Baylor University has found great success in leveraging Oracle Journeys for demographic reporting.

Demographic reporting enables organizations to demonstrate compliance with specific requirements by providing data on workforce composition and practices. As a federal contractor, Baylor University is required to administer the self-identification survey during the onboarding process and re-survey all current faculty and staff every five years.

Recently, the university launched an Oracle Journey to survey the population and gather data on equal employment opportunity as mandated for federal reporting purposes.

There are five key benefits of Oracle Journeys.

1. Journeys provide personalized employee experiences. Through individualized, step-by-step coaching, Journeys help people to succeed at work while making it simple for them to complete journeys toward their personal and professional progress.
2. Journeys simplify the complex. By providing contextual statistics, training, and instructions throughout their guided digital journey, you can assist employees in making educated decisions.
3. Journeys unify the employee experience. You can give the right experiences depending on a worker’s particular circumstances by using a single source of people data throughout the entire organization.
4. Journeys can apply to the entire enterprise. Extending guided journeys helps advise employees on contract management, position management, finances, and project management.
5. Journeys can be extended beyond Oracle. Connecting to external applications can help you make the most of journeys while maintaining a uniform user experience and protecting employee data.

Self ID at Baylor University

The primary purpose of Baylor University’s Self Identification project and implantation of Journeys for demographic reporting was to satisfy federal requirements. Although the federal requirements were a major catalyst for the project, the team wanted to move beyond the basics to bring meaning and intentionality to the process for their employees. To that end, they scheduled the Self ID experience around National Hire a Veteran Day and the 33^rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. As a university, they wanted to acknowledge these days and celebrate a workplace inclusive of diverse perspectives.

As an Equal Employment Opportunity employer, Baylor University is dedicated to attracting and retaining a diverse workforce. In support of their effort and to comply with requirements as a federal contractor, they invited employees to self-identify their sex, race, ethnicity, disability status, and veteran status. Their email to employees explained that Self ID is voluntary and confidential. It would contribute to reporting capabilities, workforce transparency, and DEI initiatives.

At the end of the email, they highlighted the steps to completing the Self ID process as well as pointing out the different ways to begin the Journey. Employees could click the bell icon within the system or utilize the custom embedded links that were in the email. The team would follow up with employees who didn’t complete the Journey.

Checklist Template Setup

Below is the basic checklist for setting up an Oracle Journey, which Baylor utilized to implement Journeys for demographic reporting. Baylor University set the category type to Person. The specific eligibility profile was Self ID Journey Faculty & Staff. The Journey was launched on Ignite—Baylor’s Oracle system—July 17, 2023. While you can trigger the Journey by an action name, Baylor left this blank because it would be manually assigned to individuals.

Note: To manually assign the Journey to multiple employees, you have to turn on the profile setting.

As for task setup, Baylor had three tasks for the Journey. Only one of these was required. The information-only tasks are external links to give employees more details surrounding the campaign.

Below is the setup for the message that employees see as soon as they click into a journey. There’s a title, welcome text, and optional images and logos. Take note of the alert template in the example, which is set to Notify Assignee of Self-ID Journey. This template is how Baylor University created custom notifications.

In terms of items that can be better utilized in Journeys, the What’s Happening area is an opportunity to leverage the events and happenings subsection of the Journey template.

Custom Notifications

Alert Composer allows you to access custom notifications. There is a default alert that gets sent out—housed within the bell notification—to let the recipient know that the Journey has been assigned. If you’d prefer this go to the mail list, there are EL expressions to use. You’ll drop the EL expression, found on Oracle docs or white pages, into the setup. This automatically routes to the email that the employee has on file.

Note: Oracle uses the terms Checklists and Journeys interchangeably.

The communication methods for the Demographic Reporting Journey included both the bell method and email. The custom notification template sets the intro to the recipient’s username.  The Journey name is embedded, and the purple Journey link is a deep link to the Journey, itself. The employee can either click that link, go to the Journey tab, or go to the bell notification to begin the Journey.

In terms of keeping the system connected, the askHR email address listed is a deep link back to the help desk for answers to questions or solutions to issues.

Additionally, here are Oracle Guided Learning hotspots that can further track how users are engaging with the Journey. This gives data into which tasks are being lingered on or if users tend to click out of the Journey and come back later. It also gives data on the completion rate of the Journey, itself.

Key Takeaways

Baylor has had success using Oracle Journeys for demographic reporting to comply with federal requirements as well as assist with their DEI initiatives.  For a demo of the Demographic Reporting Journey, watch this recording from Cloud HCM Week from 25:25 to 30:36.

For more Journey’s demos check out the Journey’s Demo Center and the Quest Content Library. To connect with other Cloud HCM users like those at Baylor, consider joining Quest’s Cloud HCM Community group.

For more sessions like this one, consider attending a Cloud HCM Quest Event.