If your organization’s HR onboarding process is like most, it involves a lot of paperwork before new hires are ready to hit the ground running.
Some initial documentation, like the I-9 or benefits enrollment forms, are time sensitive. Others, such as your employee handbook, are crucial to a new employee’s foundation for success. Yet despite their importance, getting through the sheer mass of forms can be a tedious and exhausting process for both new hire and HR staff alike.
And shortcutting the onboarding process can hurt both employee and employer in the long run.
“Employers might say, ‘Let’s just get new employees going and we’ll bother them later for that,’ but then six months later, it’s been forgotten,” says Nano Zegarra, chief technology officer for Blue Technologies, in the March issue of Smart Business Magazine. “Or, someone can forget to mark a checkbox, verify a critical licensure or they may enter a piece of information incorrectly.”
A poor experience can leave new hires with a negative impression of your organization – and can be a contributing factor to the nearly one-third of all new hires who quit their jobs within the first six months, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.
Fortunately, the opposite is also true. Studies show that 69 percent of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experienced great onboarding.
Regardless of your organization’s exact onboarding process, electronic forms can help you maximize its effectiveness, says Zegarra – and help create that great experience.
Zegarra goes on to explain how a document management solution can make it easier for HR staff to complete forms quickly and efficiently, eliminating errors or oversights that could cost your company down the road.
The biggest benefit of utilizing a document management solution to create digital forms is eliminating the need for HR staff to hand-key data on multiple forms, Zegarra says. Once employment information is created and stored once, it can then be pushed to other forms or even other linked systems, such as payroll.
What’s more, it’s now very easy and affordable for companies to to create a self-serve solution – a deviation from canned solutions of the past.
“By digitizing this process, human resources can put more of the onus on the employee,” Zegarra says. “A self-serve solution can enable new hires to fill out forms from home, then track everything – making it easy for HR to see what’s missing and send reminders as needed.”
Through this portal, your HR staff can also provide training videos and even push policies and procedures, enabling employees, managers and remote workers to easily access information and make changes remotely.
With a scalable document management solution in place, your HR department can realize benefits beyond onboarding.
“(These solutions) can store and manage documents from cradle to grave — from when the employee first applies for a job, through when their documents can be destroyed post-employment, tracking any performance reviews or disciplinary items in between,” Zegarra says.
Particularly for departments burdened by high turnover or who can’t get employees hired fast enough, any technology to digitize and streamline your company’s HR processes is a huge help.
“The technology can comprehensively handle everything in a single solution,” Zegarra says.
Interested but don’t know where to start?
Zegarra recommends working with a technology partner who can help you determine the best-fit solution for your organization and customize it to fit your unique internal processes.
This partner can then help you expand the capabilities of your technology investment as your business needs grow.
For more information on streamlining your HR process through the latest document management solutions, contact a Blue Technologies expert today at (216) 271-4800.
You can also read Zegarra’s full interview with Smart Business Magazine here.