Efficiency, Security, and Compliance: 3 Ways Employee Onboarding Automation Returns Your Investment

Employee onboarding is a time-consuming, monotonous, yet necessary process that ensures all federal and local regulations are met and that new hires understand the requirements and expectations for the job at hand. All of this ultimately translates into a pile of forms and contracts that new hires must navigate and sift through to begin their new position. 

A new job should be an exciting time full of opportunities and new challenges, but a mismanaged onboarding process can create roadblocks to an impactful start. In fact, Zippia reports that organizations with a strong onboarding process improve retention by 82% and productivity by 70%. 

Below, we highlight a few key ways that employee onboarding automation can lead to a more secure, compliant, and efficient organization while paving the way for new hires to make an immediate and noticeable impact.

3 Ways You’ll See Your Onboarding Automation Returns On Investment

1 Enhance Efficiency

The employee onboarding process involves lengthy, confusing forms that are time-consuming to complete and frequently lead to follow-up questions from new hires. The W-4 tax form and I-9 employment verification forms, for example, contain countless fields that may or may not need to be completed depending on previous answers. These forms also all have many questions in common, such as the employee’s social security number and address.

New hires can be guided through this onboarding process, though, using web forms that only display fields relevant to the current individual and automatically fill in fields that have been answered in previous forms and sections. 

This ultimately saves time that could have been spent waiting for clarification or completing unnecessary prompts. This method also dramatically improves the onboarding experience for your employees with streamlined, easy-to-understand form completion and increases productivity for HR staff by opening up time to focus on other initiatives. This process even allows new hires to hit the ground running with faster access to the tools and resources locked behind forms like company privacy compliance agreements and NDAs. 

Another onboarding challenge involves a lack of visibility into when these forms are completed. By automatically routing them to HR staff upon completion, these forms can quickly be reviewed, approved, and archived, eliminating time spent on follow-ups and form collection and ensuring these documents efficiently make it to their final destination for easy retrieval when needed.

2 Improve Compliance

Businesses are regularly audited to ensure they adhere to regulations. U.S. federal policy requires that every new hire fill out I-9 employment verification forms to ensure they are cleared to work in the United States. Failure to produce I-9 forms when requested or audited can result in fines ranging from $281 to $2,789 per violation.

Additional forms that contribute to compliance regulations, such as recognition of workplace security quality assurance policies, background check authorizations, and W-4 tax forms, may also be included in the onboarding process.

Proper onboarding procedures that streamline the process and provide visibility into form completion ensure these documents are filled out by all employees. Automatic archival and indexing also help maintain records of these forms for easy access during audits from enforcing regulators and agencies.

When coupled with effective enterprise content management that offers advanced search options, reports confirming the completion and archival of these forms can even be drafted prior to an audit or inquiry. This ultimately eliminates stress and simplifies the audit process.

This universally enforces compliance and allows organizations to provide quick proof of this enforcement, greatly reducing the risk of costly errors and fines.

3 Simplify Security

Employee onboarding forms contain a large amount of personally identifiable information such as social security number, address, date of birth, and more. This information is extremely valuable in many fraud and cyber crimes, so protecting it is essential to ensuring employee well-being and maintaining adherence to best practices.

By keeping this information digital in a secure solution throughout its lifecycle, organizations can prevent the risk of leaks through paper forms and local PDFs, which are easily accessible to others in the workspace. Onboarding new hires using secure web forms that automatically archive records upon completion greatly assists in keeping this information digital. 

To ensure a solution is secure, make sure it uses single sign-on technology and permission-based controls so that access to sensitive information can be monitored and managed.  This ensures that security measures are enforced across all employees and prevents inadvertent errors that can leave an opening for leaks. 

For cloud-hosted solutions, encryption of data both at rest and in transit prevents it from being leveraged by unauthorized sources, while compliance with privacy and security standards like SOC and HIPAA indicates a high level of care from providers in protecting your data. 

These security measures greatly mitigate the risk of information leaks that can result in harm to your staff as well as reputational and legal damages to your business.

The Resulting ROI:

The result of the benefits mentioned is a substantial return on investment. This return includes hard, easily measurable benefits like enhanced productivity in your HR department, more immediate productivity spikes from new hires, lower turnover due to positive employee experiences, and reduced fines due to compliance violations. It also includes soft benefits like reduced security risks, more efficient use of HR staff’s time, and more convenient access to information.

WoodSpring Hotels Property Management, for example, automated its onboarding process amidst a period of rapid organizational growth. Using their new solution from Square 9, the hotel chain was able to save 25% of its administrative time, hiring 970 new employees without needing to grow its HR department.

Why Square 9

Square 9 is a leading provider of AI-powered intelligent information management solutions that take the paper out of work and make it easier to get things done. With digital workflows that automate many aspects of how you work today, we make it easy by extracting information from scans or PDFs, storing documents in a searchable archive, and building digital twins of your current processes through graphical workflows.