Onboarding employees is traditionally a process that involves a lot of paperwork and administration. Employees get contracts in the mail, fill them out and mail them back to head office. Then data entry commences, often different staff find themselves entering data into multiple systems more than once. We call this double data entry and it greatly increases the risk of human error. With the right technology, onboarding employees can be done paperlessly and reduce admin time by up to 80%. More importantly, it makes the process much easier for employees and provides them with access to their own information.
With HR software, onboarding can be automated making it very easy to introduce new staff to your business quickly. This is hugely advantageous during peak holiday seasons. It also helps your employee learn more about their new company and can be used as a way to introduce them to your company culture, mission and values.
Here are 4 ways paperless onboarding can improve your business.
1. Increase speed
Onboarding is critical for turning new hires into valuable employees. As mentioned,without an HR software you and your new recruits probably spend hours filling out and processing paperwork. It’s a huge time drain with so many documents to create, complete, sign and scan.
With HR software, new hires complete all the HR forms online and are able to view and acknowledge workplace policies. All employee information, including their initial application form, now resides in one centralised location that you and employees can access at any time.
It also means that all your new starters get the paperwork completed at their own convenience, allowing them to spend their first day at your company in a more productive and engaging way.
2. Build trust
HR software allows employees to input their own bank account and super details. This means this data only needs to be entered once, greatly reducing the risk of error. It also means that if employees want to change their payment details, they can do so themselves digitally without having to fill out paperwork and hope that payroll staff get round to updating details in a timely manner. Allowing employees to have control of their own payment details and easily access information regarding their employment helps to build trust and also greatly increases efficiency.
3. Reduce risk
When onboarding employees with an HR software, you can ensure that employees receive all the important legal documents that come with beginning new employment.
Legally, employers need to prove that employees cited and signed off on important workplace policies, health and safety procedures and so on. With a paperless onboarding process, all this is automated and tracked, so you can rest easy knowing that your onboarding procedures follow due process.
4. Engage employees
It’s important to remember the onboarding process is your first opportunity to engage employees and help them get used to your company culture and expectations. With an automated onboarding procedure, you can ensure employees receive information like a welcome letter with information about your company mission and values and a company directory with information about who is who in your business. During a peak trading seasons, it’s really easy for small tasks such as this to drop off the radar. A good HR software will ping managers once a new employee is onboarding, reminding them to make that all important call!
Overall HR software can reduce the time taken to onboard employees from weeks to mere minutes. It can also help embed employees into your company culture much more quickly and allow for a much easier administrative experience all round. This will give your new employees more time to learn about their new role and hit the ground running on their first day. Bring on the sales!
To learn more about how to survive the hiring and onboarding of employees over the busy summer holiday period, listen to our full webinar on Hasty Hiring.
