Improve your employee experience: digitally sign and manage your documents
With the arrival of a new HRIT system, almost everyone thinks that, from now on, everything will happen automatically. Until recently, you were in for a rude awakening. Before the foundation is in place, a lot of the work still has to be done manually. A big stumbling block is caused by expectations surrounding templates for document generation and limitations of functionality. But with the latest generation of HCM systems, a different era has begun. In this blog, AMS agent Balázs Székely and Senior Business Consultant Tom Wijers explain why Workday Docs will amaze you.
Until previously, SuccessDay’s two HRIT specialists had to regularly dampen clients’ expectations when it came to automated document generation. “People often believe that the sky is the limit. Customers come to design sessions with a whole list of requirements: whether it can be in their own house style, whether tables can be included, text in multiple columns in multiple languages, you name it. I have had to disappoint them the past, but I am happy to say that it is all possible nowadays,” says Tom. All because of a new feature in HRIT land. At Workday, this feature is called Workday Docs, but SuccessDay also plans to support this feature from other HCM systems, such as those from Oracle and Ceridian.
What is Workday Docs?
Since late last year, this feature has been available in Workday with templates for offer letters and employment contracts. The interface for creating and managing documents is very similar to that of Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Making it much more user-friendly and easier to maintain. This is quite an improvement compared to how it used to be. Before, digital documents looked like nothing fancy, and the text blocks were rather user-unfriendly in design. Now the best of both worlds has emerged: digital documents that are always up to date, with the familiar look and feel of documents on stationery from the old days. This contributes to a better employee experience, from the earliest possible stage, which is useful in today’s tight labor market.
SuccessDay employs several experts who can configure documents for clients. “With the editor, we can insert data fields, tables, images and other content for our clients or manage conditional rules. In addition, we can create and edit built-in headers, and footers, and add logos and fonts. This gives the documents the familiar look and feel that employees are used to from their organizations—and allows us to pleasantly surprise new candidates,” Balázs explains.
Making customers happy
Based in Budapest, the AMS agent has already developed templates for several Dutch clients. He is currently working on documents for a large biotechnology company headquartered in the Netherlands. Documents for the United States were recently delivered and documents for Denmark were practically finished by mid-July. Furthermore, together with Tom, he is already well underway to tackle documents for the Netherlands. “Every country has different laws and regulations, so it’s definitely not a copy-and-paste exercise—always a new challenge,” Balázs says.
Several SuccessDay customers have already expressed an interest in using the templates in their own house style. Tom: “SuccessDay already supports several customers in this way. Ultimately, a lot of manual work will disappear—also because the hiring process takes place entirely within the system, instead of being done partly manually—via email—and partly in Workday. Besides improving the employee experience, the other key benefit is being GDPR-compliant. So, customers will be happy about it. And there is nothing more rewarding than making customers happy.”
Other use cases coming soon
Now I hear you asking: what about signatures? Workday Docs supports both DocuSign and Adobe e-sign. Documents signed via one of these tools are automatically linked to the employee’s profile within the system, so there is no need to store the document outside of Workday anymore. In addition, you can take the following steps for document review:
- E-signature
- Confirmation (a simple check mark to accept the document)
- None of the above options (if you just want to send the document)
The last option can be useful for companies/countries where laws do not allow digital signatures but require a wet signature.
What about other documents? Currently, this feature is only available for recruitment documents (offer letters and employment contracts), but also in HCM processes that may result in a contractual change for the employee. These include changing jobs, adding an additional job, the employee contract, and termination of a contract. In addition, these include reference letters, a probationary period letter, and wage theft prevention notice. Furthermore, Workday further extends the functionality to all the processes that DocGen already enabled.
For whom is this feature useful? For Workday customers who have not yet used document generation for offer letters and employment agreements. In fact, now is the time to go for it and start using Workday for document generation. You’ll be saving paper and thereby trees. Even if you’re a Workday customer who already has several documents configured—but is frustrated by the limitations—now is the time to switch to Workday Docs. We are happy to get into building new templates for your organization.
