How to Streamline the New Employee Onboarding Process

How many new employees is your company bringing on each month? If it’s just a handful, you might think, “Sure, I’ve got this.” But what happens when you become consumed with other HR programs, training, and recruiting? What happens when business starts booming (especially if you’re at a start-up) and every department begins adding new team members like wildfire across the enterprise?

Chances are, you don’t have time to explain and process documents like W-4 forms every time an employee is added.

Streamlining your company’s new hire onboarding process is not only helpful and convenient for your new co-workers. It also gives you a strategy for simplifying time-consuming tasks so you have more time for relationship building and collaborating with stakeholders across the business.

Any seasoned HR professional will tell you that onboarding involves a lot of documentation for both legal and organizational purposes, which has traditionally been done with (you guessed it) paper. But paper is not only wasteful; it’s cumbersome and indicative of manual data entry and outdated processes. Automating new employee onboarding isn’t just about making your documents electronic. It’s about streamlining the entire workflow with easier ways to:

1. Digitize forms. Perhaps you already digitized the employee application process. Now that they’ve been hired, keep the trend going with electronic employee contracts, W-4s (or W-9s for contractors), noncompetes, and more.
   
2. Send agreements for signature. The first few weeks are busy times for new employees. Make agreement signing convenient, secure, and easy to manage by sending the documents for eSignature.
   
3. Store and organize docs. With every new employee comes the conundrum of storing and easily accessing the documents and information that comes with them. (PS - The 1980s called. They want their filing cabinets back.) If you’ve digitized your onboarding forms, safely and securely storing them for future follow-up is a piece of cake, especially if your document and storage system are integrated.

Human resources is a prime spot for streamlining process management with document automation software and workflow templates. If your company has growth on the brain, consider the value of the time you’ll get back by automating the mandatory parts of onboarding and being present for the people-centric moments instead.

Formstack Documents is the HR professional’s preferred solution for workflow automation. With hundreds of free, premade templates for onboarding new employees, acting on the information you gather is simpler than ever. Do you want to know the best part? You can start generating documents for free! Never manually draft paperwork again.