The way we help each other inside of organizations is changing. With internal team collaboration so critical to success, how teams service and provide support to others in the organization is becoming a new way of approaching work. In our latest blog on this topic, we found that 50% of organizations have adopted or are planning to provide service outside of IT.
For example, let’s look at Human Resources at Atlassian and learn how they were able to scale their team and provide self service to anyone in the business by adopting Jira Service Desk. Meet Sandi Kochhar, the Head of People Operations and Shared Services, and learn about her story in setting up a service desk for her team to service the entire business.
Sandi’s challenge
Sandi joined Atlassian over two years ago to open the Manila HR Shared Services Office and now runs all aspects of People Operations which includes new hire onboarding, promotions and raises, or anything that Atlassian threw her way. No small task, but we had a feeling Sandi would be up to it.
When she first arrived two years ago, she realized she had to figure out a way find a scaleable solution for supporting global HR operations from Manila.
But Atlassian wasn’t going to wait around for her to figure that out. Instead, the company grew and grew and grew. In the past few years, Atlassian’s employee growth has skyrocketed to a total of 1,500 employees across seven global offices. As Atlassian grew, Sandi’s team was fielding more and more requests.
Atlassian has seven offices located in San Francisco, Austin, Sydney, Amsterdam, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Japan.
Sandi knew, however, that a lot of the requests were repetitive. Employees had similar questions including how to onboard a new hire, visa requests, and employee changes and transfers.
Furthermore, the requests were coming in from all different channels, such as email, chats, or even employees approaching her desk. The solution at the time was to email an alias that sent an email to the entire people operations team to process the request. When employees approached the team with requests, they often weren’t providing all of the necessary or correct information right off the bat. This created email chains being created between the People Operations team and employees. Sandi needed a solution that would standardize these requests and introduce a more streamlined process for the team and give employees full visibility to track their request.
On top of that, as a manager, Sandi needed something that would help her and her Team Leads manage a global team across San Francisco, Sydney, and the Philippines.
Setting up their service desk
To address these challenges, Sandi decided to investigate the benefits of having Jira Service Desk for her team. Sandi had seen how other business teams within Atlassian were setting up their service desks.
She needed something that would help in the following ways:
- Get her small and busy team to create means for Atlassians to provide all the information required to process a request at the onset
- Find a way for her team to easily share work and pick up for another team member if one of them was swamped or on vacation
- Enable employees to have complete visibility on the status of a request
- Have an easy way to document approvals and search all of their information for auditors
Sandi needed flexibility over everything else. She needed something that would work for her team from day one. If it was more hindrance than help, it just wasn’t worth it.
After the HR team set up their service desk, they had a one-stop-shop for employees to file HR requests. They started off with a catalogue for 30 common requests across the business.
See how an employee can fill out a service request using Atlassian’s HR service desk.
Empowering a team
After getting everything all set up, Sandi and her team were able to field service requests from 1,500 employees across seven offices globally. They resolved about 800 tickets each month with an average of only 24 hours to resolve each one!
But ultimately, it wasn’t just about being ninjas in resolving tickets: The People Operations team felt empowered to not only handle the sudden growth of Atlassian, but also proactively provide service to anyone who needs it.
Two years later, Sandi is excited to be part of a high performing team and show off everything her team has accomplished.
“Now, within a few minutes, I can see what’s it going on within my team, who’s working on what, how many requests are backed up, any deadlines close to being missed. I have a snapshot of my operations at my fingertips.”- Sandi Kochhar, Head of People Operations
If your IT isn’t using Jira Service Desk yet, check it out. It’s your team’s one-stop-shop for service requests, incident management, SLAs, and of course, knowledge management.
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