For a lot of business owners, onboarding is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, onboarding is necessary to get new employees up to speed. Plus, onboarding can be a morale-booster because it means that you’ve added a new teammate to your company. On the other hand, onboarding comes with several difficulties, and those difficulties can slow down your workflow and decrease productivity. For example, it requires tenured employees to take time out of their own busy schedules to train the new teammate. Is there a way to keep all the good parts of onboarding while making the difficulties easier? Definitely. There is a better way, and that way involves a digital document management system.
Getting employees up to speed as quickly as possible is critical to productivity, and with digital content management, you can do just that without interrupting another employee’s work day.
With new electronic document management systems, organizations can automate much of the onboarding process. There’s no more wondering if everyone received proper training. Instead, new employees can get ready for the job faster because you’ve put templates and processes in place ahead of time.
Every new hire goes through the same training, so you can have confidence in their abilities when they get to work. New employees will be happier, too. That’s because they won’t have to put up with any ambiguities. They’ll know exactly what to do because they’ll have access to clear, concise instructions. As a result, they’ll feel more sure in their footing and able to help drive growth.
Here are some of the ways an electronic document management system can help your onboarding program. Let’s go over how you can make the most of your digital documents for new hires.
Create Templates with an Electronic Document Management System
One of the most important aspects of onboarding is making sure every new hire gets the same information and completes the same tasks. You need to create a baseline for each hire to make sure that everyone is on the same page. This way, you avoid confusion and ensure productivity.
However, you don’t get this kind of standardization with traditional employee training. Humans make mistakes, after all. No matter how many times an employee trains a new hire, they can always miss a step or forget to explain something. When that happens, different employees start working with different information. They may start working while missing critical data. As a result, they can run into snags, and then their productivity comes to a halt as they search for clarification.
There are other challenges that come from standard employee training. For example, what happens when an employee can’t train a new hire due to illness? What happens when two employees take very different approaches to training?
Digital content management removes these risks by standardizing the onboarding process. An electronic document management system allows you to create templates that make the process exactly the same for each new employee. Indeed, there is no personal opinion or circumstance interjected, and you can make sure that you lay out all the information that your new hires need. Finally, each trainee gets the same forms and can learn how the organization operates faster.
The standardization means that new employees can start work with confidence. You, meanwhile, can have confidence that everyone is on the same page. You get more control over the onboarding process.
Human Resources Work Is More Efficient
Your HR department likely takes on the bulk of the onboarding burden. That’s because Human Resources deals with more paper than virtually any other department, and that’s especially true when a new hire signs on to the company. There’s no getting around it: getting hired means signing forms. From tax documents to nondisclosure agreements, a lot of documents go into hiring and onboarding. For the new hire, there’s not a lot that you can do to reduce the paper burden.
For your HR department, however, your electronic document management system can make things a lot more efficient. For one thing, digital document management provides a simple and secure method for document storage. They can get rid of the filing cabinets, or at least reduce the amount of filing cabinets taking up space in the office. With less clutter, they’ll have more space to work.
Next, they won’t have to waste time tracking down documents for your new employee to sign. Instead, the employee can access all of these documents in the cloud. They can sign everything they need to sign at once. As a matter of fact, you may not even need to print these forms at all. Some electronic document management platforms support electronic signatures. New employees can provide an e-signature, and then those signed documents can stay secure within your cloud-based software.
All these factors mean better efficiency for your HR department. When they can devote less time and space to document signatures, they can focus on the more important and less tedious aspects of their work.
SOPs Are Accessible
Finally, by implementing a digital document management system, you can help your new employees familiarize themselves with your company’s standard operating procedures. When someone joins a new organization, they work and learn the ropes at the same time. A lot of times, employees will have questions about policy or what to do in a given situation. An electronic document management platform can allow them to access anything they need immediately. Access to company files lowers the chance of errors and misunderstandings. Plus, when they have quick access to answers, they can move on with their work and experience limited interruptions in the process.
The onboarding process isn’t always easy, but Vasion is here to make it simpler for you. Our digital document management platform is scalable, flexible, and multifaceted, so you can always get what you need. Want to learn more about what Vasion has to offer? Get in touch with us today. We’d love to have a chat with you and answer your questions.