Facing multiple challenges, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) made the move to a digital platform-based system, enabling better service, said a senior agency official.
Lindsey Willis, division chief of the Systems Management Division within the Office of Human Capital and Talent Management at USAID, described how the move to the new Launchpad platform enabled her team to provide better service to agency employees during Monday’s ServiceNow Federal Summit.
Launchpad “is our employee portal, where employees can submit requests and we have transparency into them on the HR side, no matter who is in the office,” she said.
Through the new system, employees can communicate with HR specialists, help shift workloads effectively across the HR department, and allows employees to view data from the agency’s systems of record, among other tasks.
The move to the new platform also helped ensure the data quality of HR systems by allowing employees to correct the record.
“We brought it all in one place so we can share the responsibility of the data being correct with the employee. This is not just HR’s job to keep it right all the time – the employee has a responsibility as well,” said Willis.
Another part of creating the new platform was adding a knowledge base to answer commonly asked questions from employees. Willis noted that there is also an internal knowledge base, and the HR staff monitors the most visited articles and the average star rating of each article to assess areas that may need more clarification for employees.
Launched in conjunction with the USAID IT department, the Launchpad portal has already left an impact, making the issuing of cables three times faster on average.