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 personal problems. An HR document management tool can simplify these challenges.
As if these responsibilities aren’t enough, the stakes for achieving them are higher than ever. As the human resources profession legitimizes and ingratiates itself into the sphere of executive leadership, HR directors and managers are put in tough positions to prove their worth.
However, using HR document management solutions can help HR personnel conquer these challenges and fulfill the roles that executive teams desire of them.
Business Solutions: A Byproduct of HR Document Management
Bench-marking and compensation tools are just the beginning of HR business solutions. The real complexity of these items involves training employees adequately, so they can assume the rates of pay and performance standards that will enable retention within companies.
Essentially, compensation tools and bench-marking coalesce company strategy with human capital improvement efforts.
One way to ensure an all-in-one business solution for onboarding is to improve on-site training for new hires.
Improving On-Site Training for New Hires
All software that is implemented by an organization for company-wide use should be part of on-site training and hiring for all companies, no matter how large or small the organization or business.
This is just one of the reasons HR document management can save the world’s workforce: Not only is it easy to use and therefore easy to train others to use, but it touches every portion of the business process — across a wide range of industries, departments and consultative services.
HR document management doesn’t just provide a window into all employees’ activity within a system, it lets HR managers regulate complex processes of the HR process, 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, all HR personnel must do is set retention for a file to a date when they want it automatically purged from the system. Over the long haul, this helps scale back on system clutter.
Audit trails: In confluence with document retention, the audit trail feature lets HR personnel manage information effectively within the HR document management solution. In the event of an external audit, HR will be able to tell auditors exactly what has happened in the system, and at what time. For HR employees working in financial industries, conducting internal audits is also simplified, for the same reason.
Role-based user permissions: System administrators of the document management solution (which are usually HR executives), can customize who can see what within the system, and who can download certain files. Given that more than half of data breaches are internal, role-based user permissions are extremely helpful in securing information from not just outside attackers, but also employees within an organization. This feature helps HR managers meet OSHA standards.
Templates: Templates give HR managers the ability to mass-apply isolated storage structures across a greater range of cabinets, drawers and files in an HR document management solution. Take the HR onboarding process again, for instance: If a company is hiring rapidly, creating new employee drawers in cabinets takes seconds. With a typical paper-based filing structure, this would take nearly four to five times longer. And within an HR document 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 reaches new heights.
HR Document Management Forms Automation
This is where document management helps HR managers in automating repetitive tasks with Zonal OCR (optical character recognition), which helps auto fill forms at the field level, automatically routes documents into an HR document management silo and makes documents retrievable in the system.
This is one of the many reasons World Paper-free Day Paper Free Hero Chris Beebe exclaimed that he could “find files so fast it’s ridiculous.” (World Paper-free Day is an initiative of AIIM, the global community of information professionals, to promote improving processes in the digital age.)
He also noted that he had 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 have to manually go through these processes.
Organizational and Employee Development
Typical office employees spend 30 to 40 percent of their time looking for paper-based information, not doing their jobs.
This has numerous negative ramifications for employee development and wellness. And, when analyzed in confluence with worker sentiment, the feeling that employees are “working longer hours and not feeling like they’re getting anywhere” suddenly starts to make sense.
For this reason, 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 for departments and organizations. And it 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 purposes to improve a company’s position in the marketplace.
Rethinking the ATS (Applicant Tracking System)
The Society for Human Resources Managers has reported that a 2016 survey by Aptitude Research Partners found most HR directors are unsatisfied with their applicant tracking systems.
Many companies are not 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 and limited in scope, but feature-rich enough to cause confusion among those using the systems.
Using Document Management to Overthrow ATS Issues
Although applicant tracking systems are well-intentioned and a step in the right direction for HR onboarding processes, they don’t enable HR managers to touch every portion of the business process in the same way that HR document management can.
In fact, the categorical capabilities of these document management solutions alone make for fitting alternatives to applicant tracking systems.
Jesse Wood is the CEO of document management software vendor eFileCabinet. 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.
