How Vuori manages the employee lifecycle with Jira Service Management
Plus, new HR service management capabilities so your team can get started now
This blog is adapted from the Team ’25 session, Delivering exceptional employee experiences: How Vuori approaches employee lifecycle management with Jira Service Management
For a while, we’ve noticed teams relying on Jira Service Management for HR use cases from onboarding to offboarding and everything in between. Our customer community inspires us, so we’ve invested in shipping improvements for HR teams so they can be more productive and deliver exceptional employee experiences.
Recently, I presented a Team ’25 session on HRSM with Alex Stillings, the Director of Workplace Technology at Vuori Clothing. Alex is a true Jira Service Management power-user. If you need proof, he presented at Atlassian’s conference in 2015 (then called Summit).
Alex’s work to implement Jira Service Management as an employee service management system at Vuori is pretty impressive, and I wanted to be sure to share that story and how we’re making the systems he implemented accessible to even more customers.
Vuori’s lofty onboarding aspiration: “perfection”
Take a moment to think of your first experiences at a new job. How was the onboarding? Were you set up for success? The way your first day goes can set the tone for your entire work experience. I’m lucky to say that Atlassian is pretty great with this: I had my laptop, email address, and access to everything I needed before my onboarding program officially kicked off.
Vuori makes premium performance apparel inspired by the active Coastal California lifestyle, which integrates fitness, surf, sport, and art. The company has grown rapidly and sees plenty of opportunity for the future.
Vuori is a high-growth company and needed a scalable approach to onboarding. Alex and his teams are critical in delivering this, with responsibility for corporate technology, and things like software and hardware access.
We strive for one thing when it comes to onboarding. And that is perfection. Using the word perfect in an IT sense is a terrible thing to do typically, but when I talk about perfection, it’s having that laptop, having that email address set up, and having the access that they need to hit the ground running.”
Alex Stillings, the Director of Workplace Technology at Vuori Clothing
Getting away from time-consuming, manual processes
A year ago, before Alex kicked off an onboarding revamp, new employees were filling out forms with free-form text everywhere. The supporting spreadsheet displayed enough columns to run through the alphabet twice. Everything was manual, time-consuming, and prone to human error.
He aimed to overhaul onboarding with a system that included dynamic forms to efficiently gather information, was connected to Microsoft Entra, was approachable for the HR team, and could scale as necessary with the business.
Today, a new employee receives a streamlined onboarding form. Following completion of that form, their manager receives a notification to input information into a secondary form that asks questions to ensure the right information is populated in employee record and get the new employee access to the systems they need. Then the payroll department receives the employee information, with security configurations that restrict access to information only to relevant employees. Jira Service Management also automatically creates work items for software and hardware access.
Alex and his team also overhauled the processes for implementing employee changes like promotions and offboarding, and plan to keep striving to improve the employee experience.
Automation in Jira Service Management
“Automation-wise, I’m winning and I love it. So huge shout out to Automation! Jira Service Management has enabled us to create these workflows, to eliminate menial tasks, automate and save time for my team so they can work on more important and higher-level work.” – Alex Stillings,Head of Workplace Technology, Vuori
For instance, new employees now get their employee discount via an automation with Shopify that previously took 10 minutes of manual work.
Alex is an automation expert and has configured over 75 automations with the Multiplier add-on! Jira Service Management is flexible enough to set up automation for all kinds of tasks. That said, we’re making these workflows easier, with capabilities I mention below.
A year of Jira Service Management for the HR team – saving 100 workdays
Alex has effectively built Vuori an employee experience management system. In the year since he implemented these processes in Jira Service Management, there has been a lot of movement at Vuori. They have drastically cut the manual effort required for onboarding, offboarding, and employee changes and saved over 100 workdays.
5 ways your team can get started with HRSM in Jira Service Management
The impact Alex and his team made is exciting, and we wanted to make it even easier for your team to achieve similar results. Here are five of my favorite innovations:
- Request type templates
We have thirty best practice request type templates to choose from, so you can get started quickly with tasks like conducting background checks, employee transfers, sensitive queries, and more.
- Forms
HR teams can use forms for a clean, refined end-user experience. Forms are easy to build, with a drag-and-drop editor. And now, with cascading fields, which show different options depending on the previous selection, everything is kept uncluttered.
- Restrictions
It’s easy to restrict who can view and create work items with sensitive information. With granular control options, you can configure different permissions and privileges, even for people in the same team.
- Customized employee experience
We’ve made it possible to customize your help center and display the resources employees need. This enables employees to self-serve and reduces request volume.
Additionally, the virtual service agent can deliver personalized answers powered by knowledge articles, policy documents, and the content you already have.
- Integrations
Information lives across many tools, so we know integrations will save time for agents. Our Workday integration pulls employee information automatically into Jira Service Management, without the need to switch between applications.
I had to hold myself back from writing a much longer blog, there are plenty of other exciting things and more to come!
For more information, you can check out the full presentation and learn more about Jira Service Management for HR teams here.