5 Best Practices for Implementing Paperless Employee Onboarding at Your Organisation

Paperless employee onboarding is efficient, time-saving and secure. We find companies can complete their onboarding in a matter of minutes, which in turn cuts down labour and HR costs significantly as well as reduce friction for your new team members. 

Yet to make the most of paperless onboarding, you will want to pay attention to a few best practices. These will ensure that it’s not only the onboarding process that’s improved: it’s also payroll, award compliance, employee experience, new hire retention rates, the first shift and employees’ relationships with management.

How Does Paperless Employee Onboarding Work?

Truly paperless onboarding is quick, easy and intuitive (not to mention that it’s better for the environment). New hires won’t have to print off paper, sign documents and return them to you in the post. Your HR team won’t have to double-check the forms have been correctly filled out or manually type up the information.

There’s also less risk. Confidential information can’t go missing in the post or be viewed by the staff at an internet café. Poor handwriting won’t cause incorrect data entry, no matter how illegible it is (and your HR team won’t make any typos, either). Coffee can’t get spilled on forms that then need redoing.

5 Best Practices for Paperless Employee Onboarding

To get the best out of your paperless employee on boarding, consider these best practices:

1. Automate as Much as Possible

The more automated your processes, the fewer things that can go wrong. You can take advantage of Humanforce’s system to ensure that new employees automatically receive all the necessary forms at the same time. All you have to do is enter their basic details, and then once the forms have been signed and submitted, approve them. 

You won’t even need to confirm the employee’s availability or give them the location of their first shift: all that will be automatically done for you. And you can rest assured that nobody will forget to attach a file, fill in the incorrect year, or miss the last page of a contract.

2. Finish Employee Onboarding Before the First Shift

Speaking of first shifts, make sure on boarding is done beforehand. Ideally, you should initiate the process as soon as the job offer is confirmed. This will reduce the risk of first-shift no-shows or new starters quitting before the contract is even signed.

Smart phone Apps makes paperless employee onboarding so quick and easy, you will also be able to follow up in plenty of time if the new hire hasn’t signed the contract or submitted their details.

3. Ensure Tax Office Compliance

As part of our automated onboarding process, new hires enter all the details you need for award, tax and superannuation compliance. Australian companies can lodge forms directly with the ATO after the manager’s signed off on them, meaning that’s one less piece of paperwork to do.

Plus, since it’s all done through the same system, there’s a reduced risk of errors. You won’t have to worry about your HR team misreading Tax File Numbers or dates of birth.

4. Integrate with Payroll

Streamline Payroll’s processes by integrating mobile App functionality and data ingestion of the onboarding program with your preferred software. All the data can be exported with the click of a button to ensure payslips are compliant and correctly calculated.

In fact, it’s easy to export the information for any department or initiative, whether you’re passing select details onto IT or reviewing diversity data.

5. Prioritise Employee Experience

On boarding is a new staff member’s first glimpse of what it’s like to work at your company, so it’s important to make a good impression. 40% of new employees quit within six months of starting work – but a Glassdoor study found that strong onboarding processes increase new hire retention rates by 82%.

When done right, paperless onboarding can not just improve your company’s processes but also create a stress-free start for your new staff. Plus, it enables you to show you care about their experience even before their first shift.

Review the onboarding process from the experience of a new starter to make sure that it doesn’t seem cold or depersonalised. Ensure that the mobile app you use can customise any part of the process, from branding through to messaging, and reflect your tone of voice so you start to build the culture from day 1. 

Humanforce has written blogs on the importance of communication LINK  and how you communicate before their first shift as well as the communication before every shift and post-shift can augment the employee experience, their commitment and output.  This is especially true for a casual team of workers which for many do not see or interact with their managers on their shifts.  Managers should never underestimate ‘first impressions’ and communicating before the first day is critical.  Now managers can send new employees a welcome message and double-check if they feel ready for their first day. When managers get involved, workers are 3.4 times as likely to describe their on-boarding experience as “exceptional”.

It’s important to make sure new hires have all the information they need for their first shift: the location, where to go, who to report to, if they need to clock in, and more. Your Mobile App Humanforce app, they can specify their availability and shift preferences. Then, once they have been rostered, the app will show them an up-to-date schedule with confirmed shift locations and times.

Employee onboarding with Humanforce is simple: new hires enter their data and availability, digitally sign contracts and any other relevant forms, and then view their first shift location. This information can also be shared directly with Payroll and (for Australian companies only) ATO. 

Yet just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s basic. It reduces HR’s workload, facilitates payroll, helps you remain awards-compliant, and prioritises the employee experience.  Humanforce takes all the hard work out and allows managers to mentor their teams by automating tasks and reducing the hours needed to complete administrative work.