‘I love paperwork’, said no employee ever. Millennials, that make up about half of the US workforce, would go so far as to argue that paper pushing is their worst nightmare in an increasingly febrile world.
You may have made available the latest wellness and fitness apps, employee self-service technologies and upskilling sessions. But if your employees are still heading to the office, while social distancing guidelines are in place, expressly to print out individual contracts and then sign and courier them, know that there is a chink in your employee experience armour.
A chink that can be almost instantaneously remedied with a SaaS Digital Transaction Management solution such as Signeasy. Signeasy enables touchless contracts for all your paperwork, reducing employees' concern over cross-contamination.
By elevating your employee experience with touchless contracts, your business will succeed in attracting and retaining skilled employees.
Marie Kondo your Employee Paperwork Journey 80% of employees consider their experience at the workplace to be very important, according to a Deloitte study. Safe to say that the majority of those surveyed are millennials, who shy away from even buying cars or applying for loans, with aversion to tedious paperwork as one leading deterrent.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-thinking/
When dealing with such documentation-averse employees, it’s important for companies to use the principles of design thinking. This is the most user-centric way of identifying and eliminating roadblocks in the employee’s paperwork journey.
The framework dictates that first, you need to listen and empathize with your employees. Find out how they feel about the existing gamut of paperwork through surveys, shadowing, interviews and the like.
A recent Gallup study shows that millennials care a lot more about wellbeing. So, most likely in the current COVID context, what your young employees really want is a safe and quick way of doing clerical work.
Next, create an experience calendar featuring “moments that matter”, to define the problem. If you are assessing a new hire’s experience, note down each touchpoint in their documentation journey. This will help you map out every relevant issue they’ve had to deal with, (say) in the first 30 days of work.
If I were to sketch out the average employee journey in relation to just the hiring workflow, it would look something like this:
With eSignatures this archaic process can be fixed in the following manner:
Hit send on the contract between employee and company Send automatic reminders sent to signees Receive the signed contract in minutes (automatically stored on cloud). See how this simple addition reduces time spent on documentation and keep it touch-free and sanitary?
Finally, you can do away with the next 3 steps (ideate, prototype and test) from the traditional model, and jump to implementation of the right eSignature tool to fix your documentation issue.
To that end, you need to get rid of that which doesn’t spark joy in you or your employee. In our current example, that redundant element would be the wet signature. Especially since there is a risk of the infection spreading by interacting with high-touch surfaces like printers and pens; physical signatures are not only hallmarks of poor employee experience but also unhygienic.
With eSignatures this archaic process can be fixed in the following manner:
Hit send on the contract between employee and company Send automatic reminders sent to signees Receive the signed contract in minutes (automatically stored on cloud). Essentially think of hesitancy to use wet signatures as the employee mindset and DTM solutions such as Signeasy is the key to unlocking it.
Apart from the hiring contract, you will see that employee onboarding has several other long-drawn documentation workflows including benefits enrolment, enrolling for attendance tracking and confidentiality agreements.
The question that arises then, should the HR sanction the adoption of this new technology? Or is it the IT team’s responsibility?
Elevate employee experience with touchless contracts Traditionally, employee experience has been seen as the duty of the HR department. But it needn’t be so.
Especially since the presence of wet signatures would trouble every function, more so in a post-COVID world, department heads can individually take the call for their team.
For instance, if the head of sales wants to make sure that their team doesn't have to burn out by wading through mountains of sales contracts, sales orders, invoices; they should invest in an online signature solution.
Similarly, if the legal team is tired of sending manual reminders to each signee (and there tend to be many), an eSignature solution can eliminate this chore; allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks.
Ultimately, the success of that one team (read: improve employee experience) can be used as a case study to encourage a company-wide transformation.
Lessons from the frontline Globally, large corporates and SMBs alike are going digital with their documentation process. In the last few months, healthcare , educational institutes and not so surprisingly technology companies have almost instantly adopted to electronic signature solutions to keep their paperwork moving smoothly and swiftly. So, why should your heroes on the frontline be left out?
Ask any health worker , police official or academicians about what causes a plummet in their enthusiasm for their profession. Their unanimous answer is likely to be - too much paperwork.
See how adding Signeasy to their everyday document workflow has helped such employees:
“It takes 30 seconds to one minute to complete the process, and there is an electronic record instead of a piece of paper that can get lost while being passed around”, says Stewart Jesse, Director of Glass City Academy, who uses Signeasy every day to process staff leave requests. Red Nucleus, a life sciences company, found that Signeasy provides a great way to ensure the contracts keep moving, in the absence of access to office printers & scanners. “These days, our contracts are executed in under 10 minutes! We might never go back to printers and scanners again”, said Philip McCrea, Managing Director of Red Nucleus. Sometimes it’s the smaller things that affect the employee experience, such as having to close existing software every time in order to access the eSignature solution. Since Signeasy integrates with productivity tools commonly used by businesses, such as FreshWorks, Gmail, Outlook, Google Drive and Microsoft Teams, documents can be signed in the most intuitive manner possible.
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If you wish to give your everyday heroes a break from the rigmarole of paperwork, simply get in touch with sales. Healthcare organizations, educational institutes, NGOs and other sectors involved in relief efforts can claim two months of free access to our easy-to-use eSignature solution.
