One might mistakenly assume documentation during onboarding to be pretty straightforward and easy. After all, getting some forms filled by new hires and then having them processed shouldn’t be such a big deal, right?
Wrong.
Getting new hires to complete their paperwork is one of the most cumbersome and complicated processes in employee onboarding, coming a close second to employee background checks. HR teams often end up losing a lot of precious time and energy in collecting and filing these documents.
Manual processes top the list of limitations in the documentation process. New hire unresponsiveness, bureaucratic delays in coordination with multiple departments and human errors while completing paperwork follow close on heels. Even among companies that have taken a digital approach to documentation, disjointed HR systems and the absence of a centralized management platform have failed to ease the stress for onboarding teams in any significant way. Of course, some of the earlier problems of manual onboarding have been resolved. But newer challenges of digital onboarding have emerged.
So what are these challenges that continue to make paperwork during employee onboarding a nightmare, whether manual or digital?
Challenges of documentation in employee onboarding
- Data Duplication: Duplication of data is also a duplication of human effort. Filling out 15-20 forms during onboarding is already an overwhelming experience for your new hire. Add to it, the fact that they have to repeatedly add the same information in different forms. This can significantly hurt your new hire’s experience with your organization. And in the absence of a unified digital onboarding software, the onboarding team too will end up manually integrating this data with different systems for further distribution and processing. Not the best use of your HR team’s time.
- Information Insufficiencies: Even though this can seem unlikely, a lot of new hires do end up making mistakes in their paperwork and end up sharing wrong or unclear documents. In such cases, HR gets into what seems like an unending back and forth, coordinating with the new hire and the departments processing these documents. And often these insufficiencies come to light only when, say, a background check vendor, days after the new hire filled out the document, opens it. This lost time adds undue pressure on HR managers, stripping them of precious focus time for more strategic work.
- Communication Roadblocks: In the absence of an integrated onboarding platform, we are talking about people teams manually relaying information to new hires and other teams. Reminders and escalations are sent over emails. And in cases where the number of new hires is large, this manual mode of communication gets extremely chaotic. When should HR send a reminder to an employee? When should the IT team be informed to deliver a new laptop? When should an employee ID be created? Imagine managing all that communication over emails and messages.
- Data Security Concerns: Employee information being collected on paper and through emails and messages are subject to data breaches. Data breaches that will impact the new hire and the organization - that’s huge. And even for those that have taken the digital route, data is collected across disparate systems. Some lie in the Application Tracking System, some in the HRIS and some in the HR manager's email. This puts your employee data at huge risk. And that is not something that enterprises can afford to ignore.
- Fragmented Systems: Even among the organizations that have taken their onboarding process digital, the biggest challenge is that multiple systems are involved in one single process. And that makes data syncing and flow of the onboarding process still a manual effort for HR teams. Often, this leads to data duplication and the underutilization of tools. What should be saving you time, is now even more cumbersome and complex, resulting in more time spent managing different tech for different processes.
We’re reimagining everything onboarding, including documentation
Tydy’s goal is to take the busywork of onboarding off HR’s plate, so you can focus on more strategic efforts.
With onboarding, Tydy becomes your central nervous system. It will collect documents from your new hires, distribute them to relevant teams, automate reminders and escalations in case of non-completion, send data to other HR systems, and keep your employee data secure and in one place. In terms of time, that would be around 18000 hours saved for the HR team. It's no surprise that our Employee Data Capture and Verification module is a favorite among our enterprise customers.
Related article
Better, faster, stronger.
