Your employees are busy. Between meetings, appointments, and just heads-down time to get work done, there’s little space to print off forms, fill them out, and scan or fax them to the right place.
Put Employee Forms Online
It’s true that your intranet serves as a digital home base for your teams, colleagues, and employees. Whether it helps people access their everyday tools and links, or it serves as directory of employees, departments, and vital contact information, it’s a constant highway of activity.
And often, your employees need to access documents and forms. You’ve probably got an idea of even common forms you use such as:
- Paid time off requests
- Health insurance or benefit updates
- Technology or training requests
- Emergency contact forms
- And more
But before you get ready to throw them away and move them online, let’s start with a small, accessible list of forms that are best (and most efficient) to move online.
1. Human Resources Forms
Human resources (HR) is a big part of any organization. And the amount of forms under the HR umbrella could be endless. Start by looking at the most frequently accessed or requested forms to move online. These might include:
- Benefit or insurance update forms
- Direct deposit request forms
- Expense report forms
- Paid time off forms
These forms are often lengthy, so to make the paper-to-online transition easier, review your forms and see if you can break sections down more simply. The better designed your form is, the more likely you are to have correct completions and conversions, meaning less rework later.
Likewise, make sure your form builder allows you to set up workflows, which can allow the forms to be routed to appropriate people on the HR team for appropriate handling. Learn more about what to look for in a form builder.
Most importantly, HR forms (and all forms across your intranet) are vital and need to be secure, so choosing a high-security form builder is essential when integrating with your intranet.
2. Employee Event Registrations
Are you planning that holiday party or company mixer? Is there a family-friendly event open to all employees just around the corner?
Finding a form builder that not only integrates with your calendar but also can handle registration information is a huge plus for any intranet. When thinking through employee events, consider some must-have information that your form builder should collect, such as:
- Ability to add guests or additional registrations
- Ability to follow-up on partial or incomplete registrations
- Registration counts (and caps, if necessary)
- Series registrations, which are great for training courses or continuing education classes
- Payment options, especially if the event has a registration fee
- Personalized emails and roster follow-up options
As registrations come in, your form builder should be able to show you who’s completed them, how many registrants have signed up, and how many spots are left, if there’s a limit.
You should also have a form builder that gives you the option to follow up with registrants who didn’t complete the process. And lastly, you need a way to personalize the emails and follow up with roster registrations as the event comes closer (or suddenly needs to change).
3. Employee Surveys
Throughout your organization, changes are always on the cusp of happening. Sometimes it helps to have your employees weigh in on decisions, or provide feedback on a recent change. Employee surveys are a great place to start.
Your intranet is the home of all your tools and resources, but it should also be a place where employees can freely and honestly provide input to your stakeholders and leadership.
Consider embedding surveys with a compatible form builder that could cover:
- Improvement surveys, especially for changes in-process that may impact the employee experience
- Marketing surveys, which are perfect for projects like website or intranet redesigns that employees might have opinions for
- Needs or request surveys, which should reveal things employees may need, particularly in the shadow of COVID-19 and possible work-from-home requests
- Pulse surveys, or check-ins on how employees feel about work or ways the organization can keep improving
Be sure to preface any employee survey with transparent information about how their information is used. You can also make surveys anonymous, as to avoid any concern employees might have about sharing their feedback.
Giving your employees a place to share their thoughts only builds a better trust between the intranet experience and the employee experience.
4. Contact Forms
This might seem obvious, but contact forms online are the lowest hanging fruit and the easiest way to build engagement with your employee intranet.
You might have a multitude of contact forms, but if you’re not sure where to start, try thinking about touchpoints such as:
- “Ask leadership” forms, which can build a communication pathway for employees to ask leadership or stakeholders about issues or needs throughout the year (Hint: Turn this into a regular feature of your intranet to keep people coming back!)
- Department contact forms, which can help employees contact department leaders directly, if needed
- Intranet team forms, to contact the intranet administrator(s) with a change, request, or feedback
- IT request or issue forms, great for reporting IT problems or requesting desktop support
- Marketing request forms, helpful when you need to put in a request with your marketing department and make sure it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle
- Story submission forms, especially helpful if you have a company blog or newsletter, so employees can share their stories to be featured
Your contact forms don’t have to be fancy, but they should be easy to access. Make sure your intranet pages feature callouts or calls-to-action that lead people to these online forms for quick conversion and follow-through.
Get Started
If you’re ready to transform the forms experience on your intranet, but aren’t sure where to start, contact Formulate for a demo and learn about our digital strategy services. You can partner with experts who’ll help you design effective, employee-first forms and connect them to measurement tools like Google Analytics to help track their success.