Accelerating Your Human Resources Digital Journey

Tips for existing Docusign customers looking to digitize more of their HR hire-to-retire processes

By Dea Allgood, Customer Success Architect, Docusign

As a Docusign customer success architect, I spend a lot of time working in the field with our HR customers planning and implementing digital solutions to automate and simplify HR processes. I work with customers beginning with their first Docusign project through planning and deploying digital automation solutions across multiple HR functions and processes. In this blog I’m sharing some of the steps-to-success based on our customers’ experiences to help you be more successful and reach your HR digitization goals faster. (I cover this topic in an on-demand webinar as well).

When I first engage with a customer, they are usually trying to solve for a single process problem, such as improving their new-hire offer letter process. After they deploy Docusign for their first use case and start to get a taste of the cost-savings and efficiency benefits, it’s not long before they ask ‘What can we digitize next?’

When a customer successfully gets a digitization project ‘under their belt’, they usually move up the digital maturity curve quickly and can take on more high-impact, high-business value projects. One of our customers, a leading global technology manufacturer made an organizational commitment to digitize across their HR hire-to-retire processes. They wanted to modernize the employee experience to align with the company’s cutting-edge tech brand. Together we developed their digital roadmap with multiple phases, first assessing and prioritizing each HR process based on the time, effort and expected business benefits from digitization. I also advised them to include both users and executives as advocates for the project to provide insight at key points and ensure adoption. Over 18 months, they digitized new-hire documents for mobile access, automated benefits updates, and eventually integrated Docusign eSignature with their HR system of record, Workday.

The business results were pretty dramatic. Time-to-hire for new candidates shrunk by 70%, benefits update processes were more efficient with improved accuracy, and they brought their employee experience into the digital era. Did I mention these projects can be addictive? With this success, the company has begun digitizing additional areas of the business including product and sales processes.

If you’re considering how to digitize and automate more of your HR processes, here are a few tips to help you get started:

It’s a journey – get started, expand and grow. As a Docusign customer, you’ve already taken the first step. You can build on that success and know-how to approach even larger or more complex HR processes. Maybe you started by digitizing new-hire offer letters with Docusign. Investigate what it would take to digitize the employee on-boarding paperwork. As your new digital processes gains traction and deliver value, consider integrating with other business systems, such as your HR system of record, to gain further efficiencies.
Create a digital roadmap with prioritized projects. This is an important step. Make the effort to evaluate other HR areas or processes that could benefit from digital automation and prioritize them. To do this, you’ll want to assess the potential benefits of digitizing each ‘use case’ against the time and effort to implement. This prioritized list of projects becomes your digital roadmap. For more information on prioritizing digital use cases in HR, view this on-demand webinar.
Nurture and identify digital advocates and partners: Since you’ve already digitized at least one HR process with Docusign, it’s important to nurture and engage those users. This group is strategic to your larger digital goals. As users build digital competence and confidence, advocates and partners will emerge to help make your organization’s digital roadmap and digital transformation a reality.

For more steps-to-success, current Docusign customers can download our guide Accelerate your Employee Hire-to-Retire Process from our support center or contact success@docusign.com.