Discover everything you need to know about Digital HR

Digital HR offers many benefits; it can transform the way an organisation works and is a crucial factor in business growth. For HR professionals, digital technology provides solutions that can help improve onboarding and employee experiences while streamlining workflows. Digital HR enables HR leaders to increase employee satisfaction and focus HR staff away from mundane tasks.

Using digital tools can unlock the true potential of your HR department. Read on to discover more about digital HR and how to implement it in your organisation.

What is digital HR?

Digital HR means using digital technology and automation to transform human resources processes. Implementing digital technology helps HR professionals modernise administration tasks and reduce the use of paper.

The use of integrated platforms and solutions can help the HR department to facilitate communication, streamline contracts with Contract Lifecycle Management, monitor the achievement of goals and create intuitive end-to-end workflows. It can also make the recruitment, selection and training processes more dynamic. Automated processes are essential for attracting, evaluating and retaining talent.

Improving workflows with Digital HR

A fundamental way of driving employee satisfaction is to prevent employees from having to do activities that waste time. Removing paperwork from day-to-day tasks allows teams to spend more time on value-add activities. The digital transformation of HR processes can also result in cost savings, opportunities for growth and better integration with other departments. The adoption of digital HR is transforming business and is becoming a necessity. As many employees start to return to work during the COVID-19 pandemic, digital HR solutions can support the process for re-hiring, compliance and health & safety agreements that allow businesses to re-open. HR teams need to send and monitor company-wide HR policy updates to their employees and rehire furloughed employees with ease. Digitising the HR process can help organisations recall employees after furlough and redundancy.

What are the benefits of digital HR?

Implementing digital HR solutions has several benefits for organisations. HR departments in many organisations are responsible for processing tons of employee documents, and often these processes can have many manual steps. As companies grow and scale, HR teams benefit from systems that can automate complex repeatable processes. The way candidates can apply for jobs, sign employment or promotion contracts electronically, give feedback, or have their goals set, can all be digitised.

Here are just some of the benefits of Digital HR:

• Increases efficiency and reduces administrative tasks

Implementing digital technology to improve processes makes the HR team more efficient and dynamic, promoting increased productivity. Docusign conducted a survey on HR trends in 2020 and discovered that HR teams are struggling to dedicate time to their most important work, and are instead spending time on other administrative tasks. Automating HR processes can save time, resource and cost.

• Helps to hire and onboard employees

Go digital for hiring and onboarding demonstrates investment in candidate experience. Implementing digital HR solutions can help teams streamline and speed up the entire hiring and onboarding process, and even enable HR to hire and onboard employees remotely. Digital HR can also help HR teams to comply with regulations and safeguard candidate confidentiality–it can help to establish processes to protect sensitive information.

• Improves employee experiences

Automated workflows can transform existing processes. The HR department plays a vital role in employing, training, promoting and retaining employees. HR automation can make life easier for both HR professionals and employees.

Digitising the processes that help develop talent and raise performance is an essential component of staying competitive. In a Forrester State of Systems of Agreement 2020 study, written on behalf of Docusign, almost a third of survey respondents said that they had lost potential candidates due to inefficient employment agreement processes in the last year.

Processes can be transformed entirely by connecting HR systems and forms, making them speedier and more secure. HR automation can be an essential step in enhancing employee experiences. As the amount of information employees receive increases, it's crucial to provide employees with better user experiences to reduce overwhelm.

• Reduces risks of error

Digital HR tools can connect systems and processes, reducing the need for duplication of data entry and repetitive tasks. It also reduces the risk of errors from manual transfer of information and data when creating contracts.

• Reduces the use of paper

Digital transformation of HR service and processes can rapidly reduce your organisation's use of paper, therefore helping the environment and reducing costs. It also reduces the additional costs of printing and posting while saving the time spent manually preparing contracts. Digital HR tools can help to make HR processes paperless.

• Streamlines employee data and contract management

In recent years, HR contract software has become a crucial tool for reducing manual processes, saving both time and effort for HR teams. Contract management in an HR setting can include recruitment, training development and compensation and can rapidly improve employee experiences. Discover more about contract management software for HR.

How can I implement digital HR in my company?

Knowing how to implement digital HR effectively is essential to success. A good place to start is to review HR touch-points to determine which tasks would most benefit from digital transactions. Here's an outline of how you may want to consider preparing to digitise the HR process.

• Define the goals and objectives you want to achieve.

• Analyse current processes and identify use cases for digitisation, identify those that will offer promising benefits. It's a good idea to consider both functional benefits and those that can contribute to the growth of your organisation and better experiences for users.

• Establish a clear vision for change and communicate it to your organisation.

• Form teams and appoint HR leaders for change.

• Select the right technology.

• Implement digital tools to automate workflows.

• Train your HR team and employees.

• Monitor adoption of new processes and tools, and gather continuous feedback.

Your first step toward digitising your HR processes could be a small one. For instance, you might decide to start by making new employee offer letters digital. You could identify all procedures that would benefit from digital automation and their priority order. Prioritisation can be driven by the time and effort of implementation assessed against the potential benefits. Discover more top tips for HR managers on digitising the hiring process for employees right through to the time they retire.

What digital HR tools and technology can be used to optimise processes?

People Analytics

In the HR sector, people analytics can be used to capture, summarise, compile and evaluate employee behaviour and working methods used by teams. People Analytics allows HR professionals to make data-driven decisions–it can help measure statistics like employee turnover and employee performance, and even how that is linked to financial performance. The results of the analysis can be used to increase employee engagement and drive productivity.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence is being used by forward-thinking Human Resources departments to simplify processes like sourcing, screening and interviewing candidates to increase the speed of recruitment. Artificial Intelligence also enables teams to search large volumes of employee agreements rapidly.

Mobile

Enabling employees to execute actions through mobile devices helps to facilitate integration and communication between employees and HR teams. It also provides the opportunity to monitor, approve, disapprove or revise specific tasks. It makes life easier for employees when they are travelling or working remotely. For example, with electronic signature software, you can sign an agreement via a mobile device from almost anywhere.

Docusign Agreement Cloud

The Docusign Agreement Cloud for HR can help companies of all sizes modernise and digitise contracts and agreements. The cloud-based solutions can help HR teams with document preparation, management and storage. The Docusign Agreement Cloud includes Docusign CLM; this contract lifecycle management software allows HR users to automate contracts and agreements. For example, K2 Partnering Solutions uses Docusign CLM to automate the onboarding of new talent.

The Docusign Agreement Cloud has over 350 integrations, including a partnership with Workday, cloud software that allows HR departments to track employee data. The Docusign for Workday integration transforms HR processes by integrating Docusign eSignature into any core Workday business function. You can create and send digital offer letters, offer benefits enrolment, employee handbook acknowledgement, non-disclosure agreements, and more. Discover more about integrating Docusign eSignature with Workday.

How can digital tools help HR to become more strategic?

The HR department is able to influence and drive an organisational culture which can deliver growth. Strategic HR is essential to the future of an organisation to align with overall long term goals. Digital tools can help with this.

• Engagement and Commitment of employees

Digital tools can help improve employee commitment and engagement by improving communication, training and the efficiency of processes. Engaged employees are less likely to leave, and better employee processes make sure it's more likely an organisation can retain talent.

• Productivity

Digital tools can offer functionality that looks at an organisation's processes and improves them with effective technology. Better communication, easier processes and better employee engagement all contribute towards increased performance and productivity of the organisation as a whole. Digital tools can unblock your organisation's HR team so they can spend more time on strategic tasks rather than administrative tasks.

• The ability to adapt to the future

The technological revolution is shaping the future of every sector and delivers the ability for many organisations to drive change. The use of digital HR represents the possibility of managing people and processes, and of aligning the company's interests towards success. Using digital tools, organisations can plan for future resourcing needs and match resource and employee requirements to future goals. Digitising HR processes can create employee efficiencies by automating manual tasks, reducing risk, and improving the employee experience. It can unblock HR teams from outdated tasks to focus on more meaningful work like culture and values.

Docusign helps teams to spend more time on people, not paper. Discover more about the benefits of Docusign for HR or speak to one of our experts today.