Keeping Work Human: Our HR Team’s Approach to the Employee Experience

In today's competitive business landscape, companies are increasingly recognizing the critical role of employee experience in driving success and fostering a thriving workplace culture.

To delve deeper into this topic, we sat down with Andrea Otis, director of people systems and operations at DocuSign. With her expertise in managing employee experience at scale, she shared valuable insights on how DocuSign prioritizes and enhances the employee experience to drive growth and success.

Priority 1: Get the employee experience right

Employee experience is paramount to the success of any organization. It encompasses all aspects of an employee's journey, from their first interaction with the company during the hiring process to their ongoing development and engagement within the organization. When employees have a positive experience, they are more likely to be engaged, productive and committed to their work. Moreover, a great employee experience attracts top talent, helps retain valuable employees and ultimately drives customer satisfaction.

Onboard talent and get them productive faster

According to McKinsey, the highest achievers outperform their peers by 800%, but you have to work hard to create an environment that enables your talent to do their best work. I’ve found that using a tool like DocuSign eSignature to deliver simple and positive employee experiences is a low-cost way to enable our talent to stay productive and maintain high performance.

We achieve this by:

• Meeting employees where they are: Companies today face a difficult question: Keep remote options available or bring employees back to the office? As organizations navigate hybrid work and distributed workforces, they’ll need to continue to deliver important documents to employees. DocuSign eSignature helps us quickly deliver agreements and forms to our employees no matter where they are. 
• Building trust in turbulent times: The HR landscape has changed in recent years. Economic uncertainty paired with rounds of layoffs lowers employee morale. An employee-centered approach in all business areas helps rebuild trust and keep employees engaged. 
• Giving a warm sendoff: It might sound counterintuitive, but your offboarding process can be a long-term retention strategy. People leave companies and then change their minds all the time. A positive offboarding experience tells employees how meaningful your relationship with them is and lets them know the door is open if they decide to come back.

Embrace a people-centric mindset

Employees have to deal with a lot of paperwork throughout their careers. It’s the nature of employment. Data collection and compliance requirements are usually at odds with a pleasant experience. But no part of the employee experience should be painful.

At DocuSign, we support our employees from day one by identifying the “moments that matter” throughout the employee lifecycle and making them as uncomplicated as possible.

This can be tricky to navigate without the right tools. I’ve had roles in the past where employee processes were a lot more tedious and complicated than they needed to be. Pairing DocuSign with Workday simplifies touchpoints across the employee lifecycle—ultimately keeping employees happier and more engaged with the work they were hired to do.

Priority 2: Collect and manage data

A key part of our role in HR is collecting, storing, and maintaining employee data. This work begins when we hire a new employee and continues even after an employee leaves the company. To do this well, we need the right tools and technologies working together in a fully integrated system.

DocuSign eSignature is the connector that keeps these systems in sync.

Simplify your data-gathering process

Data collection requirements are a fact of HR life, but they don’t typically add value to the employee experience, and can be manual and time consuming for both the employee and human resources professionals to manage. We want to make it simple for our employees to provide us with the data we need, and streamline the work for HR to process this data.

One of the most exciting times in an employee’s journey is when they join the company. In HR Operations, we want to give them an onboarding experience that is engaging and welcoming. DocuSign helps us by providing a personalized signing experience and by simplifying the data collection process.

In just a few clicks, we can:

• Select the correct employment agreement template
• Make specific changes to the agreement by role
• Add review/approval steps if necessary
• Send it to the new employee to sign from anywhere in the world
• Securely store that data so you can update it at any time

Prior to using eSignature, we would need to coordinate a time to have someone come in and sign their offer letter in person or spend money to ship new hire paperwork to and from the New Hire. That would be a huge bottleneck for a growing global company with operations in different states, countries, and time zones. 

Use data to drive future decisions

Accuracy is everything when it comes to managing the hire-to-retire lifecycle for employees worldwide. Outdated or inaccurate data in our systems could cause problems when it’s time to prepare an agreement or send a report.

Priority 3: Stay secure and compliant

Candidates and employees rely on us to keep their personal information safe. Having an agreement platform designed with enterprise-grade security features allows us to provide them with peace of mind that their data is secure.

Keep employee information safe

Veteran HR executives know the pain of analog workflows. Before digitization, we’d have to send offer letters and policy documents through the mail for manual signature—adding a whole new level of security risk. Paper workflows lead to uncertainties such as:

• Did the right person receive it? 
• How long will they take to respond? 
• Who has access to the data in the meantime?

With eSignature we have visibility into the end-to-end document process. We don’t need to worry about mishandling documents or tracking down where an agreement is. Everything is digitized in one centralized repository. Two-factor authentication and ID verification help us ensure the person signing the document is who they say they are.

The digital agreement process is more flexible. If a contract or non-disclosure agreement contains sensitive information, HR leaders can manage who gets to see the data internally. It gives us peace of mind that only the people we have approved have access to the data.

Prepare for compliance audits

Preparing for an audit can be costly, time-consuming and inefficient. Not preparing for an audit can be catastrophic. While it’s tempting to put it off, having a comprehensive audit checklist ensures your company’s practices are legally above board.

Executing documents and contracts with eSignature creates an automatic record of all actions taken on the document including time received, opened and signed. The identifying information of each signee is recorded at the time of signing, along with a confirmation that each signee agreed to provide an electronic signature. This documentation gives us a complete audit trail for compliance purposes.

Maintaining compliance can take up hours of employee time across the company. By leveraging eSignature, and automating documentation, we can make the most of limited legal and compliance resources.

No matter the contract, we have a template that identifies the legal steps beforehand, so we can dot every “i” and cross every “t.” For a large enterprise like DocuSign, this mitigates the risk of doing business around the world.

Why HR leaders need to take a service-first mindset

HR exists to balance the needs of the business with those of our employees. This means creating systems to collect and manage data that are secure, easy to maintain and enable data driven business decisions while at the same time ensuring they’re convenient and seamless for employees.

Any part of the employee experience that causes delays or confusion is a missed opportunity to do better. A poorly designed process adds time to busy HR professionals’ days and could lead to losing your best talent or exposing your company to cybersecurity and compliance risk.

DocuSign eliminates paper-based processes that slow down agreement management—helping you increase compliance and create a better employee experience across the board.

Learn more about DocuSign solutions for HR.