eSignature Legality for Human Resources in United States

How to eSign a document: eSignature legality for Human Resources in United States

give me a little bit of info about augsburg yeah oxford university um you know we're here in in lovely minneapolis minnesota uh we have about 35-ish 100 students about half those are your traditional age college students you know with like a thousand of them typically living in the dorms and stuff and the other half are adult students um and i think i think employee-wise you probably have five to 600 employees what what is um the kovid situation how remote is it yeah we've been doing um you know the last fall and then spring that we're in currently right now we're probably doing roughly 10 classes face-to-face the rest is all zoom and remote what was what was happening when when was when was this when you were beginning to consider uh a solution and what what problems did you keep encountering that finally made you start looking yeah this was this was pre-coded so i think it was 2019 um you know i think it was a compliance driver so in hr there was a new minnesota law that was like a wage theft law that every employee had to essentially sign a letter acknowledging their salary as part of this law and we had to make sure we could be compliant with that and doing that all with web signatures uh would have just been a nightmare for hr um and so so we need we needed a way to do this digitally um and do it kind of fast because the law kind of went into effect kind of quickly and there wasn't a lot of time for businesses to get in compliance so we had to move a lot faster and so you know we i know we looked at several different options and we really liked uh sign now's you know pricing structure was worked well for us the features were all there that we needed um and it was you know quite easy to use good user interface and so we had basically set up hr to you know use it for this compliance need and so hr started using it for that and then doing it for some of their other hr forms you know when there's um you know salary position changes you know different things that require approvals and like that so that was back in 2019 and so we were pretty much just using it in hr and then and then coveted and everybody went remote on march you know in march 2020 and then people started emailing me um because they're uh they're they're wet signature pdf solutions obviously we're not working and like what can we do and so well since we happened to already be using sign now i said well you know we're using something in hr um but let's expand that to more departments and more users across campus what were some of the other departments that it was expanded to and do you have what what kind of things did they use it for yeah we definitely have a handful going so we you know that first coveted summer um you know we typically run a summer institute for k-12 teachers to help them stay current you know and get their continuing educational credits um and those are all workshops well we took those all online but they still had forms for the workshop leaders to sign um the people who were going to run the workshop so we worked with our continuing education folks there in the education department essentially um get them set up assigned now so that they can you know get all those workshop leaders their paperwork done um i was approached by our grants office because they have some various forms like conflicts of interest forms and some other grant forms they needed to get signed you know a lot of that was for federal compliance for some of the grants so uh they needed a way to have to have a signature digitally and another one that we got going in the summer really was one of our most critical uses it was with our student counseling center um because of course the student counseling center you know went all online with you know telehealth and zoom and everything but you know their forms were all paper pdf web signature you know it's an intake form at the demographic form it's an information release form and they really needed a way for the students to get those done quickly so they could get the students in to be seen with a counselor because you know during covid you know you know it's it's been such a critical time for mental health for students you know they've really been struggling and they've been leveraging the counseling center immensely and uh and so that you know that was really important for them to get all that processed stuff digital because they could just get students in as fast as possible as fast as they had time honestly um to fill up all their slots and everything what were some of the uh the features that you were looking for when you were shopping that you haven't mentioned like what were some of your must-have features yeah i mean really really it's easy for end users to create the fields um like the pdfs they upload you know the signature field the data field you know essentially and then other fields as well um you know it's really easy for them to do um because you know as we've really spread it out to all these different areas you know they're obviously not coders and so just have having a good user interface where it's drag and drop easy for them to to do that um you know that was that was really a big one and uh and the other feature that's helpful is the kind of team folder structure where like in hr since there's multiple people using it for them to have you know an hr team and they have an hr team folder where they can have some of those documents or even the templates you know using the team templates they can have you know the you know there's one form that's standard that you know multiple hr people might be sending out to different folks and so to have that team template that they can access and use and send out the standard form you know is really important so that that just saves time uh especially when you've got a team is there something that you go to and sign now the the most honestly i think uh the big part of it is just the ease of getting a document in there getting getting a signature and date field on it is so fast you know just when i'm training people and i and i show them how they can do it you know it's you know it can it's like a minute but you know to just to get the to get the essential setup like especially if they just need to do a one-off um you know and then it takes a little bit longer to create a template which that will save them time later but just the speed at which they can just get a signature on something they need at the moment is is just great it's just it's very fast great um what about implementing it were there any challenges and successes getting getting signed now fully integrated across the team i think the only challenge was us figuring out organization how we wanted to do the team structure you know we started out just in hr and we were looking at well it's just hr you know and then we needed to you know as we wanted to expand it then we had to figure out you know how we were going to kind of structure the account so that we could you know not have it be an hr account but have hr be a team in the university account and that was then a lot of that was just us figuring out okay who's going to be kind of a primary on the account and then you know and everyone else it's essentially users in there that get put into into teams and stuff and so um it's you know i think it's more figuring out um yeah kind of you know who's who's primary and then who are who are all the users and groups um and then then being able to to kind of run with that as we've been able to add more uh departments and people on okay how long would you say it took to to implement it and then how long were you using it before other teams were fully implemented that's a good question because hr really implemented initially themselves um actually quite independent of me you know because since it really started with an hr compliance thing they work directly with support um and from what i recall um you know it was not difficult for them to you know really get going with you know the wage wage theft law compliance form um and uh and i think you know i think the only challenge for them was you know that was that would be a mail merge thing where they would have a spreadsheet where they'd essentially kind of do a mail merge um so everybody got their own with their own name and all that kind of their own data on it so i think i think that probably took them the longest um just because it was a new system for them um and to figure out the ins and outs of how best to do that great okay good to know um so we can we can move into some of the results now um how is your team's experience different or better than it used to be um how do you feel how do you feel empowered you know how does this make your day a little bit easier i think it's i think it really empowers all the folks we've got into it because you know honestly they're super independent um you know once i get trained them on it um they're really good to go um and uh and they can just you know send send send away for signatures um and i would say they've almost never really come back and asked me questions they might have asked support or gone into the nice extensive knowledge base to look stuff up which i always when i train them i always point that out like there's all this help right here that goes through everything that you need to know so i think a lot of people also do that as well and so they mean they're really independent and and really it's you know more what i've done is maybe i've circled back to someone and maybe shared a tip with them that i've learned you know as i've used it a little more or i've trained more people and kind of discover things that we didn't realize that we could do and so then i'll you know i'll share a tip um to hopefully make it a little easier for them what would you say is your estimate for the total number of people who touch sign now how many people administer it or administrate it and then if you if you ask me how many people eventually use it on you know as a user that would be great too yeah we have you know oh yeah we have 17 um you know admin users right now um in several different teams across the university so yeah you know and they all represent those examples i gave before those different areas about just you know things like paper saved time saved you know how many human hours do do you save by by using this rather than putting something in the mail um yeah i think it's difficult to quantify but i think it's definitely uh you know quite a lot of time especially in terms of the back and forth i think there's a comfort level and uh an ability to just get it done um because it is really quick to do um and there isn't all that overhead has covered effect you know changed your mind on anything regarding digitization do you is this the kind of thing that um i know you started this before coven but what are your plans for this in the future even after covid yeah with so many things that we've learned in the past year with uh the pandemic and changing how we live there's a lot of things that we're not going to want to go back doing the old way we're not going to want to go signing paper stuff anymore because it just takes too much time and what's what's the point we can do it electronically um and so you know i think this you know one of many things that you know is going to stay and grow and you know our lives will be better because of it we have more time to do more meaningful things you know and offices can spend more time interacting directly with students and right and helping them less time uh printing and faxing and mailing yeah totally is are there any specific stories or anecdotes about using sign now that specif that you know that you thought were interesting i think the big story is just kind of how fast we're able to pivot you know since we already had the product and we just needed to grow with it and and it's been so easy for people to use it once we show them how to use it and they can just run with it yeah yeah i just think it's it's allowed us to quickly adjust over this past year and keep things moving along [Music]