter, and I have the privilege of moderating today's panel of executives as they share about their digital transformation initiatives and also the impact that it's having on their organization's employee experience. So during our time together today, we're going to touch on a couple of key themes. And some of these are including new strategies for managing transitions, attracting top talent and the ability to retain employees in an environment like today; reshaping those digital and physical experiences by bringing the best of those worlds together; and last but not least, but how to measure that impact and be able to manage these costs for real estate services on our people, this world that we all are so closely intertwined in at this time. Just as a quick reminder, we'd love to hear topics you'd be interested in by using the survey at the bottom right-hand side of your screen [Operator Instructions]. So now let's go ahead. Let's get started with a round of introductions from our speakers. So Christopher, why don't you go ahead and kick it off for us and tell us a little bit about yourself, your team and your role at CommonSpirit Health?

Great. Thanks, Jordan. Hi, everyone. I'm Christopher Burns. I've been with CommonSpirit Health for [over] 15 years. I serve as the System Director of Enterprise Workflow. I have the privilege of leading the brilliant team behind our HR Instance of ServiceNow, which we fondly call Employee Central.

Fantastic. Awesome. Christopher, we're so thrilled to have you with us here today. I personally am thrilled from the standpoint. I know that last year at Knowledge Live in New York City, you had also serve on another panel thought leadership discussion with ServiceNow. So we're really thrilled to have you here today to be discussing how your digital transformation has evolved since then, being on that larger employee portal, and then just hearing how your HR teams, your workplace teams are working together at navigating this new environment. So thanks for being with us.

Thanks for having me.

Kelley -- of course, of course. Kelley, let's go on over to you. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your tenure and your role here at ServiceNow.

Well, welcome, everyone. My name is Kelley Steven-Waiss. I am the Chief Transformation Officer at ServiceNow and prior to that, was the founder and CEO of Hitch, which was acquired by ServiceNow last June. And Hitch was a B2B SaaS platform for internal talent mobility that use skills intelligence to match people to work. So super excited to be a part of ServiceNow. And prior to that was a CHRO for 13 years in technology. It's where I first saw this problem and opportunity around employee experience. I spent a lot of time on the future of work, wrote a book called The Inside Gig, which I published in 2020, right in smack middle of pandemic. And I am also a Board Director of FormFactor Inc., where I Chair the Compensation Committee and Nominating and Governance. So looking at work from many different angles.

Absolutely. Well, Kelley, we are excited that you're here with us today, bringing forward such tenure and expertise within the space. This is all around an employee experience conversation. And we have people who are on this call that are not only heavy leaning in the platform and understanding the power of this larger digital transformation, but also seeking guidance of how do we manage this human experience that's actually underneath it all. So really fantastic to have you here, also to be even seeing Hitch coming into the ServiceNow platform as well and how we're using tools like that to re-skill other employees or even increase the employee experience boosting productivity. So looking forward to a great conversation today. Okay. Well, Tonya, last but not least, I see your title here. You and I have a lot of conversations due to some of the areas that I cover here at ServiceNow around workplace experience. But let's tell the audience a little bit about yourself and this massive role that you serve for global real estate here with ServiceNow.

Absolutely. Thanks, Jordan. So Tonya Thornburgh, VP of Global Real Estate and Workplace Services here at ServiceNow. I've been with ServiceNow for 5 years as an employee. I had my own company doing consulting in the workplace world prior to that, and ServiceNow was one of my customers. And yes, I'm just really happy to participate in this conversation today. It's a big topic. Lots of things changing, talking about the world of work as we know it, has definitely evolved. And so really looking forward to the conversation. Thank you.

Yes, absolutely, Tonya. And I really see the way that this is all going to come together as we talk about our people, our places and also those services that happen within them. So let's go ahead and engage our audience.

And we're just kind of -- we're curious. We're doing a little bit of a pulse check with you all. What stage best represents where you are at in your EX digital transformation investment at this time? And what we're asking with this is we're talking about have you done anything in terms of your human resources? Your employee experience transforming the workplace, maybe you have implemented some kind of a reservation management system, something for onboarding, offboarding, how that connects to IT in terms of assets? So really just curious to get a little bit of a pulse check from our audience of where you're at within the stage of a journey. Okay. I'm seeing some answers coming in pretty dispersed across the board. We'll give it just another 30 seconds here. Okay. So this is -- I mean this is fascinating, right? So we're seeing within this 33% haven't started. A lot of people are in early rollout, 20%, well along the journey, which is this is exactly what's expected. So what's -- we all are facing this really common set of challenges right now that are within the workplace and within our workforces. Organizations are having to fundamentally shift the way that they are having their offerings and their future of work strategy. So we're facing major layoffs. The majority of employees that are still within their organizations after mass turnovers are also feeling this increased workload and burnout. And we see that 49% of HR leaders are actually struggling to define what this next strategy will be for their future of workplaces. We see that 50% of corporate offices are looking at engaging in some kind of a flexible workplace strategy, and that 39% of organizations are shifting their resilience. They're moving from fragile to more agile by really modernizing their digital transformation. And so the other thing is that these challenges are creating friction. So essentially, with that being said, now organizations and people are having to be challenged to take the lead and help their employees regain their productivity to become more engaged at work again or maintain their productivity. But the experience for employees is really complicated. It's fragmented. And research is showing that workers spend a disproportionate amount of time navigating across the various systems that their organizations use. So if it's 9% of time based on the research, it's roughly 1,200 transitions a day. And I was having a really engaging conversation yesterday with a different one of our customers, and they laughed at me and said, "Well, Jordan, that's if these employees know which application or which system they're meant to be going into." So that's another major factor of this conversation. So with that being said, let's ask our panelists where they're at in transforming their employee experience and what digital transformation means to them. So Kelley, let's go ahead and start with you. You just discussed; you've been a CHRO for 13 years before you founded a tech company. And I know that we've talked, and consumeration is a passion of yours. We're seeing a lot of great inroads for leveraging technology to create more of this consumer approach. So what is your vision for modernizing the employee experience?

Well, Jordan, I believe we have a huge opportunity with the emergence of AI and machine learning to provide a much more personalized, customized experience. The employees of today are -- many of them are digital natives. They're digital thinkers. They're not analog thinkers. There's a trust with technology that maybe we didn't have from prior generations. They expect an iPhone experience at work. And so what do I mean by that? I mean that it's frictionless. It's seamless. It's more personalized, the applications that matter to me. It's smart. And it's much more consumer-like than traditionally we've built technology. So given that we have the ability to actually capture things like their aspirations or their preferences, we can now consumerize much more of the applications and deliver on that modern experience. And you also mentioned a lot of burnout. A lot of the burnout is because we have created, in good faith, a lot of best-of-breed technology for employees, but we haven't made it frictionless. We haven't necessarily made it personalized. So the much more that we can streamline, the much more we can take feedback and the flow of work on how people are engaging with that technology, reduce the friction, will also have vast benefits for their engagement and productivity down the line.

Absolutely. I think that you make great points, especially when we think about the past 2 to 3 years, even just call it the past 5 years and all the advancements that have happened in technology. How do our customers, when they're flooded in a market with so many various tools and solutions, even make those kinds of decisions? That could be just crippling between that overload. And when we're adding in the employee factor into this, we do want to make sure we're checking for things like engagement where, if we're making investments like this SaaS an organization, is it bringing value in? So Christopher, at CommonSpirit Health, what does digital transformation mean to organizations like yours? And what issues were you trying to solve? And what motivated you to initiate this kind of transformation?

I'm glad to hear a lot of what Kelley said resonate and our thoughts as well. Digital transformation is kind of a moving target for us. Just when we think we have an idea or a grasp of where we need to go, we get a certain curveball. So for us, our digital transformation is letting technology do the heavy lifting so that our caregivers can focus on healing. It's about assisted experiences that help us make better informed decisions, faster decisions, safer decisions for our patients. It's about creating experiences that delight our caregivers. Because we know that delighted caregivers are better healers. So what types of issues am I trying to solve? Jordan, the stats that you've prepared really, really resonate, hearing that 9% of your day is spent toggling applications. And I completely agree, that's if you can find them, that's if your access isn't broken, all of these types of things. In another study, it's estimated that we spend 3.6 hours per day searching for information, trying to get answers to certain types of things. So it's this [cysifist] like employee experience. You're always pushing the ball up the hill only for it only to roll back down and you start all over, depending on the next problem that you're solving. So I find myself spending my days working on trying to give our employees a digital place to get help, to get answers, to engage and to learn. And I think one key thing here, this came up earlier as well, is making sure that we're aligning things with what employees are already familiar with, that consumerization of this. I can't tell you how many times we'll get into focus groups with our employees, and we constantly hear, well, my bank on their website or on their app is able to do it this way, and I love it. I'm able to do it on social media a certain way. I want to be able to like. I want to be able to share. I want to be able to do all of these different types of things. So we're seeing that influence a lot of what we're trying to do. And that digital transformation is a constant alignment of what's happening out in that world, which I think is really fascinating. I think the second thing is a digital place to make CommonSpirit feel like home. So much when I think about my experience becoming familiar with the organization and its culture and all of these types of things, I reflect on my experience. So our leaders, our culture, all of these types of things was established in the office. I saw them with my own eyes in a physical presence. So that was, from the sign on the building, the decor and how that aligns with our branding, the quality of the coffee, our interactions and meetings, how we interact and the technology that we're using there. But that was all in person. We've got a new world. We're in a new frontier with so much of our workforce remote, and our plans to stay remote and offering that. So these folks have never stepped foot into what has always been this curated experience. You walk in, there's a certain look, there's a certain feel. We're trying to replicate that. How do I digitize that? So this person who has never, may never set foot in that experience, how can they become a part of CommonSpirit's, the culture and really feel at home and with family? I think those are really the key things that I think about when focused on digital transformation.

Yes. I mean I'm hearing that, and I just hear all these buzzwords going off. And in my mind, I'm like, "Oh, Kelley, like are you hearing the conversation of the standpoint?" Because it really, CommonSpirit Health is not only looking at being able to let those providers do their absolute best work, but you're also looking at digitizing the experience for those employees, making those things more frictionless between the applications that they're going to the 3-plus hours a day searching for that kind of information. Even hearing you say things like, oh, to like something or even easily being able to share something out, this is that consumerization conversation that folks, like Kelley in the market, are leading in those standpoints and people like yourself within the organizations are leading. So really fascinating, and I'm looking forward to diving into that deeper. So Tonya, shifting over to you. As you are leading all of these strategic decisions across ServiceNow's global real estate and services, hearing the things that someone like Kelley cares about, things like Christopher are leading, it really sounds like we are seeing these 2 worlds come together. It's this physical and it's also this digital world. So now that ServiceNow were a couple of years into our transformation journey, would you say? Does that sound right?

Yes. And probably revision 52 based on everything COVID throughout the shifts, I think it takes for the first 2 years, yes, definitely, moving direction and hearing what Christopher was talking about, right, those are all the things that we're trying to solve. Pre-COVID again, that focus was in the same place, same all, experiences together, physical experiences together. COVID hit, we had to make a complete shift, right? Full 180, and now everything is digital, right? And now we're in this kind of more flexible, hybrid kind of work anywhere, everywhere all at the same time mode. And so now we have to think about what are those employee services that we deliver, how do we deliver them, right? For those working from home, I don't have the ability to have the coffee that we have in the office, right, and do that. How do you create those connections and those collaborations? The things that we had before, on-site events, the cafes, the break rooms, those were intentional places for people to have those collisions, right, that you might not -- unplanned collisions during the day, those watercooler chat, how do we recreate that in today's environment, right, are some of those challenges? And to Christopher's point, you start a new company right, and your number on site, you're never working with people. We have people working remote before. Their jobs tended to be very siloed jobs, right? Now it's anybody and everybody. And so helping people connect to the culture, helping people to sift through the noise and all the information coming at them. And Kelley, I love the consumerization kind of perspective of it. Hey, because you're like this, you may be interested here. This ability to kind of personalize what I get fed to me as a priority, but then knowing I can go see what else is new and know where to go to do that, I think, is really huge and some of those things that we're still working our way through and challenging. And we're trying to make sure that we're not making place really the center of attention, right, that where you work, there's pros and cons tub to each of them, and that space is a choice. We have communication choices every day that we make, and we're used to that. It's no longer that this one place and this desk is trying to serve my needs, that I can really choose the environment, the place, the tools that support what I'm trying to achieve in that moment, how do we educate people on that and bring that to life, all while thinking about all the other challenges of accessibility, inclusivity. How can I be seen? How can I be heard by creating that equity across all of those experiences.

Yes. No, it's completely spot on. And it just makes me think how do we use that technology for good. And I heard something really miraculous the other day on a podcast I was listening to. And it was saying that humans, we made computers. We made these incredible machines. We're the ones pioneering in AI and all of this. So we don't -- we can't even fathom just the power that we personally have within that ability. So really using these technologies for good. And I think of the way that all of these services and events have transitioned and how someone who, like Kelley might be in the HR space or transformation space of leadership, and really wondering how do I continue to foster a community that's here? How does that lead into things like retention and creating community? And how do I make sure it is inclusive of all? And then at CommonSpirit Health, even just having something like a unified portal for all of your employees to go and access and find information, I mean that was a complete paradigm shift that many organizations don't even have now. And Tonya, on the workplace side, I think of some of the latest innovations in workplace service delivery. And I know that you, yourself, we call it here at ServiceNow, drinking our own champagne, because a lot of times, we are customer zero. So there's the product side of the house at ServiceNow, but then there's also the side that is our customers. And our customers, like yourself, you're on this product. You're using it and giving feedback along with other customers that are in our partnership groups, and they're sharing feedback with these teams in real time around how do we shape these innovations based on what the actual needs are for our customers and the market at this time. Because it is absolutely a revolving door that continues to shift. And I'll share an example, and then, Christopher, I want to go back over to you to dive in on some specific use cases. And a couple of examples that were -- the first of which was from the floor maps that are available within the product, being able to easily click the link and share out that URL with another colleague or employee. So you could literally navigate to directly almost as the maps do for us today. And that was so phenomenal. We're talking about these things of the ease of use that really bring our employee populations together and use this technology for good. So Christopher, kind of starting with you on some of those specific use cases. You're discussing at CommonSpirit health. You've been there for many years. And one of the things that we do talk about here at ServiceNow is actually bridging these workflows across multiple departments. So breaking out of these various siloed aspects. And I know that you have a really great story to tell here. So talk to us a bit about where you started, how you've shifted your strategy along the way, and you've been able to successfully adjust to these cross-departmental workflows.

Yes, it's been quite a journey. So we launched what we call Employee Central, our HR Instance of ServiceNow, in February of 2020. I remember some of the prelaunch meetings that were in-person, literally sitting there in a conference room, starting to hear about COVID. And just kind of chatting about it, what do we think it's going to be like? What do you think it will do? And we kind of shrugged it off. So then we all fly home and things went sideways. When we launched our ServiceNow Instance, in our minds, we launched a case of knowledge management tool at the end, right? We were moving on. That's all this was to solve for. So then, I get a frantic phone call and find out that in our Pacific Northwest hospitals, there had been a mandate to start to do a pre-shift COVID screening. So the phone call -- how do we solve for this? We're doing it on paper. We know that this is going to scale. We've got to do something better. So my team went off, built a digital solution within ServiceNow, launched it. It went great, and we thought we were going to be done. And it just kept going and it kept going and it kept going. So I want to talk about digital transformation. The experience to work with ServiceNow is they stood up, Safe Workplace, being able to be a key participant to let them know what I'm hearing in our hospitals, giving feedback, being able to see the feedback actually turn into a product was really, really amazing. So some of the key things. An organization, 150,000 employees, 50,000 physicians, anything that we do, anything that we build, there's got to be the scalability of it. So we knew that we had to do these pre-COVID shifts. We've built that functionality. We're able to leverage that. Then we move later into COVID into a process of how we're going to get our entire population vaccinated. How do we let them know? How do we communicate all of these types of things? The other thing is CommonSpirit Health was newly formed. This was the first application that was launched for a combined CommonSpirit. It was one tool available to the entire organization, which was really key in its success for us. So we go through the vaccination process. We go through the process of employees being able to report back on all of these different types of things. That's when we realized, okay, there's more to ServiceNow than case of knowledge management. We're using it to communicate. We're using it to workflow. And that's when this whole concept workflow for us really started to take bloom from that. We had -- during the pandemic, I think every other organization realized we're dealing with so much change right now. Let's jam in some of these other big things that we've got to just get accomplished. We leverage ServiceNow to workflow process for our organization as we transition to Google Workspace -- or Workplace to be able to allow employees to sign up to be a guide or a guru through this process. We used it recently with a payroll issue that we had to work through and communicate with our employees. We use it in mergers and acquisitions activities throughout our organization. So it's been a really great experience. Our organization really understands and harnesses what we can do to workflow any of those items that come our way. And in fact, as of 2 weeks ago, after 15 years of HR, my team was realigned under IT infrastructure.

Wow.

So I think we're doubling down on our investment for -- in my title, Enterprise Workflow. That's, that. That's the name of our game.

Yes. I mean, it's outstanding to see and even hearing about that. And I do think that this is a really important part of the story of what really sparked toward accelerated digital transformation for a lot of organizations. I believe that there are so many of us who have scars around COVID in various different ways and traumas that were in regard to that. But one of the things that we saw from an organizational perspective was a lot of companies were like, "Oh, shoot. We really have to automate. Something has to change." All of this is in these manual spreadsheets. And various teams like workplace, as an example, I see Tonya nodding her head, these people got scooped up in this world of this, right? It was no longer just IT infrastructure, because you had your workplace team banging on the door, needing to do things in regard to real estate and space management and capacity planning, let alone if there were any mandates. And we were focusing on providing the tools and technology, depending on what industry and depending on what factor you were in to make the office a magnet, not a mandate, that you would have all of the tools and the resources in there to be able to make workflow, whether you were from an HR perspective, whether you were from the facilities team perspective or that employee who was onboarding in the height of the pandemic or even onboarding tomorrow, as an example in regard to that. So it really pulls together the larger conversation that feels like it's happening around the fact that our teams, these departments, we do not actually work in silo. We really do. When you think about an employee starting on their first day, they have to get their laptop. So we're talking about hardware. Do you have a proper hardware like asset management solution that's in place? Do you have a unified portal for them to go and access this information, upload all of those various kinds of documentation? You set a communication platform. How are you communicating with these various employees, bridging these various cases between the teams that are there, so on, so on, so on, right? The journey continues further. So with that, we're going to reengage the audience again. And one of the questions that we want to ask to you all is what level of insights and analytics do you feel that you have to drive decisions around your employee experience? Are you getting that kind of information of which engagement platforms they might like to be on? Kelley, what are some of the other areas that you would highlight here for insights and analytics around EX?

I think getting a real-time feedback. So if we have the capability to do that is another really important thing. So how are employees actually engaging in applications, getting some insights on their productivity and adoption? Where are tickets showing up? And how seamless was directing them to what they needed to get done? Because remember, stepping back to what you said, Jordan, employee experience, we all own. No one department owns that. So when we -- when we're all sort of aligned around what is the employee experiencing, then all that feedback is important because our job is to reduce the friction. So understanding where friction is happening, where someone didn't get an answer, they needed or there was just the -- a stall on productivity is, back to what we said in the beginning, that's now eating into the amount of time it's taking someone to get something done. So any type of analytics, we can get. Remember what I said about personalization, also, how much is that? Or do we know -- what do we know about that person already so we can forward them to the right information.

Yes.

And not -- basic tools or little to no insight gives you a huge opportunity there.

100%. And this is a safe space, right, as we're talking about this. And to me, this really highlights the opportunity that's here. And we were in a conversation, actually the 4 of us, just the other day. And I was saying, we all are really trying to figure it out. It is changing in such real time, and it is information overload. There are so many tools and systems. So sharing this kind of knowledge and in these kinds of thought leadership settings is really impactful to understand what are other people doing, what are they thinking about and what areas of our organization and where do we start? And this basic combination, a point -- basic or combination of point tools, it sounds pretty common. We go back into that 9% of time transitioning between each system, if you know where to go, right? So little to no insight, 20%. And we've got a big group of folks that are here on this call today, and I won't list of organizational names, but it just really goes to show that this is a common challenge among so many of us. Kelley, I wanted to lean into something that you had said around multi generation in regard to employee experience. What are some of the things that you're thinking about when you say creating an employee experience that's attracting to multi generations and personalizing that experience? What do you mean when you say that?

Well, I think obviously, I spent a lot of time focused on the operating model. So where will the people strategy aligned to that, around skills and capabilities of people, because I thought that we could create more personalization and consumerization with that. But we could also point people towards the type of work that they wanted to do that they were capable of doing. We could communicate with those generations very differently. And so I spent the better part of my career on that problem statement. And so if we have the ability, back to also what Christopher said around creating a commonplace and trying to build culture digitally, is if we know people's preferences, if we understand their aspirations, if we can capture real-time feedback, then we can help them feel like they belong. I mean think about what it's like when you walk in -- I don't know if we have any people from Starbucks, but when you walk into Starbucks and they already know your name, they know your order, right, they recognize you, think about that way that, that makes you feel. And that was done through an application, right? That's kind of what people expect at work now, regardless of generation.

Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Christopher, she brought it back to you a little bit. Are you able to make some better-informed decisions using data for your employee experience? And if so, how is CommonSpirit Health doing that?

Yes, absolutely. We've been really lucky with the way that we designed our ServiceNow implementation. Being HR, we wanted to be able to bring in a lot of that demographic data into the user's profiles. Because, to your point, I really wanted to build a curated experience. Because of that type of demographic data, when I log in into Employee Central, I have an experience that says that I'm a leader, that I'm remote, that I was human resources, all of those types of things. I'm able to see things, access things that are curated specific to me. And that has really resonated with our employees. And there's new functionality that we're excited to be rolling out, like Manager Hub and those types of things, that really take that to the next level. But the out-of-the-box functionality that we have from ServiceNow with that demographic data and how we also are leveraging Google Analytics, we have wild, wild amounts of information to understand who's going where, so to the generational point. Who's reading the knowledge articles that tell you the answer to that versus who's just still putting the question in or wants to call in, all of those types of things. We're able to really understand our organization and the people that it's made up with using all this information in the platform.

Yes. Game changer to have that. So let's bring it back over to Tonya. And first, we're going to run a poll with our audience. And now this is leaning a little bit more to that workplace side, right? So employee experience, of course, is feeding into our larger workplace experience. So we're curious of what level of reporting do you have to help drive decisions around workplace services, your real estate investment, the use of office space, a couple of recent innovations with workplace service delivery. We released a scenario stack planner, also something called Workplace Central, which is a single one-stop shop for these workplace managers to view their workplace maintenance plans, to do things like their contracts. So that could look like things like leases that are within the space, also to manage space scenarios, be able to push those out. And then, of course, all of that feeds back into the larger employee experience. So what phases our reservable? What are those indoor mapping experience? Any guidelines around visitors? How that pushes through into the larger employee center or Employee Central, like you call it at CommonSpirit Health. So just curious, from the pulse of the group versus their employee experience side, how much do you have around your workplace real estate workplace services? All right, let's go ahead and do it. Okay. So interesting. We've got 30% with an advanced understanding with reporting and metrics, which is actually phenomenal in the standpoint of that. But when you look and you see almost 70% of the rest of us, we've got basic, we have combination of point tools. Tonya, what does this make you think of when you're seeing the poll coming back from our audience?

Yes. I mean I think definitely -- yes, I want to talk to those who have had advanced understanding for sure. But the challenge that we have is what is the purpose of the office, right, as we move forward. And real estate, being your kind of -- you spend your second largest cost to an organization -- and again, before COVID everything really focused around that place. And you have really good ideas of where you are hiring, right? And you had the strategy because you were hiring people to be in certain places and be together. And through COVID and flexibility, we're now being able to find the great things, the right talent, the best talent, wherever they are. But that makes my job to plan where and when we need space really difficult because I can't turn space on tomorrow, right, not and have that full curated branded experience, I can just like -- yes, it's not like offices aren't pop-ups, right? It would be great if they were. And so that is our challenge now, is really understanding what our employees need. Who is coming to the office? Similar to what Christopher was saying around who's reading these articles, right? Who's -- how are people consuming data? What can I learn from that? And then how does that help me shape what I do and where I put my resources, the same thing in the physical place and in the services we provide. So we measure the value of what we're doing and ensuring we're hitting our targets, what we're providing is meaningful for people, that they know how to take advantage of it and participate. And then what isn't working? And the things that aren't working, we can stop that investment, not put that time and energy there and really invest in the things that are meaningful, that engage our employees, that help them increase their productivity, at the same time of improving the bottom line for our company, right? I can't control sales, but I control operating costs. So when I am being fiscally responsible, how do I make sure that I'm meeting my customer needs, right, and what they want in the space, at the same time doing my financial responsibility to the company to ensure that we're investing in the right place. Turning real estate on takes a bit. Turning it off isn't just easy as everybody thinks it is. I don't just go and say, "Oh, sorry, Lamar, I don't want that anymore." There's a huge cost to getting rid of real estate, right, or remodeling it all the time. So flexibility in how we design our workplaces and how those things will flex and change, because the only constant is change, right?

Right.

Even if I remodel reconfigure my office today, how somebody needs to use it next week, next year, in the next 10 years is going to keep changing. So we got to think about what are our tethers, what are the must-haves and then how do we create the flexibility around that. And with that comes the technology aspect of it. And to your point, and I think, Kelley, you said it earlier, no single one of us is responsible for employee experience. We all are. And we firmly believe that, that happy, engaged, productive employee who is living their best life and in turn, helping us be the best company that we can be in the best products and services we provide sits in the middle of a perfect triangle and balance and partnership between people, place and technology. So really trying to understand that. And again, what is the purpose of the office? And that's going to be different for every company and in different locations around the world. It's not even a one-size-fits-all within a company. But my sales team, how they work, how they come together is different than my people teams, is different than my technology teams, is different than my product teams. And so really being able to get in and understand that and create what feels like a very personalized and curated experience when you're in the office as well, without having to employ 1,000 little people to be in the background changing the stage all the time. We can't afford that either, right? So it's that changed and thinking about how do we utilize our people and our experiences, how do we automate things that are repetitive, right, that can be self-service and get that information to people easily and up level the other talent that we have to create a more consumer-grade experience, to create more concierge like experiences and make it when you come to the office, it does feel unique. It feels like that Starbucks. It feels like you're walking in. And I'm saying, hey, Jordan, great to see you. Hey, I know your meeting is on the third floor. Stop by the break room. We've got doughnuts on your way in or whatever that may be, right, to help connect you. Or you come into the office, and wouldn't it be great if it recognizes -- you walk in the office, and it recognizes that you're here today, and it knows that, hey, you like yoga, right? And what is it were to tell you? "Hey, Jordan, guess what? We've got a yoga session at 2 today. You look free. Calendar looks free. You want a slot? Right? And if we were able to take all that goodness and feed it to you for just the things that you want, not everything because, good lord, that would be like shut it off and a lot of the pings, but meaningful, purposeful things for you. And I think a lot of us right now are understanding how the office is being used. And then we're saying, look at the trend and plan for, we're really working with the product team and whatever you think about this concept of presence. And how do I know the intent where I'm going to get a lot more value? Isn't by just guessing based on historical, that's great. What if I have the ability to have the intent. You Plan. People plan every day. When you're going to go on vacation, you want your favorite restaurant, right? People will plan that. So how do we make these offices the destination? How do we understand the intent of our employees coming in? How do we help them share that with other people? So that when people are making the effort to come to the office, spending that valuable time that they got back during COVID on the road to go somewhere, why do you do that? Why do you drive an hour to your favorite restaurant? Why do you fly, right, 20 hours to a destination location or what have you. So we can think about for the office and make sure that when people are making that investment to do that travel there, when they're there and they're getting all the value out of that and then some.

Right. What exchange of value, Tonya, you and I talked about that once before is so important because it can't be a one to many going forward, right? We had office space. It was defined by our culture, et cetera, and there are people that made decisions about that office space. But now I think the pressure is on to define various personas, very experienced, varied experiences that work in the future, going further out to draw people back in a hybrid workplace environment back to the office. What is the value to them in terms of their productivity, the human connections they're going to make? Does it feel personalized to them? And that will be our challenge in the future.

Absolutely. -- agreed in its entirety. And I feel like there's also so much antidotal data. Like, oh, no one's in the cafeteria at this time, and it's whatever the pulse of the Street actually is. So at companies like CommonSpirit Health, how are you looking at actual data beyond the hallway discussions to shape strategies like things like what Tonya is talking about? Or if Kelley was bringing her entire team on site, how is she making sure that it has the proper event space and can host that or requesting those services? So how is CommonSpirit Health taking a second look at what in-person looks and feels like?

Yes, I wish we were further along. The reality is CommonSpirit Health, the nature of our business is health care. So if you think of our locations, it's not just an office building. We have mega hospitals in some scenarios, million square foot in some scenarios. So we are looking to apply to leverage technology to give us better visibility into the usage, the utilization of that space. If we have a hospital and we have a request to build another building near it, right? Before we're going to go off and build that, we want to better understand what current space is in that hospital. If we have people sitting at desks in a hospital, but we want to build a clinical setting, it makes sense to kind of move those resources around and make it a better patient experience. So we're looking to use ServiceNow for this. We have a pilot, actually live now, that's helping us understand the usage of that space. Our clinical settings are a little bit different. But when I think about our national offices or our corporate offices, the shift has occurred. These places are no longer a place for you to have a designated office or queue before, something like that. This is where we come together to collaborate. So we want to use ServiceNow to understand the usage, to be able to understand if we do a wellness room, are people using it? If we do a yoga room, are people using it? Should it be better repurposed as another collaboration space? I think the other thing that, I think, is really important with that is, Tonya, to your point, on planning, right? I have a visit to the San Francisco office. I know that my hotel will give me a bike. I can take a bike. It can be healthy instead of taking an Uber, that type of a thing, but where can I park it? If I know that I'm going to our San Francisco office, I can go out to that digital space and start to answer some of the questions before I get them. I know that I can reserve a bike locker. I know that we have a couple of preferred hotels that are nearby that are walking distance, maybe some restaurant recommendations, all of the things that end up as kind of chatter, like I am your manager. Hey, you've been to San Francisco before. Where should I stay, all these types of things. it allows you to be self-sufficient. You can go out and get all of this information. So we're really excited to leverage the functionality. We're just not there yet. We're in that pilot, doing some shifting of our real estate and the configuration of those offices. But next time we talk about this, we'll have data.

Yes. And my mind goes, Tonya, this is the perfect opportunity to use the boat analogy. Our analogy that, yes, we may be on the same water, but we're not actually in the same boat. I kept hearing that boat overall. We're all in the same boat. And like we're all the same ocean. Some of those were on cruisers and others are there like hanging on for their life and, right? And again, it's not a one-size-fits-all, right? What I loved about COVID is we really opened up that ability to really share, right? A lot of things we kept to ourselves and all this information was like our secret sauce. And I think now we've really built this kind of in the industry, but also cost functionally within our company to lean in on each other, look at every aspect. Every move we make in real estate, there's a legal implication for people. And they're hiring contracts in, in Europe, and they're so involved. There are so many things, and it's even more critical today that we are locked step with our legal partners, with our communications teams, with our DT partners, with our people teams and others to really ensure that we're thinking about the holistic employee experience, everything that touches them and how we work together to create that seamless frictionless experience, regardless of where you are, and I think is of our biggest challenges today. And it's exciting, it's terrifying, it's exhausting all at the same time. But this is kind of one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, right, that when I'm 80 and old and gray, which probably is closer than I want to admit, right, maybe my kids are talking about this and learning about this in history. And I'd be like, when I was your age, right or whatever, but it's an exciting time and you think have so much opportunity in front of us that is incredible.

Yes. And it's a big boat to turn and not to the standpoint is that I think that everyone should feel encouraged in this conversation and the open to having conversations, I also view as a really great way to create community and culture and organizations. Suddenly, the legal team and workplace team are working together. Suddenly, HR teams and workplace teams are teaming up because they're both reporting into the office of the CFO or the COO, depending on organizational structure, or the CHRO, we all have different landscapes of how this funnels up. And so it's a really encouraging time and it's a process. It takes time, and it starts with just getting in all this good kind of information. So with that, there's been such impactful conversation across this group. I really want to thank everyone for just the participation and sharing this with our audience that's here and with us today. And with this little bit of remaining time that we have, I wanted to do just a quick lightning round with our speakers today. And that's if you had one key piece of guidance, and we know it's not your only piece of guidance, but just one piece of guidance for your audience today around their employee experience or around their workplace transformation, what would you share? And Kelley, let's start with you.

I would say digital transformation is a journey and employee experiences owned by the entire enterprise. You can figure out how to start small on something that's high impact and lower complexity, breaking down your employees into personas and thinking about their journeys, what you can automate to free up time that shouldn't be wasted on low-level tasks and reduce friction in their daily work. So that's my advice, start small, take it as a journey.

Okay. I love that. Continuing on the journey over to Christopher. I think maybe Christopher is on some video issues, or audio issues. I'll jump in right now just in case we get Christopher back. Jordan, I think, yes, piggybacking off of what Kelley said, I think it's experiment. Don't be afraid to experiment. We're going to get some things wrong. This is an opportunity to learn and grow and share and reach out, ask for help, share what you thought going. We're going to be better together. This is a perfect opportunity for us to crowd-source ideas and solutions and share together because we'll win together.

Agreed. Agreed.

I think we have Christopher back.

Do we have Christopher back?

I'm back. I don't know what happened. I apologize.

This is the world.

I think my key thing is that if you were put into a position where you have responsibility and employee experience, remind yourself every single day that you don't know the answers. Many of the things that I thought I had my finger right on the answer, I knew it. When I talk to our employees, and I like to do that very often, I find out something completely different or it's evolving faster than I realize. So you don't know the answers, ask questions, listen and take action from them.

Yes. Yes, agreed on that. Agreed on that. Okay. And I think we have just a couple of minutes. So I am going to hop into the Q&A. And Kelley, I think this is kind of a combination actually of everyone. We got a question that was talking about how do you see the use of streaming video as relevant to the employee experience? And they're talking about access to things like all hands, things like town halls, maybe it training, maybe its compliance materials, whoever wants to go ahead and take an answer at that.

Well, I do think video is very engaging and in fact, could be very interesting. You can do sort of person on the street where you can actually stream what employees are posting as well. But using that employee central or employee center. Certainly, with ServiceNow, we have the capability to use video. It's very engaging content. You can get a lot of messaging across. You can make leaders seem a lot more personable and human through video. So I think that the bite-sized messaging and information is kind of what people have an appetite for today. So I think we're going to see it used quite a bit.

Yes. I agree with that. I think, Jordan, as well, I think we've have seen as some leaders doing their updates in a video format versus trying to schedule a meeting where you're set to a specific time and you're trying to deal with a global team. And so by being able to kind of do that video and publish it, people can consume it at their leisure. They can rewind, they can what-have-you. And then you can use that forum to do Q&A, and everybody gets the goodness in that versus what may feel like a digital inequity, whether I'm in the room or I'm on Zoom or something like that. So I do see that being a tool. And to Kelley's point, this ability to say like, hey, instead of hour-long trainings, how do I get people 1- to 2-minute things in a very detailed way where they can jump to exactly what they need. I got this far in the process, but I need this, I can jump right to it versus trying to go where was that Zoom meeting? And can I go find it again and pass forwarding through? And so again, just that ease of how do we help get people the information they need very quickly so they can move forward and reduce that friction in their day, I think, is going to be huge.

Yes, agreed. Absolutely. Okay. We're going to -- Kelley, I'm going to go to you and maybe Christopher, each about 30 to 60 seconds. And the other question is, how have you brought together different teams and departments to help achieve that transformation? So I'm assuming this question is these departments aren't connected yet, a little bit of friction there.

Yes. So I think sometimes when you take an activity like onboarding, for example, where you know, depending even by country, there is legal that has to be involved, there's HR, there's finance, there's facilities and IT. It is a perfect example of how you can manage that workflow with a bunch of departments relatively unseen in the background, but very well coordinated, all after one mission, a better employee experience. So onboarding, I think that's one of the things at ServiceNow, we've tackled and provided, I think, for many of our customers a much better experience for their employees.

And Christopher, with Employee Central, it sounds like you've also brought together so many of these requests and services. So how did you help to achieve that transformation of getting all those teams to work together?

Yes. I mean, I think the major realization was that everything is connected, everything that we do, tugs and pools on other teams, other functions, other goals, those types of things. So I think especially through the pandemic, us all coming together and working on things together was really the secret sauce.

Love to hear it. So with that, thank you to our audience for being here and being with us today. Kelley, thank you for the breadth of this conversation; Tonya, for sharing your insights and expertise; and Christopher, for joining us today from CommonSpirit Health. On behalf of the audience, we all truly thank you for this time today. So with...

Thank you.

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Thank you.