In today’s digital world, a great employee experience means employees have the tools they need to get their work done from anywhere. That’s why we’re introducing the Employee Data Model, a new set of standard objects and fields to accelerate employee application development.
The Employee Data Model is available today within the Work.com Workplace Command Center and enables you to capture and centralize important employee information to help guide your business through reopening. What’s more, since this is a new standard data model, you can improve the employee experience beyond reopening by building apps for any employee need. Since building employee apps often requires integrating with HRIS or HCM systems, we’ve designed this new data model to meet Cloud Information Model (CIM) standards in order to help simplify integration and interoperability with the core systems that house your employee data.
What’s included in the Employee Data Model and why it matters
We built the Employee Data Model to capture the essential employee information required to build apps. With the launch of Work.com, we expanded the objects in our initial data model to enable us to capture employee the data most relevant to reopening businesses. These new objects include:
- Employee: Represents an employee within a company or organization
- Internal Organization Unit: Represents an organization that an employee belongs to
- Crisis: Represents a major crisis event that affects an Employee in an Internal Organization Unit
- Employee Crisis Assessment: Represents a crisis assessment of an Employee
Each of these objects is available through Salesforce SOAP, Bulk, and Streaming APIs. You can configure them to your needs by adding custom fields, adding automation with Flows and Process Builder, customizing with Apex code, and more.
The Employee Data Model combined with some existing standard objects make up the Workplace Command Center Data Model:
As with the rest of the Salesforce Platform, we will continue to release regular updates to the Employee Data Model. We’ll be expanding the data model to include more objects, and we’ll build new features leveraging these Employee Data Model objects. This means you’ll get faster time to value and continuous innovation with this out-of-the-box data model versus building employee apps from scratch with custom objects.
Apps that can be built with the Employee Data Model
When it comes to improving the employee experience with apps, the possibilities are endless!
One common use case that applies to any business is building an employee onboarding app. An employee onboarding app can be used to streamline and automate common onboarding tasks, such as allocating equipment, assigning training modules, sharing communication channels and important documents, and so on. Another common use case is building an internal employee help desk. This is where employees can get their common HR, IT, and facilities questions answered both through self-service and ticketing.
How to get access to the Employee Data Model
The Employee Data Model is Generally Available today and is included with Workplace Command Center. The Employee Data Model can be accessed through a development org so you can start developing apps to improve the employee experience. Learn more about how to set up Workplace Command Center to use the Employee Data Model.
About the author
Alessandro Yamhure is a Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce where he focuses on Work.com and Salesforce Platform. He’s currently working on the Work.com Data Model and Workplace Command Center. He has been building workplace and employee solutions for the last five years.