- HR managers believe they are the most ignored people in the business
- 46% say they need to chase employees more than once before a form is returned
- 12% resort to offering employees incentives to speed up HR processes
Document disdain is driving HR teams crazy and new research from Adobe has found that 78% of HR managers are left frustrated by managing employee forms. The biggest annoyances are having to chase people to sign and return forms (42%), managers and employees holding on to documents (31%) and forms getting lost (24%).
This is a contributing factor to HR managers considering themselves to be the most ignored people in the business. Only a quarter believe that employees pay most attention to HR compared to direct managers (70%), colleagues (44%), office management (41%) and finance (37%).
HR teams believe employees stall signing because they can’t be bothered (40%), it’s not a priority (35%) and they forget about it (31%). Contract fear is also slowing down HR processes, as a quarter agree that employees stall signing so they are not legally bound by the terms and conditions.
The document battle line is drawn
Tracking documents remains one of the biggest headaches for HR teams. Of those surveyed, the top excuse heard from employees to avoid returning documents was ‘I haven’t seen your email’. In addition, nearly half (46%) of HR managers say they need to chase more than once for a form to be returned. Many will go to extreme lengths to overcome this document disdain, with 12% saying they often resort to incentivising employees.
Despite these challenges, only 30% of HR managers say they have used a digital document solution to simplify or speed up HR processes, and 31% of HR managers say they do not have complete visibility of where HR forms are in the whole signing process.
Richard Langham, Head of the Adobe Document Cloud business for Europe, Middle East and Africa, said: “From recruiting, to hiring, to maintaining and eventually transitioning employees, there is an overwhelming amount of paperwork and manual processes for HR to deal with. Digitally transforming these processes allows HR departments to eradicate the frustrations they experience by simplifying their workflows, enabling them to have more time to focus on high-impact work”.