Employee Onboarding using Electronic Signatures

Employee onboarding is a crucial focus of organizations in 2021 as pandemic has completely wiped off the traditional onboarding process, forcing every task to complete remotely. It has resulted in the unexpected extension of the hiring timelines from weeks to months.

The onboarding process is the systematic transformation of promising candidates into top-performing candidates by following these steps:

Welcome Mail: If the employee is selected, the HR sends a warm welcome mail, onboarding forms & offer letters.

Offer Acceptance: Once the employee accepts the offer, the company will set up a quick call to review the form, policies & benefits.

Waiting Period: During the waiting period, the new hire may be open for offers from other companies. It is always a good idea to plan the waiting period during the employee onboarding process.

The Joining Day: This is the day to welcome the new joiners. HR managers must make sure that the new hire feels welcome & comfortable.

Coordinate with new departments: It is essential to introduce and notify your coworkers & managers about the new hire. You can start by scheduling an orientation session or welcome meetings.

Training & orientation: This phase provides new hires with crucial information about the company’s teams, processes, and company policies.

Probation period: The objective of this period is to check if the hired employee is a fit for the organization. If the new hire meets the company expectations, then he is a confirmed employee. The probationary period may last from three to six months.

Electronic signatures have proved to be the most incredible helping hand to organizations. They are the quickest way to end enormous paperwork, ensuring authenticity and winning crucial employer trust to attract top talent, shorten their learning curve, and make them an inseparable organizational asset.

Moreover, worldwide electronic laws have reinforced the credibility and awareness of eSignatures, expanding its influence for employee onboarding and daily business operations in every possible sector of the industries.

Here are top reasons to use e-signatures for employee onboarding:

1) Aligns with a digital vision

In the digital age, organizations don’t want to survive. Instead, they want to thrive and ensure that their promise of thumping growth, cost savings, and employee productivity align with their digital vision. So, the entire focus is on digital transformation inside the organization and the results during its usage phase.

In 2021, it is evident that technology is not a choice anymore. It’s a no-nonsense necessity. If you fail to transform your business digitally, every second, a new competitor is ready to eat up your revenue and market share.

eSignatures are much easier to adapt and need comparatively lesser adaptation & implementation time than any other digital technologies in the industry.

Suppose you are a growth-hungry company eyeing digital transformation. Then you need to choose the best eSignature service provided by vendors who understand your business very clearly.

Once the eSignature solution integrates with your day-to-day business processes, you need a few clicks to complete business processes efficiently from virtually any device in real-time.

2) Speed and Convenience

Electronic signatures are much faster & process documents quickly than handwritten signatures, making speed and convenience one of the top reasons for using them in employee onboarding.

The current pandemic situation has delayed the joining of new employees due to worldwide travel and movement restrictions.

With eSignatures, one can rapidly share the employee agreement with the new hires in a blink of an eye. After that, they can conveniently sign it on a computer or any portable device, regardless of their geographical location.

Another critical point is that using e-signatures adds to the sense that your company culture is forward-thinking and geared toward efficiency. There is no need to print and store the online document as physical records. It helps you save good money annually as you don’t need to buy office stationery like ink and paper again & again.

Document tracking is another appealing feature of e-signatures.

Another important thing, you don’t have to run helter-skelter to get your document signed by new hires.

Even if the new employees have not signed the papers, you know about the esigning status due to the document tracking feature. You receive an immediate notification when the new employees sign the contract document.

These popular features of eSignatures make employee onboarding a breeze for HR departments.

3) Helps in Automation

Your new hires can complete the employee onboarding process remotely from anywhere using the eSignature application.

The HR department and the new hires do not have to depend on handwritten signatures, printers, scanners and the mail system to sign-copy-scan and mail the document.

The credit of the employee onboarding time getting lengthier goes to the above traditional document exchange process between the new employees and the HR department.

Electronic Signatures authorize you to send bulk onboarding documents to multiple new hires at the same time.

You do not need to remind other signees to sign the document as they get application notifications for eSigning.

Also, none of the parties needs to carry the physical documents. Once everybody has signed it, they are safely stored in the cloud storage.

You can reduce the signing process to a few minutes and clicks by automating the paperwork flow with eSignatures.

4) Centralized document management

Every human resource department has to get involved in document management after printing, storing, scanning, and uploading the documents of every employee.

It is one of the most demanding tasks as it takes lots of time to track and organize employee contracts.

The digital signature feature enables the HR department to centralize contract management and store the contract data in the cloud, accessible at any time via the eSignature dashboard.

There are multiple benefits of centralized document management with eSignature solutions:

Greater control: If files are stored in one central location, implementing controls related to retention and deposition becomes easy.

Efficient business operations: It actively encourages efficient operations because all files are located centrally, saving employees precious time to retrieve the HR data.

5) Decreased costs of printing and storage

HR professionals handle large amounts of paperwork every day, ranging from employee onboarding, transfer, contracts, performance appraisal documents, exit process, and many more things.

Using paper documents for newly hired employees can be expensive as company policy forms, confidentiality agreements, and employee handbooks are some of the crucial things that need to be reviewed by new hires. It is estimated that any HR department might be printing 50-100 pages per new hire. That’s a lot of ink, paper, and time spent preparing for a new hire’s first day.

Once you print these documents, you will have to find a place to store the published information that may inflate document storage costs.

Organizations using electronic signatures save huge on:

• Paper purchase costs
• Printing/photocopying costs
• Paper delivery costs
• Paper scanning costs
• Paper storage costs
• Paper disposal costs
• Document retrieval costs

6) Security

Employee documentation can contain sensitive information from both the new hire and the organization, such as an employer identification number (EIN) and Social Security number (SSN). Those documents and credentials must be kept secure.

eSignatures use tamper-evident technology to detect any changes made to a document after each signature, lowering your risk of fraud. Furthermore, identity authentication tools, such as knowledge-based authentication, ensure that only authorized people access the documents.

These security measures ensure that confidential company information is challenging to duplicate, scan and edit.

Conclusion

eSignatures are a proven world-class technology allowing HR departments to complete the onboarding process efficiently, saves time & money while improving retention of employees.

Sign up for a free eSignature trial and see what LunarPen solutions can do for your business and help organizations in employee onboarding.