Governments struggle with attracting and engaging talented employees, especially younger ones. One reason for that is out-of-date recruitment and human resources (HR) processes that compete poorly against their private-sector counterparts.
“The biggest obstacle has always been outdated and inefficient processes,” said Barton Phillips, Vice President, Public Sector, at DocuSign, a leader in electronic signature and agreement management.
“Think about a recruit considering a job at one of the Washington Technology Top 100 companies versus [one with] the federal government. Same industry, same geography,” he said.
The private-sector application is digital, online and trackable, so the candidate knows where they are in the process. But the government version requires paper forms, faxing, scanning, emails — and offers no way to know how the application is progressing. That lack of visibility can cost an agency potential talent, especially given the typically longer time-to-hire in government.
“You have younger, more technology-savvy employees who come in with this passion for public service, coming out of universities or a private-sector world where they’re used to digital processes, and you put them in an environment where it immediately seems antiquated,” Phillips said. “It reinforces a stereotype about working in government.”
Improve EX From First Day to Last
For one federal agency, replacing a cumbersome onboarding process with a DocuSign digital workflow reduced the cycle time for providing access to agency enterprise resources by 62%, Phillips said.
After hiring, government agencies constantly engage employees through documents. From onboarding to retirement, each HR function generates its own flow of forms that contribute to EX.
In many parts of government, an employee’s regular work may also involve processing documents — for constituents, contractors and to interact with other agencies and departments. Here, too, digitized workflows can make for a more efficient and less stressful employee experience. Take the example of a job requisition. As it advances through the internal process, it collects revisions and approvals. If it’s moved from place to place on paper, or even sent around as an email attachment, it’s all too easy to lose track of where it is and who’s weighed in, Phillips said.
But in a digital workflow, that information can be routed, tracked and captured.
Digital also helps protect data. “When you think about security, ultimately, there’s nothing more secure than moving a process into a digital cloud that meets federal security requirements, [such as] FedRAMP,” Phillips said. “Think about the security vulnerabilities of moving paper around or even emails.”
DocuSign Helps Deliver a Better EX
DocuSign is best known for electronic signatures. But its agreement management solutions make workflows more secure, visible and efficient from end to end.
“We think of employee experience in terms of engagement, efficiency and effectiveness,” Phillips explained. “That employee experience, [from the time] they’re onboarded and as they’re working with an organization, ultimately ends up impacting how engaged they are in their work, and in the end turns into whether they’re delivering better services to the citizens.”
This article appeared in our guide, “Tools and Tactics for Employee Engagement.” For more tips on improving you employee experience, download it here:
