From hire to retire: How efficient Workday document management improves employee experience
Enhancing employee experience presents impacts far beyond HR to influence staff retention, organisational relationships, productivity, and innovation. While HR leaders may prioritise big-ticket items, a positive employee experience requires a foundation of streamlined, standardised HR processes. Though seemingly insignificant compared to marquee initiatives like salaries, training, and culture, document management within Workday is one such process that, when simplified, can incrementally increase efficiency while bolstering functional HR performance—creating a lasting, positive employee experience.
Managing documents from their first day to their last
At its core, employee experience is the perception that an employee has at different stages of their professional journey. A positive experience requires business leaders and HR teams to focus on every individual touchpoint throughout an employee’s journey with an organisation.
Onboarding is one of the first and most important steps in the employee journey. Helping new team members to acclimate to different roles and integrate with your business has a major impact on an employee’s experience and a poor experience can negatively impact their relationship with a business.
The onboarding process can be intensive, with the average new hire expected to complete 54 activities. Termination and retirement can be equally administratively exhausting, with specific documentation requirements for pensions, termination agreements, and tax documents.
Mobile and distributed workforces can make these processes more difficult again, requiring expensive document couriers and creating drawn-out, disparate onboarding processes that frustrate employees and preoccupy HR teams.
Effective, streamlined tools can help to make document processes within these stages of the employee lifecycle more efficient, from onboarding to offboarding and every step between. Simple document distribution to personal and Workday inboxes makes the talent acquisition process easier for teams and new recruits to promote a positive experience from day one.
As worker populations expand and change, an ideal scenario is were documents are stored accessibly on worker profiles, all within Workday, giving your workforce and HR teams access to all the information they need instantly. When a worker’s journey with your business ends, fully customisable retention rules have the ability to make document compliance completely hands-off.
Focusing on tactical and process changes such as these can have a hugely positive effect outside of the HR function, with improved onboarding increasing staff retention by as much as 50% while boosting employee satisfaction. By consolidating and streamlining the management of employee documents, businesses can ensure that HR teams can focus on making sure employees are happy from the second they apply, to their last day.
Empowered and productive teams are happier
Beyond onboarding, stress and the ability to be productive are major contributors to job satisfaction and a positive employee experience. In addition to their core roles, employees can be responsible for managing large amounts of personal administration, interacting with HR throughout their tenure to sign new contracts, manage absence, or request training.
When the documents attached to these requests and processes are managed across multiple systems or legacy software, valuable time is unnecessarily spent haphazardly approaching these tasks.
When resources are already stretched, these additional small yet cumbersome tasks can be detrimental to the ability of employees to fulfil their roles effectively, causing overall job satisfaction to suffer.
HR teams are also tied up in completing these requests, finding the correct documentation, and exchanging information manually. Lost documentation or slow responses result in high numbers of HR tickets and help requests, inhibiting productivity and reducing HR teams' ability to fulfil their core purpose—making sure that every employee feels comfortable and able to do their job effectively.
Automation, however, can empower business leaders to enable employees to be at their best by optimising business processes and minimising friction during HR interactions. By allowing HR teams to operate more efficiently and employees to complete vital administrative tasks with ease, it can truly eradicate barriers to productivity brought about by poor document management practices.
Enhanced, automated document functionality within Workday means creation, storage, retention, and purging involves minimal manual input. With consolidated templates, eSignature capabilities, and dynamic data insertion, creating documents can be more efficient than ever for HR teams.
The benefits extend beyond the function, with employees able to access documents centrally through a familiar and intuitive dashboard to focus on what they were hired to do. Enabling HR teams to efficiently generate and manage documents means they can focus on multiplying the benefits across your business, helping empoyees to feel satisfied and perform at their best.
Dynamic businesses need adaptable solutions
Businesses, especially large, global organisations, are dynamic and constantly changing. Although change brings improvements and growth, rapid change can bring about ‘change fatigue’—a negative perception of transformation that can lead to apathy, burnout and frustration, ultimately harming your business.
When new strategic initiatives like mergers, hybrid working or rapid expansion are underway, thousands of new documents like contracts and training files need to be created, placing HR teams under enormous strain, limiting effective communication with employees. Being able to effectively and easily adapt to these projectss is key for any business and, at the heart of change management is a HR function equipped with simplified, automated processes.
Workday already helps businesses plan, adapt and grow with scalable solutions and Kainos Employee Document Management (Kainos EDM) builds on these benefits by helping your HR teams to create, store and manage vital documentation easily and with familiarity.
If new software means more training and often, frustration for your Workforce, Kainos EDM works inside your Workday configuration, with an interface that looks, feels, and acts just like Workday to minimise the friction of introducing new tools.
With automated document generation using your Workday data in a secure and compliant way, the complex document needs brought about by business change don’t impact HR operations. Flexible management policies and enhanced categories mean your business can quickly adapt to regional expansion and updated compliance requirements. This ensures that big changes to business as usual doesn’t equate to document administration overload for your employees, so HR teams can focus on making transitions as smooth as possible.
Empowering employee experience with automated document management
Every organisation’s people and requirements are unique and will evolve, but one constant is the need for HR processes that enable your business to stay flexible and your workforce to prioritise the task at hand. With changes in how teams work, HR leaders can no longer look at employee experience one-dimensionally, with every aspect of the journey contributing to a positive employee experience.
Workday’s ability to bring together siloed systems and provide unique insights helps businesses build a human-centric approach to HRIS so, it makes sense to leverage a document management solution that can do the same. Kainos Employee Document Management, the only end-to-end Workday employee document management system, provides an accessible platform that streamlines and simplifies the creation, management and storage of employee documents.
By building this functionality into your existing Workday system, you can make admin easier for teams and free up HR partners to focus on improving the employee experience—from hire to retire.