People, Not Paperwork: How to Boost HR Effectiveness with Intelligent Agreements

When you think of HR, people are always top of mind. After all, HR teams empower employees and unlock the talent within your organization. But what may not rise to the forefront is the role technology plays in that mission. As digital expectations rise and technology is capable of doing vastly more, the role of HR operations must evolve too, incorporating new tools that increase productivity, remove friction, and set employees up for success throughout their journey with the company.

When e-signature technology came onto the scene, it revolutionized how we sent and signed offer letters, employee onboarding documents, and other critical HR paperwork. But that was just the beginning. 

Today, Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) is transforming the entire agreement process, leveraging unified, cloud-based software to help teams, including HR, create, commit to, and manage agreements with more insights and less risk than ever. 

From faster hiring and onboarding to self-service employee requests and seamless offboarding, Docusign IAM improves the efficiency of document creation and supports compliance across regions and roles every step of the way. See how IAM gives HR teams the tools to cut down manual tasks, protect sensitive data, and put people at the heart of their mission.

HR depends on documents to get work done

People operations touch the entire employee lifecycle, from hire to retire. Even before candidates start their journey, HR sets the tone, empowering new hires with the information they need to succeed. It’s a big responsibility—and it comes with a lot of documents.

Each stage has its own set of document needs, from offer letters and NDAs to benefits summaries and security check-offs to termination contracts and severance agreements. When the process of creating, customizing, sending, and managing these documents is entirely manual and falls squarely on HR’s shoulders, it saps considerable time and resources. What’s more, the lack of automation and specialized agreement tools can turn HR teams into an unintentional bottleneck of employee data, slowing recruiters, finance, legal, and more.

Recent Docusign research revealed that increasing team productivity and effectiveness is a top priority for over 54% of HR teams—and nearly half struggle with staffing issues. 

Without the technology to automate agreement management, organize contract data, and stay on top of compliance, HR teams and employees have to grapple with costly inefficiencies:

• Communicating and checking across departments to make sure the right terms get into offer letters for a wide variety of roles, regions, and job levels.

• Manually filling in the same information on multiple forms, such as W-4, I-9, and consent forms.

• Tracking the completion of tasks across groups of employees via email, phone calls, and individual reminders.

• Re-entering data across systems, uploading documents more than once, and manually confirming that only the right people have access.

• Searching through emails and disparate platforms to locate and verify documents and signatures.

E-signature solutions ease the burden—but even more can be digitized

The signature process has come a long way from the days of in-office clipboards. Now, e-signature technology allows people operations to send employees offer letters on their phone or via email. But HR’s role is just too essential—and its responsibilities much more widespread—for signing alone to meet all of their administrative needs.

The agreement lifecycle doesn’t start or end with signatures. Creating and managing these documents is also critical for boosting productivity and maximizing the value of every HR process and team member. People operations teams need a holistic agreement solution to cover all three phases, allowing teams to:

• Find information faster, without having to confirm emails or chase signatures.

• Improve the candidate and new hire experience by tracking upcoming tasks, so they can get excited about their new opportunity.

• Handle high contract volumes and short deadlines by allowing people ops to quickly build, customize, and deliver documents in bulk with confidence and accuracy.

• Manage all terms and conditions through a central platform for storing and tracking commitments made in employee agreements.

The Docusign IAM difference: faster and more secure people operations and better talent experiences from start to finish 

In a world of evolving HR responsibilities, work models, and technology, Docusign IAM makes people operations simpler and more effective at every step. From hiring and pre-boarding through personnel changes and transitions, everyone involved in HR gets to tap into a smoother, faster, more secure agreement experience.

With IAM, teams can keep track of to-dos, deepen employee relationships and make more data-driven decisions through the following features:

• Centralized storage: Make contract details easier to find with a unified secure platform where teams can store agreements, search for particular clauses, and understand obligations using Docusign Navigator.

• Efficient, consistent generation of documents and forms: Say goodbye to juggling hundreds of templates, forgetting to include an onboarding document, and wondering if your recruiters included the right terms.

• Streamlined agreement preparation: Easily create and automatically update templates for frequently used forms and contracts like NDAs, offer letters, and employment agreements with Docusign Agreement Preparation.

• Bulk send and multi-channel delivery capabilities: Send the correct forms and terms to just one employee or hundreds of recipients at a time.

• Robust data protection: Manage security obligations through ID verification measures that give only the right people access to the right agreements and personal employee data.

• Automated workflows: Eliminate manual tasks with no-code workflows, reusable templates with pre-placed fields, and AI-driven summaries.

• Data insights: Track completion, contracts with specific terms, and other metrics to identify process bottlenecks and implement data-driven improvements.

• Self-service access: Empower candidates and employees with access to their agreements at any time, from virtually anywhere, with personalized workspaces.

No more sorting through templates, forgetting to upload forms to the right system with the right permissions, or searching endlessly for a particular agreement or term. Instead, HR hours per employee go down, employee engagement goes up, and noncompliance risks shrink.

Optimize your people’s potential with Intelligent Agreement Management

HR is about people, not paperwork. The right technology frees people ops teams to focus on just that, being dynamic problem-solvers and organizational heroes.

In the constant swirl of HR tasks, Docusign IAM acts as an anchor, combining a versatile agreement generator with AI assists and an intuitive, mobile-friendly platform. From the moment top talent arrives on your radar throughout their career at your organization, Docusign IAM helps HR teams and employees make the best use of their time, talents, and technology.

Learn more about how IAM helps HR teams thrive.