Paperless Employee Onboarding Solutions Are So Last Season

Posted in Talent & Onboarding

by Enboarder

Going ‘paperless’ for employee onboarding isn’t your mission. You need to future proof onboarding with an employee experience-driven tech solution. Here’s how to tell them apart.

Paperwork sucks, doesn’t it?

It’s a common cause of angst in offices worldwide – Encyclopaedia-length checklists, forms, and manuals for every new hire start, training event, leave requests, and offboarding.

Paperwork has really proliferated, with:

  • Government forms
  • Bank details
  • Contracts
  • Benefit forms
  • Emergency contact forms
  • Induction packets
  • Training manuals
  • Manually entering data into HRIS systems

For those of you printing and marking up pages with neon yellow “sign here” stickers, our commiserations.

In the last few years we’ve seen a rise in paperless onboarding solutions that promise to solve this papery burden.

Give us your reams of dead trees, they say. And we’ll give you spreadsheets and computer-based checklists and downloadable PDFs.

Sigh.

Without proper thought for the employee experience, these systems are just replacing paper forms with their digital counterpart. Not that revolutionary at all.

Future proof your onboarding by looking beyond paperless, towards employee experience

Some systems were built to solve the labour-intensive paperwork issue, and employee experience is just an afterthought.

But if you’re intending to future proof your onboarding and introduce the most effective and efficient solution for your investment, you must start with the employee experience. Because a negative experience can damage your internal and external brand, affect productivity, and lead to disengagement and turnover.

For example, we built Enboarder to enhance the employee experience. Because employees are the life of your business (and we mean that quite literally).

Paperless onboarding? Or Paperless + Engaging onboarding?

Some onboarding solutions eat paperwork for lunch.

For others, paperwork is just the appetiser – the main course is cracking employee experience and engagement, and we’ll munch that down too, thank you very much.

There are many benefits for your organisation in choosing an employee experience-driven onboarding solution over a purely paperless one (or one that belatedly adds on a few nice features and dresses it up like it’s an employee experience solution!).

For one, the entire system is designed with employee experience in mind, providing more powerful functionality for personalised onboarding and enhanced experiences.

So the next time you read about some cashed-up startup holding amazing new employee welcoming experiences, you can turn to your hiring manager and say “hold my beer”.

Not to brag (OK, maybe a little), but we knew employee experience was the future years ago, even though everyone was, and still is, moaning about the paperwork.

OK, but paperwork is still a problem for you

So we’ve talked about why employee experience is a big thing for onboarding. But that’s not to say we haven’t tackled the paperwork issue – we’re all over that like a kid with chocolate birthday cake. And just to show you, here are some of the ways we’ve simplified paperwork for HR and employees:

  • E-forms (with electronic signatures)
  • Preboarding – instead of packets
  • E-learning (instead of manuals)
  • Automated workflows – routing information to the right person to action (e.g. IT orders and provisioning)
  • Integration with e-signing platforms (that literally fill in the form for you, so you don’t have to enter information twice
  • Integrations with HRIS and ATS systems
  • Automated notifications, reminders, and nudges for those who haven’t returned something
  • Acknowledge modules – employees are asked to acknowledge they have read something, and it’s recorded in one central place.

So yes – technically, we offer paperless onboarding, too! But for us, paperless is part of the process to make the employee experience, manager experience, and HR experience all that more enjoyable. It’s a tool to enhance the experience – but it’s not what’s driving the onboarding strategy. Capiche?

How to tell these paperless onboarding solutions apart

No one enjoys the heartache of choosing to invest in systems that don’t quite cut the mustard long-term, resulting in an expensive, drawn-out process to re-invest in a different system 18 months later. Because you settled for vanilla not realising salted caramel chocolate mud was available.

We say get it right the first time.

Here’s how to tell which onboarding solution is truly employee experience-focused. Consider:

☑️ Where they originated – Did they start as “paperless”? Or, were they straight to market with employee experience?

☑️ The messaging on their site – Are they boasting that paperless is the way?

☑️ How the platform is designed – Try a few demos and you’ll be able to tell if experience is at their core. If so, the user interface will be as good as Uber’s!

☑️ The functionality level for the employee experience – Have they invested years in making sure their employee experience is flawless? Or have they just tacked on a quick ‘warm welcome’ solution in the last year?

Give us a twirl

We’re changing onboarding for good – the applications for an employee experience workflow solution are only limited by your imagination!

Being future-focused, you can use Enboarder to help you manage and automate:

  • office moves
  • parental leave
  • managerial promotions
  • VIP experiences for senior members of staff and top talent
  • cross-boarding, transitions, and location moves
  • training & event communications
  • invitations and follow ups to corporate events
  • recognition and award programs
  • other internal comms requiring personalisation.

Experience Enboarder and see for yourself how delectable our employee experience-driven, paperless onboarding solution really is.

Become an Enboarder insider!