HR Answers: Conquering Challenges With Document Management

Human resources managers are playing a growing role within business expansion; more than ever, they are expected to weigh-in on company decisions with executive teams, engage in strategic planning and foster employee wellness in a world of workers overwrought by workplace stress and personal problems.

As if these responsibilities aren’t enough, the stakes for achieving them are high. As the human resources profession enters the sphere of executive leadership, HR directors and managers are put in tough positions to prove their worth.

HR document management solutions can help HR personnel conquer these challenges and fulfill their expanding roles. 

Onboarding and Business Solutions

Benchmarking and compensation tools are two critical HR business solutions. The real complexity of these items involves training employees adequately, both in their job roles and to use key software implemented by the organization, so they can assume the rates of pay and performance standards that will enable retention.

Essentially, compensation tools and benchmarking coalesce company strategy with human capital improvement efforts.

This is just one of the reasons why HR document management can save the world’s workforce: Not only is it easy to use and therefore easy to train others to use—it touches every portion of the business process.

HR document management doesn’t just give you a window into all employees’ activity within a system. It lets HR managers regulate many complex processes, which would otherwise be incredibly time-consuming if completed manually:

• Document retention and scheduling: This lets HR personnel choose how long to retain records once they are scanned and uploaded into the document management solution. Most HR managers are required to retain records for seven years or more. To leverage this feature in our system, all HR must do is set a retenation date for file, after which it automatically purged from the system. Over the long haul, this helps scale back on system clutter.
• Audit trails: In the event of an external audit, an audit trail feature within a document management system will allow HR professionals to tell auditors exactly what has happened in the system, and at what time. For HR employees working in the financial services industry, such a feature also simplifies conducting internal audits.
• Role-based user permissions: System administrators of a document management solution (usually HR executives) need to be able to customize who can see what within the system and who can download certain files. Given that over half of data breaches are internal, role-based user permissions are extremely helpful in securing information from not just outside attackers, but also from employees within an organization. This feature helps HR managers meet OSHA standards.
• Templates: Template allow HR managers the ability to mass-apply isolated storage structures across a wide range of cabinets, drawers and files within the document management solution. Take the onboarding process, for instance: If an organization is hiring rapidly, creating new employee drawers in the system’s digital cabinets takes seconds. With a typical paper-based filing structure, this could take four to five times longer. And, within an HR document management solution, an infinite number of folders and files and drawers can fit into a cabinet. When compared to the manual, finite storage methods of a typical file repository, data compression is invaluable.

HR Automation

Document management can also help HR managers automate repetitive tasks. Zonal OCR (optical character recognition), for example, helps auto-fill form fields, automatically routes documents and makes documents easily retrievable within the system.

This is one of the many reasons World Paper-free Day Paper Free Hero, Chris Beebe, previously senior director of HR at Raleigh General Hospital and now chief human resources officer at HealthLinc Community Health Center, Valparaiso, Ind., exclaimed that he could “find files so fast it’s ridiculous” after implementing eFileCabinet.

Beebe noted that he used to organize files with metal brads, and as his hospital continued growing, the battle to keep all the information in alignment without the technology equipped to handle it was proving to be a nearly impossible task, and certainly not a profitable one.

If an organization is growing rapidly, an HR director relying on paper-based filing systems will soon find these manual processes to be unmanageable.

Organizational and Employee Development

Having employees waste time looking for paper-based information, instead of doing their jobs has negative ramifications on their development as workers,  as the feeling of “working longer hours and not getting anywhere” takes hold.

This is why HR document management is paramount in today’s office environment. It takes all the processes one does inefficiently with paper and turns them into digital, value-added processes.

This frees up room for greater professional development, investment dollars for employee wellness, and, perhaps most valuably, time—which can be used for an infinite number of projects to improve your organization’s position in the marketplace.

Rethinking ATS

The Society for Human Resources Managers reported that many HR directors are unsatisfied with their applicant tracking systems.

Far fewer felt they were using their systems to the fullest extent. Most applicant tracking systems are jettisoned by human resources managers for the same reasons—they simply are too clunky, limited in scope, but feature-rich enough to cause confusion among users.

Although applicant tracking systems are well-intentioned and a step in the right direction for hiring processes, they don’t enable HR managers to touch every portion of the process in the same way that an HR document management solution can. Consider leveraging a document management system in place of a single-purpose ATS to integrate the hiring, onboarding and HR management processes without additional complexity and information silos.

Jesse Wood is the CEO of document management software vendor eFileCabinet, Lehi, Utah. Founded in 2001, eFileCabinet Inc. began as a cutting-edge tool to digitally store records in accounting firms. As it grew in popularity, eFileCabinet developed into a full-fledged electronic document management solution designed to help organizations automate redundant processes, ensure security, and solve common office problems.