Aon scales and standardizes global HR with DocuSign eSignature

 Aon is a leading global professional services firm providing a broad range of risk, retirement and health solutions. The company’s 50,000 colleagues in 120 countries empower results for clients by using proprietary data and analytics to deliver insights that reduce volatility and improve performance. Aon is growing organically by 6% year over year. While the growth and global expansion via acquisition is great news for the business, it has presented opportunities for efficiency improvements within Aon’s HR team.

In order to streamline HR operations and ensure consistent and compliant HR services to global colleagues, in 2017 Aon decided to consolidate several global HR functions into a shared service center in Poland. Previously, HR teams in each country operated independently, with fewer shared processes among them. As part of Aon’s shift to a global HR center, the company also decided to use DocuSign eSignature and replace its outdated, manual agreements processes. Today, offer letters and employment changes, including promotions and job changes, are managed with DocuSign in 52 countries across 6 continents. 

Richard Bullock, global product manager at Aon, heads up the company’s global DocuSign initiative. “DocuSign eSignature provides capabilities and functionality that support legally defensible contracts throughout the European Union, Latin America, Asia Pacific and other countries where Aon operates.” Bullock says. “In its most basic web browser format, DocuSign is simple and intuitive, but the deeper capabilities allow us to integrate seamlessly with our existing software platforms.”

Navigating complexities with the help of Customer Success 

Like many other large global enterprises, creating business agility, navigating global business and industry complexities, and driving greater operational efficiencies were critical. To execute their vision for the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, Aon partnered with Customer Success to implement their first high volume use case—which required nearly 30,000 envelopes annually. To accelerate deployment, Aon relied on DocuSign Professional Services for advisory services to help build a strategic roadmap, identify and prioritize use cases, advise on the creation of a governance and funding model, provide global rollout support, and help advocate for the results being delivered to the business. 

Aon rolled out EU Advanced Electronic Signature in Italy and Qualified Electronic Signature (in-person signing) in Belgium, a major feat due to strict European compliance standards and complex signing requirements. Aon quickly realized that our capabilities supplied them with the strategic guidance to globalize Human Resources operations – which had been plagued by manual and time-consuming paperwork. 

“Having a DocuSign expert that’s ‘done it before’ gave us comfort because we knew we had the support to roll this out and be successful the first time around.” says Bullock.

We have been able to help Aon accelerate the rollout of DocuSign to support HR processes in over 35 countries. 

Aon continues to engage with a designated technical success manager to support a wide array of needs, ranging from escalating issues and routine troubleshooting to advising on product roadmap readiness as it relates to Aon’s business and technical requirements.

One global HR system, countless regional benefits 

The shift to a centralized HR center in Poland allowed Aon to standardize HR processes and technologies worldwide and to give regional HR teams vetted, digital tools. As part of the initial DocuSign eSignature implementation, Aon established a “center of excellence” with internal experts and DocuSign employees, to smooth the transition and to uncover additional processes throughout the company that could be modernized with digital agreements. 

“We set up a center of excellence to drive consistent usage, increase awareness of the product’s benefits, deploy new use cases, and support existing ones, said Bullock. “We partner and consult with business solution lines to determine where electronic signature can mitigate risk and provide client delight.”

Once regional HR teams started using DocuSign eSignature, many found other processes specific to their countries that DocuSign could improve. 

Matt Ollar, Aon’s HR Global Operations Coordinator based in Poland, points out, “Every country has a different set of regulatory guidelines and special internal approval processes we need to understand and respect. We found a way to marry the old manual process to a new standard digital practice within HR Global Operations. Ultimately, DocuSign helps get colleagues’ compensation change letters quicker, get positions filled quicker, and ensure that there are the proper alerts triggered for documents taking longer to process than they should.”

Maintaining payroll compliance in Australia

Maja Castricum, HR operations and project manager at Aon Australia, has seen the benefits of the global roll out of DocuSign eSignature and has customized it to specific Australia use cases. 

“Once we went live with the use cases supported by the global HR team in Poland, we decided that there was an opportunity to utilize DocuSign’s powerful capabilities in other processes to eliminate manual forms,” Castricum says, “for example, specialized leave requests and pension contribution adjustments are now processed entirely through DocuSign.”

In the U.S., onboarding seasonal workers digitally

Every year during open enrollment periods, Aon’s Voluntary Benefits & Enrollment Solution group must hire over 150 seasonal contract workers to help during this peak period of activity. Aon aims to rehire contractors from previous years, but the team must still send personalized offer letters that contain compensation, dates of employment, etc. to each colleague.

Before DocuSign, Aon’s team used Microsoft Word files and manually altered contracts with details for each seasonal worker. This made document preparation time consuming for Aon’s team and forced seasonal workers to print, sign, and return the contracts. 

Now, Aon uses DocuSign’s bulk-send feature and PowerForms to automatically populate form fields with specific information for each contractor. Once all of the contracts are sent, seasonal employees simply review and sign using DocuSign eSignature. Once signed, DocuSign automatically and securely routes key information from the contracts to other systems. The automated process eliminates manual data entry, ensures accuracy, and eliminates administrative headaches for Aon colleagues.