Hyphen transforms contractor experiences with Docusign eSignature

Hyphen is a global expertise group that specialises in bringing together leading organisations and first-class experts. Its mission is to find and recruit the best individuals and teams to solve the complex challenges faced by governments, foundations, and corporations. It has challenged itself to build a more sustainable digital-first business model, optimised for remote and hybrid working environments. Going completely paperless is part of this digitisation process.

Hyphen identified workflow pain points across its organisation around contract signing response times, a lack of visibility in the agreement signing process, and internal staff inefficiencies caused by out-dated work procedures. Using Docusign eSignature has enabled Hyphen to streamline the sharing of documents and contracts, thereby improving staff efficiencies and delivering smarter workflows for its 500-strong contractor base. At the same time, it has drastically reduced running costs, helping to support its sustainable business aims.

Reshaping workflows for a smarter digital future 

Hyphen is a fully remote company with employees, clients, and a network of business leaders located around the globe. It identified that to remain competitive and agile, it needed to completely digitise the end-to-end agreement processes. Such a digital transformation would make organisational procedures faster, erase possible errors and make the company more secure from a data security and privacy perspective.

Prior to using Docusign, Hyphen would manually create contracts and NDAs for freelance contractors sending the results via email, post, or courier for wet signing and return. As part of the contract negotiation process, different versions of the agreement would often be sent back and forth between parties, with annotated amends being made prior to a final signing of the document. This was not only labour intensive but also incredibly time consuming, slowing down the efficient running of operations. 

Accelerating digital efficiencies with Docusign

Docusign eSignature was chosen for the sharing of NDAs, as well as the signing and processing of contract agreements with Hyphen’s wide network of contractors. Using the Docusign API also made the rollout and deployment extremely easy to handle. Features such as the developer and productive environments enhanced the experience, as did the innovative go-live review functionality.

Hyphen has seen immediate benefits to using Docusign eSignature. The visibility of the agreement chain has improved overall response rates, while the use of responsive search, tags, and folders as part of the document storage system has made it easier to manage multiple contractors. The ability to review and sign contracts on mobile devices has further improved efficiencies.

As a result, internal teams have seen an impressive 75% time saving in creating, sending, and collecting contracts and it has also been able to reduce discussion times around confidential information with its contractors from three hours to just 20 minutes in most cases.  

A major time and efficiency saving for Hyphen has been the creation of templates within Docusign eSignature. Being able to replace a general template with a bespoke document while retaining all existing form fields vastly reduces the potential for mistakes. This is especially beneficial when ad-hoc contract changes are required.

Hyphen uses Docusign Connect to automatically download and archive all the signed documents, giving the organisation complete visibility of the signing process, reducing potential future errors, and meeting compliance requirements.

This streamlined process has heralded considerable improvements in signing completion rates for Hyphen. Almost 100% of issued NDAs are now completed by contractors prior to work beginning, up for 66% before deploying Docusign. Furthermore, Docusign eSignature has also enabled Hyphen to meet its sustainability targets by reducing its paper footprint to zero.

Reshaping future digital workflows with Docusign

Docusign eSignature has allowed Hyphen to deliver better and more timely services to its clients by significantly improving the end-to-end user experience for its contractors. However, this is just the start of the journey as the organisation is looking to make Docusign an integrated part of its ecosystem, by further digitising its workflows. This will include additional features such as Docusign Identify to strengthen the processing of legal documents.

After the success of its Docusign integration with its contractor-facing business, Hyphen is also looking to merge manual processes associated with its client-facing contract management system. Given the experiences Hyphen has acquired around its contractor-facing initiative, it is confident this next phase will be equally successful.