HR Contracts: Workflows to Fast-Track Approvals and Increase Cross-Functional Collaboration

Key takeaways:

• Implement automated workflows with defined triggers, approval requirements, validation checkpoints, and routing rules to eliminate manual coordination and reduce contract processing time by 50-75% for routine agreements.

• Create separate workflows for different HR contract types to ask specific questions relevant to each agreement and automatically route contracts to appropriate approvers based on department, contract value, or risk level.

• Build validation checkpoints into your workflows to prevent common errors, such as confirming background checks are complete before employment agreements execute or verifying budget approval exists before contractor agreements begin.

• Track usage patterns across teams, processing speed improvements, accuracy rates, and stakeholder satisfaction to measure workflow adoption success and identify opportunities for continuous improvement.

Managing employee agreements doesn’t have to feel like bureaucratic quicksand. You know the drill—an offer letter sits in someone’s inbox for days, a contractor agreement bounces between departments without clear ownership, and meanwhile, your new hire can’t start work or your critical project gets delayed.

Behind every successful hire and productive working relationship lies a series of contracts that had to be negotiated, approved, and signed. But when HR contracting becomes a bottleneck, it affects everything from talent acquisition speed to cross-functional collaboration, and research shows that improving these processes can have a tangible impact, boosting efficiency, customer satisfaction, and the bottom line. The good news? Modern contract management technology can transform HR contracting from a necessary friction point into a competitive advantage.

In this piece, we’ll explore how to build efficient HR contract workflows that fast-track approvals and increase cross-functional collaboration—drawing on real-world insights from Sydney Dimick, contracts administrator at Sarepta Therapeutics, Inc., a leader in precision genetic medicine for rare diseases.

What are HR contracts

HR contracts are legal agreements between employers and employees or third-party service providers that define the terms, conditions, and obligations related to human resources functions. These contracts establish clear expectations for workplace relationships and protect both parties’ interests.

HR contracts serve multiple purposes in modern organizations. They ensure legal compliance with employment laws and regulations, a critical function given that a recent survey found that 34% of organizations have faced employment-related enforcement action in the past year. They create transparency around roles, responsibilities, and compensation. They also provide a framework for resolving disputes and managing performance expectations.

The most common HR contracts include employment agreements, offer letters, non-disclosure agreements, and contractor agreements. Each type serves specific business needs and requires different approval processes and stakeholder involvement.

Types of HR contracts

HR contracts fall into several categories based on their purpose and the parties involved. Understanding these types helps you choose the right contract structure and approval workflow for each situation.

Employee-focused contracts handle direct employment relationships. Employment agreements define full-time and part-time roles with comprehensive terms—documents that still require legal involvement 45% of the time, according to The 2025 Contracting Benchmark Report. Offer letters provide initial employment terms before formal agreements. Non-compete agreements protect company interests after employment ends.

Contractor and vendor contracts manage external service relationships. Independent contractor agreements define project-based work arrangements, which often face bottlenecks with an average execution time of 14 days, according to the report. Recruiting agency contracts establish terms for staffing services. Statements of Work outline professional development partnerships.

Policy and compliance contracts ensure legal protection and organizational alignment. Non-disclosure agreements protect confidential information. Employee handbooks establish workplace policies and procedures. Benefits enrollment forms document employee benefit selections.

Why the HR contract process should be streamlined

If there’s anything all organizations have in common, it’s people. Behind every person reporting for work is a series of contracts that had to be created and agreed upon.

Creating an efficient process for HR contracts helps you onboard talent faster and keeps projects on schedule. This efficiency is crucial for protecting the bottom line, especially since organizations typically lose 5-9% of annual revenue due to poor contract management, according to The 2025 Legal Operations Field Guide. For example, one McKinsey case study showed how improving internal processes helped a business unit suffering heavy losses completely turned around its performance to achieve a number-one market position within 18 months. When you streamline these workflows, you gain transparency into the process and develop important data for cross-functional collaboration. This visibility transforms how teams work together—instead of chasing down approvals and wondering where contracts stand, everyone knows exactly what’s happening and when.

The result? Your HR team gets freed up to focus on what they do best: working with people, not wrestling with contract logistics.

Common HR contract management challenges

If you’re feeling like your HR contracting process is a mess, you’re not alone. Most of the challenges fall into a few buckets:

Everything is manual. You’re chasing signatures, digging through emails for the latest version, and manually entering data into other systems. It’s slow and full of opportunities for human error. This experience is common, as research shows that for legal and compliance tasks, only nine percent of HR professionals say their processes are highly automated.

There’s no visibility. When someone asks for the status of an offer letter, you have to go ask three different people. You can’t see bottlenecks until it’s too late.

Compliance risk is real. With so many different contract types and regulations, it’s easy to use an outdated template or miss a critical clause, which can expose the company to real legal trouble. Top concerns for non-compliance include potential lawsuits and large liabilities (69%) and heavy fines (61%).

These challenges play out differently across industries, but they’re particularly acute in highly regulated sectors. Take Sarepta Therapeutics—because biotech is such a highly regulated industry and sometimes their contracts are on counterparty paper, Sarepta has to ensure they manage risk by having legal review all of their contracts. Their previous contract management system did not automatically assign contract reviewers and relied solely on institutional knowledge. This manual process was not necessarily based on data, was difficult to teach, and was not scalable long-term.

To gain peace of mind, they turned to Ironclad to improve their contract management process. Automating reviewer assignments in Ironclad has not only reduced manual tasks, but it also ensures there is at least one primary legal reviewer per department, allowing each reviewer to become a legal expert on the counterparties those specific departments work with.

Setting up streamlined HR contract workflows

Streamlined HR contract workflows reduce approval bottlenecks and ensure consistent processing across all contract types. These workflows automate routine decisions while maintaining necessary oversight for complex agreements.

Define your workflow triggers. Start by identifying what events should initiate each contract type. New hire approvals trigger employment agreements. Contractor requests trigger service agreements. Policy updates trigger acknowledgment workflows.

Map approval requirements. Different contracts need different stakeholders involved. Employment contracts typically require HR leadership and legal review. Contractor agreements might need department head approval and finance sign-off. Simple acknowledgments can often be automated entirely.

Build in validation checkpoints. Include verification steps that prevent common errors. Confirm background checks are complete before employment agreements execute. Verify budget approval exists before contractor agreements begin. Ensure compliance requirements are met before any contract becomes effective.

Create clear routing rules. Establish automatic assignment based on contract attributes. Route contracts by department, contract value, or risk level. This ensures the right people review each agreement without manual coordination.

Here’s how this approach worked in practice for Sarepta. While many of Sarepta’s HR contracts are Statements of Work (SOW) or Change Orders (CO), they wanted to carve out a specific workflow for HR contracts to simplify the process for the business user. The majority of the contracts within this workflow are for temporary contingent worker agreements, but it can also be used for recruiting services agreements from an agency.

By carving out a workflow for these types of agreements, Sarepta can eliminate any workflow confusion—Sarepta’s counterparty workflow is currently set up to be used with over 30 different types of contracts. The HR contracts workflow also allows them to ask specific questions unique to HR contracts that wouldn’t be included in a regular SOW workflow, like a new temp worker’s start date, hourly rate, and hiring manager. All of which can then be used to create a more detailed naming convention for the dashboard and archived agreements.

Sarepta’s HR team comprises two groups: talent acquisition and operations, and they each have approval responsibility for different kinds of HR contracts. So instead of sending every contract to both groups to filter through themselves and find the correct approvers, they added questions within the workflow (For example, “Is this a new contingent worker?”) to automatically route these contracts to the appropriate team.

Creating questions within the launch form also helped Sarepta to validate information, like whether or not a background check was performed for a temp worker. They also use questions to set stakeholders’ expectations about the contract process and ensure enough turnaround time for the contract.

For example, a business user can agree to the 5-day turnaround time and acknowledge that an employee may not start until the appropriate processes have been completed, simply by clicking “Yes” within the workflow.

For Dimick, the ability to build and adjust processes herself using Ironclad Workflow Designer was a key factor.

Using automated workflows for faster approvals

Once you’ve defined your workflow structure, the next step is building out the actual automation. Here’s what Sarepta’s HR workflow looks like in practice, which demonstrates how these principles translate into faster, more reliable approvals.

When a user clicks into the HR contract workflow, the workflow includes the following:

• Preamble: This is essentially an introduction to the workflow and when it should be used.

Then, users are asked to provide the following information:

• Contract type (an SOW, for instance)

• Is this a new counterparty? (Is this a new agency?)

• Contract effective date

• Counterparty name

• Term (Is there auto renewal? Is it indefinite?)

• Department

• Hiring manager

• Is this a new contingent worker?

• Which executive is responsible for this contingent worker?

Instead of building out every possible signatory, Sarepta looked at their legacy contract data for HR contracts and found that 70% of the time these contracts were signed by an executive, so they simplified the process by asking which executive is responsible, rather than building out every possible signatory only for it to predominantly go to executives. Not only does this simplify the build, but it also sets them up to create a quick and informative report in the repository.

Contract process improvements

In addition to setting up workflows in Ironclad, Dimick also made a few other improvements to the contract process.

Naming convention

Dimick developed a naming convention to standardize Sarepta’s contracts, which ultimately helps with organization, reporting, and future migrations.

Departmental split

Previously, Sarepta’s contract managers didn’t have a formal system for divvying up their reviewing responsibilities, so Dimick created a departmental split, leaving no questions as to who’d review which contract from a particular department. Then, to make things even easier, she built conditionality into the workflows in Ironclad so reviewers are automatically assigned based on department.

Use of metadata

Because Sarepta has so many specific questions in their workflows, they have a lot of contract data they can use to generate insightful reports and better their business. For example, they can easily create a report for all contingent workers under a specific executive and hiring manager, the total spend of contingent workers for a specific department, and when finance needs to know how many contracts are within a specific entity, it’s simple to find.

Dimick recommends thinking about the questions you want to answer when building workflows to make generating future reports a whole lot easier.

Measuring adoption and success

Successful HR contract workflow adoption means stakeholders consistently use the system and achieve faster, more accurate contract processing. Measuring this success requires tracking both usage metrics and outcome improvements.

Track usage patterns across teams. Monitor how frequently different departments initiate contracts through your workflow system. High adoption rates indicate the system meets user needs. Low adoption may signal training gaps or workflow complexity issues.

Measure processing speed improvements. Compare contract turnaround times before and after workflow implementation. Successful implementations typically reduce processing time by 50-75% for routine contracts—in some cases allowing teams to cut contract processing time from days to minutes. Track this by contract type to identify which workflows provide the most value.

Monitor accuracy and compliance rates. Count how often contracts require revisions or fail compliance checks. Well-designed workflows should reduce errors by eliminating manual data entry and ensuring required approvals are obtained.

Assess stakeholder satisfaction. Regular feedback from HR teams, hiring managers, and legal reviewers reveals workflow pain points and improvement opportunities. High satisfaction scores correlate with sustained adoption and continued process improvements.

Since implementing Ironclad at Sarepta, the platform has had great user adoption. In fact, Dimick says that HR contracts are regularly processed with Ironclad, and her team prides themselves on their ability to turn around HR contracts quickly.

When she rolled out Ironclad training for the entire team, everyone gained confidence in the process and tools, rating Ironclad 4.5 out of five stars in an internal survey.

“I think people are probably in awe of how fast things can change,” Dimick said. “So, for instance, last night, somebody emailed me and said, ‘Hey, what do I do with this contract?’ It was a data sharing agreement. We didn’t have anything in Ironclad for data sharing, but it’s on the counterparty’s paper.

So I added a data sharing agreement to the counterparty contracts workflow, added a question that was relevant and launched it in five minutes. I mean, it was awesome. I think our stakeholders and our customers really appreciate that,” Dimick said.

Streamline your HR contract process with Ironclad

Modern HR teams need contract workflows that can keep up with hiring demands and new projects. Manual processes create bottlenecks that delay hiring, frustrate stakeholders, and increase compliance risks.

Ironclad’s contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform turns HR contracting into a source of efficiency, giving your team more time to focus on strategic people-focused initiatives. Teams using Ironclad report faster contract processing, improved cross-functional collaboration, and better visibility into contract obligations and deadlines.

The platform’s workflow automation handles routine approvals while maintaining oversight for complex agreements. Built-in templates ensure consistency across contract types. Real-time dashboards provide visibility into contract status and performance metrics.

The best part? You might even begin to enjoy the process. “Building workflows has become like a new hobby for me,” Dimick said.

Ready to see how streamlined HR contract workflows can speed up your hiring and vendor management? Request a demo today to explore how Ironclad can transform your HR contract operations.

Read more contract management success stories.

Frequently asked questions about HR contracts

What’s the difference between an employment contract and an offer letter?

An offer letter provides initial employment terms and serves as a preliminary agreement, while an employment contract is a comprehensive legal document that defines the complete employment relationship, including detailed terms, conditions, and obligations.

Who should review HR contracts before they’re signed?

HR contracts typically require review from HR leadership, legal counsel, and relevant department managers. The specific reviewers depend on contract type, risk level, and organizational policies.

How long do HR contract approval processes typically take?

Well-designed HR contract workflows process routine agreements in 1-3 business days, while complex contracts requiring legal review may take 5-10 business days. Automated workflows significantly reduce these timeframes.

What compliance requirements apply to HR contracts?

HR contracts must comply with federal and state employment laws, including wage and hour regulations, anti-discrimination statutes, and data privacy requirements. Specific compliance needs vary by jurisdiction and industry.

How can I improve cross-functional collaboration in HR contracting?

Implement centralized contract workflows that provide visibility to all stakeholders, establish clear approval processes, and use automated notifications to keep everyone informed of contract status and required actions.

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Ironclad is not a law firm, and this post does not constitute or contain legal advice. To evaluate the accuracy, sufficiency, or reliability of the ideas and guidance reflected here, or the applicability of these materials to your business, you should consult with a licensed attorney. Use of and access to any of the resources contained within Ironclad’s site do not create an attorney-client relationship between the user and Ironclad.