It's never been a better time for HR functions to accelerate towards digital transformation.

With the current popularization of remote workers and the hybrid work model, HR teams need to support a workforce that's increasingly spread out geographically. Business leaders who want to foster a positive culture must now assume a critical role in enabling tomorrow's hybrid workplace, provided that the right technologies and processes are in place.

HR, until recently, has been fairly resistant to change, with teams doing in-person onboarding, training, and payroll and benefits. Teams amid transition face not only many barriers to communication but also a long list of solutions to consider and prioritize. The key is to start simple and focus on achieving the most significant impact with the least effort.

An excellent place to start is e-signatures. Businesses have begun to tinker and experiment with e-signatures as a more strategic and systematic part of the digital transformation of their organizational culture, and many successful companies have had the same idea. In 2020, we saw a precedent-breaking 2,530% increase in the use of e-signatures by HR professionals in team agreements and other documents, and this number is sure to grow.

Get started with DottedSign today! Digitize your signature process and enjoy the freedom of workplace mobility. Free trials available.

Implementation

While e-signatures are widely seen as the low-hanging fruit of digital transformation, the implementation should be deliberate and rolled out over phases. To make teams stronger, managers should start with the processes that add the greatest benefit in terms of productivity, a more inclusive culture, and cost savings. Whether you're a SaaS content marketing agency or an eCommerce business, your business can't live long without digitalization techniques.

Offer letters and employment agreements should be naturally prioritized since they are crucial for onboarding and they benefit individuals joining the company. However, this type of paperwork comes with one-time hurdles for onboarding staff and may have a negligible impact on long-term job satisfaction and company culture over the long run.

Therefore, some businesses may want to prioritize digitizing other everyday documents such as payroll slips, timesheets, and expense reimbursements that remote and hybrid workers may be asked to sign regularly.

Digitizing all these processes would greatly accelerate turnaround as they skip the cumbersome procedure of physically printing, signing, scanning, and finally sending back signed documents. This, in turn, serves to drive business performance by preserving staff bandwidth, morale, and productivity, creating avenues for employees to focus on more strategic projects.

Most importantly, this saves time and energy for relationship managers. Across every industry, HR teams need to manage hundreds to thousands of individual signatures. It's important to adopt e-signatures in the spaces where in-person connections involve hard-copy signatures and can be impactful, such as the rollout of thousands of handbooks or program enrollments for employees who may be scattered across several regions.

Other general HR and payroll processes include:

• Recruitment (applications, reference consent forms, and confidentiality agreements)

• Non-disclosure agreements for contractors

• Onboarding, new-hire paperwork, tax, and employee eligibility forms

• Timekeeping records related to payrolls

• Enrollment forms and communications for benefits

• Staff meetings and hybrid meetings for performance reviews

• Staff appraisals, disciplinary actions, and other performance-related activities

Before starting, however, we often come across a few key concerns and challenges raised by our HR-based clients. We want to take the opportunity to address them here.

Compliance

One of the most common questions is whether or not e-signatures are legally binding within the jurisdictions in which you operate. Generally speaking, e-signatures are widely accepted in North America (the US, Canada, and Mexico). In these regions, e-signatures are valid for most business activities. Decision-makers may also want to consult experts in meeting the requirements, including verifying and securing e-signatures, sending consent forms, and allowing easy access to signed documents.

We've supported clients in the transition to hybrid work culture, such as with Singapore-based Slasify, as their contracts involve banking documents, contracts, and regulatory documents signed by local and foreign employees.

"Due to the fact that our business involves dealing with a heavy load of contract signing needs, we appreciate the referral to DottedSign," said Carlos, Founder of Slasify. "This service has solved many of our issues encountered in the past."

Outside the United States and Singapore, geographies in which e-signatures are recognized include Taiwan and the European Union, where a strong culture of digitization is widespread. And in markets such as China, we've seen a growing acceptance of this trend. However, individual situations may vary, and HR teams should speak to advisors at the local level to make a more informed decision.

Hybrid Culture, Security, and Flexibility

Depending on where you operate, local cultural practices may also play a significant role. In regions such as East Asia, authorities and businesses tend to prefer official stamps over signatures. Slasify, for instance, had the advantage of deploying DottedSign's stamp function on mobile devices for their Asian clients.

With the growing perception that e-signatures are more secure than their traditional pen-and-paper counterparts, some solutions offer enhanced security features. These include monitoring the infrastructure for suspicious activities, threats, and information security risks, secured through load balancers, firewalls, and VPNs. Read more about security models such as those offered by DottedSign.

Perhaps most importantly, HR planners may need to work through and address potential disruptions to the integrity of the process. These include the risk of fraud since the technology can be hacked or compromised. As a robust e-signature service, DottedSign can help combat these risks with identity verification and one-time passwords.

It's advisable to build appropriate safeguards. Ensure that an efficient management platform is in place and integrated with your existing HR systems to track your documents properly. Once they're on the cloud, your system should be able to display data such as signing times and signatures in an easily visible format.

Of course, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Comparatively, small businesses without legacy HRM systems can still access SaaS-based e-signature solutions such as DottedSign, which can adjust and scale according to company size and specific business needs.

Efficiency, Simplicity, Confidentiality

Once the e-signature rollout is ready to launch, HR will need to socialize the integration across functions and departments to build consensus and alignment. Communication is key, and internal messaging should center on the importance of its efficiency, simplicity, and confidentiality. Whether you're a SaaS content marketing agency or an eCommerce business, you need to make sure that your team is on the same track. Finally, flexibility is important to ensure widespread internal adoption across geographies, taking into account differences in local contexts and regulations.

In the increasingly hybrid work model, e-signatures have become an important pillar to any digital transformation strategy and modernization of human resources. It addresses the growing importance of mobility, timeliness, and speed in today's fast-paced environment, with the time saved from paperwork better spent on empowering remote staff and strategic initiatives.

Get started with DottedSign today! Digitize your signature process and enjoy the freedom of workplace mobility! Free trials available.