Josh Novelle

Director, Digital Learning Solutions, Warner Music Group

Supernova Award Category: 
Future of Work - Employee Experience
The Organization: 

With a legacy of over 200 years, Warner Music Group (WMG) is home to an unparalleled family of creative artists, songwriters, and companies that are moving culture across the globe. At the core of Warner Music Group are four of the most iconic companies in history: Atlantic, Elektra, Parlophone, and Warner Records. They are joined by renowned labels such as Asylum, Big Beat, Canvasback, FFRR, Nonesuch, Reprise, Rhino, Roadrunner, Sire, Spinnin’, Warner Classics, Warner Music Nashville, and many more. Warner Chappell Music - which traces its origins back to 1811 - is one of the world's leading music publishers, with a catalogue of over 1.4 million copyrights that spans every musical genre, from the standards of the Great American Songbook to the biggest hits of our time.

The Problem: 

WMG has grown primarily through M&A and partnerships, which has led to a fragmented digital ecosystem with many duplications across various teams and departments. We wanted to create an offering that helped our employees navigate this, so they can focus on managing some of the biggest artists in the world.

Most notably, we had a big issue with digital adoption – people didn’t know how to use the tools at their disposal and some didn’t even know which tools they had access to. 

With over 5,500 employees, we wanted to provide better self-service support, foster better data integrity to reduce data cleanup and create accurate systems of record, and get better ROI from our applications by understanding where users are struggling and drive proper usage.

Our WalkMe partnership grew out of L&D– and is now considered one of our employee experience platforms. Using both the WMG Assistant (WalkMe Workstation) and the browser extensions, we unify (and simplify!) the WMG universe for our global team members.

The Solution: 

WalkMe was one of our first truly cross-functional deployment projects. We all wanted to empower our people, through tech enablement, to work more efficiently and to make smarter decisions – enabling us to look across the entire ecosystem and spot opportunities to reduce administration and automate common actions at scale. Linking these two strategies has changed the way our teams work together.

Our solution was WMG Assistant, which uses WalkMe Workstation technology. It connects our enterprise applications, so employees have one, unified interface where they can ask questions and perform actions – without needing to know which apps do what. 

Additionally, WalkMe is the first technology that enables us to get consistent analytics from across our tech stack, democratising data access and empowering everyone to speak the same language and show quantifiable ROI for the organisation.

The Results: 

For employees, WMG Assistant acts as their guide to our complex digital ecosystems, saving duplication – as well as time and money. Within the first three months of launching the WMG Assistant (WalkMe Workstation), we had over 450,000 sessions with usage from all around the world. 

We then looked at employee efficiency (“where are systems and processes getting in the way of our people?”): If we look at Workday, our HCM, we found that employees spent an average of 31 mins per month in the system, doing basic things like booking annual leave, managing their goals, etc. Using WalkMe’s auto-step capability, we were able to cut that time in half *and* increase the amount of people following the processes.

We didn’t have a digital adoption strategy prior to our WalkMe partnership, and this project’s success inspired many business areas to take notice of what we’re offering. 

Historically, HR and L&D are viewed as cost centres, but that perception is quickly changing as our leadership is using WalkMe Insights to inform investment decisions.

Previously, our product owners would spend at least 1 day a week per month on basic “how do I and where do I?” questions. Now, they attack these using WalkMe and our digital adoption strategy – and are already seeing significant reductions in basic problem solving

Lastly, we are the first “HR Project” with ROI signoff from our CFO.

Metrics: 

We’re still early in our WalkMe journey, but the successes we’ve seen are outstanding, and we are having areas of the business collaborate like never before.

Very simply, people are openly speaking about employee experience, making sure that we have a voice at the table, and ensuring that everything we end up building is done in a manner where we can measure and assess the results (and pivot the approach if we need!)

Seeing our employees actually taking to this tool and using it as part of their day to day work is amazing.The assistant has been used more than a million times this calendar year alone, which is pretty incredible for an organisation of under six thousand employees, this can be from basics like getting their payslips, all the way through to understanding our artist streaming data and building custom API’s. It has provided users with clarity on how to find applications, which has inspired us to target our entire tier 1 support model around its automation. Another result is a massive reduction in how long our employees have to spend within their enterprise applications, some applications have seen a 50% reduction in usage. HR task time has been cut by 50% with the automation of WMG Assistant.

The Technology: 

We used WalkMe Workstation, which acts as a central hub to unify employee needs like information discovery, workflows, organisational communication, and application usage in a single UI. We branded this “WMG Assistant.” We use WalkMe across a large part of our business technology including HR, IT, Finance and more. For the first time we’re seeing user behaviour across our entire technology landscape in one place.

Disruptive Factor: 

WMG Assistant has completely transformed how employees ask questions and complete administrative tasks. Instead of spending valuable time trying to figure out where and how to get these tasks done, employees have a concierge-like experience on their desktop whenever they need it. It has freed employees to focus on what they love to do at work, while simultaneously boosting data quality and analytics for our leadership teams. 

WalkMe was the first technology that allows us to get consistent analytics from across all of our tech stack, so everyone across the organisation can speak the same data language, get visibility into application usage, and measure holistic,quantifiable ROI. Strategically, that was a game-changer for us - an organisation that grows through M&A, where we consistently inherit different platforms, terminology, and metrics. 

In many ways, WMG Assistant has unified our company to be “one WMG” in the way we learn, use our technology resources, and understand and communicate across the organisation.

Shining Moment: 

I brought WalkMe to the organisation. I wanted to take an approach to training that inspired people  – and now we’re fully enterprise, and my team has grown from just me to 4 and more to come! I plan to build on the success we’ve had with WalkMe and digital adoption to date, both to provide the best possible employee experience and to expand the key partnerships that it helped solidify.

About Warner Music Group

With a legacy extending back over 200 years, Warner Music Group today is home to an unparalleled family of creative artists, songwriters, and companies that are moving culture across the globe.