How Paperless Onboarding Helps Meet Tight Deadlines
November 07, 2023 by Shauna Seaver
Stress and urgency — these are words you would expect to hear when someone describes their work at a fire department. But maybe not when that person works in the business office. To operate smoothly and effectively serve their community, it’s important for fire departments to hire the right people and make sure they’re well-prepared to take on the job. With a paperless onboarding process, Renton Regional Fire Authority (Renton RFA) in Washington is able to save time and meet critical deadlines to get their newly hired firefighters the training they need.
Strict Hiring Deadlines
Newly hired firefighters at Renton RFA must attend fire academy training before they can begin serving the community. This intensive training takes approximately five months to complete and is offered only twice a year, leading Renton RFA to hire and onboard firefighters in groups of 10 or more.
When Finance Director LaQuanza Flowers joined the fire authority, the onboarding process was manual and paper-based, with rounds of back-and-forth between new hires, human resources, and accounting to get forms filled out and information entered into their ERP system accurately. Onboarding needed to be completed quickly to meet internal deadlines and training schedules, but this urgency — combined with hand-written forms that were often completed incorrectly or illegibly — frequently led to delays, increased stress, and data entry errors.
Tossing Paper-Based Processes
Always looking for time-saving solutions, Flowers’ team jumped at the opportunity to add paperless onboarding functionality to their existing ERP system. Renton RFA quickly experienced resolutions to their onboarding pain points. “We can limit the fields we want new hires to fill out, and we can send the forms to them via email to be completed before they report to the office,” Flowers said. Completing onboarding paperwork electronically speeds up the process and leads to more accurate records, which flow to other departments as needed. “Onboarding data is shared seamlessly with our payroll team. It saves us that extra step,” she said. With this paperless process, new hires can complete their onboarding more quickly and are ready to begin training sooner.
Recognizing the Value of Employee Time
Renton RFA operates with organizational goals that encourage adopting technology to manage resources wisely, attract quality talent, and retain employees who form a high-functioning team. In keeping with these goals, Flowers noted that new hires can now spend more time getting to know the team and culture instead of completing paperwork, and the finance team can focus on tasks that are important both to them and the organization. “Managing the onboarding and payroll process from beginning to end is more streamlined and accurate than ever, making employees feel supported and valued by an organization that cares about their workloads and their time,” Flowers said.