How Freshworks runs HR like a service organization

Johanna Jackman has spent her career running people organizations at scale. Which means that she has watched firsthand how disconnects between HR and IT play out directly on the employee experience.

Until recently, those two functions operated in separate worlds with their own systems and workflows, and even in their definitions of “service.” This friction plays out across key moments, such as onboarding or relocating, where a single employee event touches HR, IT, finance, and facilities but the systems were never built to talk to each other. That's changing as more companies pull internal functions onto a single service platform, applying the same logic that made IT ticketing work to the messier, more human business of employee requests.

“At a certain scale, the challenge is no longer just defining employee experience, it’s operationalizing it,” says Jackman, chief people officer at Freshworks. “We reached a point where the existing model was no longer sustainable, and we had to rethink how work actually flows across the company.”

Earlier this year, Freshworks’ HR team doubled down on its move to Freshservice as part of a broader push to consolidate how work flows across departments, with a reimplementation of the platform. In a recent conversation, Jackman spoke about how things have changed for HR and employees, and the role HR plays in AI adoption.  

What was the impetus for moving HR onto Freshservice—was something not working, or were there capabilities you wanted that you didn't have?

Johanna Jackman: It was a bit of both. As organizations scale, the operational complexity of running the company grows much faster than the systems underneath it. The friction rarely shows up as a single process breaking. Instead, it appears in the everyday moments employees care about most, such as starting a job, changing roles, relocating, or requesting support.

Those moments require coordination across teams like HR, IT, finance, and facilities. When those teams operate in separate systems without shared visibility, the coordination falls back on humans. The people team ends up chasing requests and manually connecting steps across the organization. That is not where human talent creates the most value.

Moving our people organization onto Freshservice means the system handles coordination and visibility so our teams can focus on leadership, talent, and building a high-performing organization. 

How do you track progress in HR service?

What I pay closest attention to is the experience employees are having, not the mechanics behind the system. I spend a lot of time looking at the patterns and the service metrics behind the scenes. I am a bit obsessed with things like resolution time, request volume, and where work is getting stuck, because they tell you very quickly where friction still exists. If I'm personally jumping into the system to open a ticket, something is probably broken.

A good example is employment documentation requests, things like verification letters or compensation confirmations. Historically, those often arrived through email or Slack, and someone had to manually track down the information. Now those requests enter the system and trigger a workflow that routes them to the right team automatically. Multiply that across thousands of requests and the difference becomes meaningful. Employees know where to go, requests are visible, and nothing disappears into someone's inbox. This is one example, but the broader shift is moving repetitive HR work into self-service and automation. At scale, that fundamentally changes both efficiency and employee trust.

If a prospective customer's CHRO called you and said "convince me," what's the honest version of that pitch?

I would probably start by saying, "I get it. I've been in your shoes." In many organizations, onboarding, internal requests, and employee lifecycle events require HR, IT, finance, and other departments to manually coordinate every step. Messages get sent, tasks get chased, and someone is always following up. Enterprise service management moves that coordination into the platform itself. Workflows route automatically, teams are notified when their part begins, and progress is visible across the process. The efficiency matters, but the real impact is what it unlocks. When operational coordination becomes easier, the people team can focus where it creates the most leverage: developing leaders, shaping organizations, and helping teams perform at their best.

Read also: How AI is moving service delivery beyond IT

What role does HR play in company-wide AI adoption?

We've been driving enablement and behavior change inside organizations for decades. Our people team leaned into AI early: We ran the first AI hackathon at Freshworks, several months before engineering held theirs. What we learned, and what many organizations are discovering, is that the biggest barrier to AI adoption is rarely the technology. It is behavior change. We need our workforce to challenge how things get done, challenge the handoffs, and challenge our roles and responsibilities. Helping teams rethink workflows, redesign roles, and build confidence using these tools is fundamentally an enablement challenge, and that sits squarely within the capabilities people teams have built for years. We’re now starting to apply AI within these workflows to reduce manual steps, improve response times, and make employee support more proactive. The next step for us is moving toward agentic AI-driven employee support, where systems don’t just respond to requests, but take action across systems.

AI should not be seen as a feature, it's something we have to engage with every single day, the way we use our mobile phones or the internet. Too many people are still thinking of it as a feature set versus an autonomous workflow.

Beyond efficiency, what does good HR service delivery look like in two or three years?

In my view, we are still early in this shift.

Efficiency is the least interesting outcome. The real opportunity is redesigning how work happens across the organization. Many operational tasks that consume time today will increasingly be handled by systems: routing requests, answering recurring questions, assembling information, surfacing insights.

In the future, employees won’t just raise requests. Systems will resolve them end to end, orchestrating workflows, data, and actions without manual coordination. This is where AI begins to move from assistive to truly operational.

What remains is the work that requires judgment, context, and relationships, such as helping a leader navigate a complex organizational decision, coaching a manager through a difficult situation, or supporting employees as they think about the next step in their careers.

That is the workplace we want Freshworks to be known for, where technology removes friction, leadership raises the bar, and talented people can do the best work of their careers.

Hear more from Johanna Jackman on May 14 at Refresh: “AI Agents in Action: The New Operating Model for IT and HR Service Management.” Register now!