Paperless Onboarding System: How It Works & Benefits Your Company

“To win in the marketplace, you must first win in the workplace” – Doug Conant.

Onboarding new employees is one of the most important jobs for any HR department. The faster you can get a new employee up to speed, the less likely they will leave and take their knowledge with them. The question is, how do you ensure that your new hires get started on the right foot?

Paperless Onboarding System

Onboarding, also known as “organizational socialization,” can be defined as the process of bringing and integrating new hires into the organization. Onboarding is a crucial process as it helps new employees quickly adapt to the social and professional aspects of the new job and its expectations.

Electronic onboarding of new employees aims to create a virtual experience for new hires to quickly absorb the organization’s work culture and promptly start contributing to the business objectives. Moreover, when an organization uses different technologies for onboarding, it can facilitate various dynamic capabilities suitable for complex situations, for instance, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paperless onboarding systems gained popularity, especially during the pandemic, which completely affected organizational dynamics. Due to social distancing and work-from-home culture, paperless onboarding became the most viable solution for recruiting and onboarding new employees.

Onboarding becomes even more delicate if it is done remotely by digital means. When paperless onboarding is adopted, the organization must encompass the following four activities, which encapsulate the four Cs: compliance, clarification, culture, and connection. This is done to support new recruits to become more and more a part of the corporate climate. These four activities need to be in synergy while implemented to ensure the new recruits have a good onboarding experience.

The first activity is compliance. This is where you will teach the new employees about the company’s general rules and regulations and ensure that they fully understand them. The second activity is clarification. Here, the new employees will be asked to clarify their roles and what is expected of them. The third activity is adaptability to organizational norms (culture).

This is an important activity, but many companies take it for granted as they assume that the new employees will easily and immediately understand the company’s work culture. The fourth and final activity is establishing connections. This activity focuses on creating and establishing relationships with coworkers and setting up an information network which is crucial for the successful performance of the new employees.

When the organization successfully implements these four activities, you can expect better commitment, job satisfaction, and greater role orientation of the new hires, which results in a significant reduction in turnover rates which allows them to fully adapt and flourish.

The paperless onboarding process has both positive and negative consequences, so organizations need to understand both and act accordingly.

Some of the critical junctures in successful paperless onboarding include:

• the quality of support given by the organization;
• the quality of work relationships;
• the perception of balance in appreciating efforts and achievements fairly;
• the results of new skills learned and experience gained in the workplace;

The newcomers’ perception and expectations have their roots in the onboarding period. The entry of new recruits brings together different generations – both the existing, experienced employees and the new ones who are all committed to bringing sustainable growth to the company. So entering an organization means establishing benchmark values and building one’s professional role in their career journey. In short, the organizational goals and values are made visible in their onboarding process.

Setting Up a Successful Paperless Onboarding Process

To begin, you’ll need to create a new employee account. This is the first step in setting up paperless onboarding.

1. Create a new employee profile:

You can then fill out your employee’s profile by adding information about them and their work experience/education. If you have multiple employees at your company, each individual needs their own profile so that they can be tracked separately from one another.

Ensure that each person has an email address associated with their username so that emails sent from within the app will automatically appear as read when opened by either the sender or recipient (depending on whether it’s sending or receiving). You may also want to add photos of them for reference purposes—this helps people identify who they’re talking with when making calls or sending emails!

2. Set up user profiles:

Once all this information has been added, set up other user accounts within the paperless onboarding system itself as well. This will allow people outside of HR/Admin departments access to some features without full access rights everywhere else inside the system.

3. Start using ATS:

Now that you have created user profiles, use an applicant tracking system (ATS). This will make the onboarding process more efficient, and you can easily keep track of their paperwork deadlines and ensure that all their information is stored securely. Now create an electronic onboarding checklist to keep the newcomers engaged and organized.

4. Use the right software:

This is a crucial process, as you need to be equipped with the best possible software for successful paperless system onboarding. When you use an HR automation tool like Cflow, you can have forms that comply with the hiring standards. Especially when you are hiring from multiple locations or internationally, it is important to use a new onboarding process that is suitable for making a consistent transition for the new hires.

5. Creare forms on Cloud:

Before automating the new hire onboarding process, review the steps and eliminate if any of the steps seem redundant. Create a custom template with all relevant information to suit the specific business needs and the new onboarding. Once you automate it, the new paperless onboarding will be clean and easy to understand so that it can be used by any department which needs to hire new employees for their teams.

Once you launch your paperless onboarding system, test it as a user to see if the training and orientation are on point. Make sure the flow is smooth, and make changes until everyone is satisfied with the new process.

6. Launch onboarding workflows:

Now that you have launched your new paperless onboarding process, it’s time for feedback. There is always room for improvement. In a 2021 survey from Principles, 94% of HR professionals who responded to the survey said that those hired during the pandemic had trouble connecting with the company and struggled during the onboarding.

They said 31% of employees struggled to interact and build relationships with their coworkers, and 10% weren’t even sure how to adapt to the new company culture. So, when the onboarding experience is bad, then you are likely to lose a lot of employees consistently unless you improve the process. An HR automation software like Cflow will help you stay organized and use automated workflows for managing employee training, time and attendance, employee development, etc.,

Best Practices for Electronic Onboarding

This section covers the best practices for electronic onboarding.

* Send a welcome pack to the new hires, which will make them feel like they are already a part of the new team. This welcome pack should be clear and structured, containing the onboarding agenda. The welcome pack can contain a welcome letter, the company handbook, HR documents, and a gift like a company T-shirt or mug.

* Introduce the new employee to the company. Get them up to speed on company policies and procedures, then teach them how to use your systems and software. This is also a great time to introduce them to their new colleagues so they can get comfortable with everyone’s schedules during their training period (which should last at least two weeks).

* Provide training on how to use the company’s systems and software. You want all employees who are going into new roles—whether as a contractor or full-time hires—to understand where things stand within your organization before they start working there full-time.

* You can use a social collaboration platform to accelerate productivity. Aside from a streamlined workflow app, a social collaboration platform can help optimise employees’ productivity as it helps them meet new people, communicate with members from other departments, quickly adapt to the work culture, and keep them organized and ethical.

* Creating a multi-departmental onboarding team can improve the onboarding experience. This is done to give an onboarding experience that goes beyond HR and involves other company areas such as relevant teams, key stakeholders and the CEO to have the newcomers interact with the stakeholders outside their team. This will help them build relationships with managers and understand how they are an integral part of the company. Also, when they interact with the CEO, can give them inclusion and cement the idea of how they represent the company and how important are they for the organization’s growth.

* Providing ideal support throughout the onboarding process is an important practice that several companies overlook. Managers and administrators involved in the onboarding process should spend time in performance coaching and creating connections for newcomers. From day one to the end of the program, the support that the newcomers get plays a key role in employee retention.

“The competition to hire the best will increase in the years ahead. Companies that give extra flexibility to their employees will have the edge in this area” – Bill Gates.

Benefits of Paperless Onboarding System

A paperless onboarding process allows you to work faster, better, and more securely.

1. Save on Paper

You may be surprised to learn that paper is one of the most expensive items in an office. The costs associated with printing and postage can amount to more than half of the total cost of a document, including the time and energy spent on preparing it. Paperless systems can help reduce these costs by eliminating unnecessary paper use and reducing storage space for records.

Paperless systems are also designed to make it easier for employees to share information with others, especially if they work from home or other locations around town, rather than in-person meetings at headquarters daily. Employees who use computers as part of their jobs will find there’s no need for bulky binders full of paperwork when using cloud-based apps like Gmail or Dropbox; instead, they send text messages back & forth over email without ever having seen each other face-to-face again!

2. Track Employee Performance

Performance tracking is an integral part of employee development. It helps you keep track of employee progress and identify areas for improvement, which can then be used to identify top and poor performers.

• Top performers will be recognized as such by their managers or supervisors. They will also receive more responsibility and have more access to specific resources like training opportunities, mentoring programs, and other perks that are only available to those who have proven themselves as superior employees over time.

• Poor performers may find themselves being removed from projects altogether; they may even be given an assignment where no one else wants it (such as cleaning the office).

3. Improve Morale

• Improve morale. Employee satisfaction is a major driver of productivity and can have a positive impact on the bottom line. When employees are happy at work, they’re more likely to stay with the company longer and contribute more ideas in the workplace.

• Increase retention rates by providing training on how you want them to use your product or service so that new hires are familiarized with how it works before starting their jobs (and later if there’s an issue). This will also help prevent any problems during onboarding—which can be especially important when it comes to a technical support call!

4. Save Time and Money

Save time and money by going paperless.

• You can save money on printing, postage, and office supplies.
• You can save time on filing, copying, and storing.
• You can save time on training new employees to use the system.
• You will have fewer work-related errors because there won’t be any piles of paper lying around that need to be sorted through before they’re useful again (and if they’re not helpful, then it’s easier just not to print them at all).

5. Increase Security

To increase security, you can use a digital signature to add your name and contact information to any document. This will protect your identity from being stolen or used unauthorizedly. You don’t have to worry about losing records anymore—you can store them on a secure cloud-based platform and access them from anywhere at any time with the touch of a button.

You’ll need fewer passwords or other credentials so that hackers will find it harder to access sensitive information such as user names and passwords (something they can easily do if they’re able to steal them). This also means that anyone who has access should be able to access only what they’re entitled to – keeping everyone safe from external threats while still allowing them access when needed without having any “backdoor” methods open up anywhere else on their devices either locally or remotely via Wi-Fi networks where employees might otherwise use those same devices outside office hours during off-hours like lunch breaks etcetera…

Conclusion

Now that you know, a paperless onboarding system is just one of many ways that you can improve employee productivity and efficiency. By implementing a training program, for example, you can save time and money by eliminating the need for multiple training sessions. By tracking employee performance through automated systems like Cflow, you’ll be able to get more out of your employees.