Top 6 Reasons to Digitize Employee Files
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51 minutes. That is the average time every day that a worker spends looking for paper documents, files, and emails. Holy moly! 51 minutes is a big chunk of your work day wasted! Imagine if you could have that time back? Think of all the things you could accomplish. With all the other responsibilities you are managing, you don’t have time to waste looking for things like employee files. And why should you if finding them could be as easy as the click of a button? Special report available for download http://info.archivesystems.com/Top-6-Reasons-to-Digitize-Employee-Files.html Compliance continues to impact organizations, this Special Report explores the top six reasons that you should digitize your employee files. Most people probably don’t think about digitizing files when discussing compliance but the reality is, employee files, and the documents therein, are subject to many audits, regulations, controls, and specific retention periods, and relying on digital files instead of paper files will dramatically reduce your burden of compliance and improve your ability to succeed.
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Top 6 Reasons to Digitize Employee Files
- 1. Top 6 Reasons to digitize employee files
- 2. com·pli·ance
- 3. 51 Minutes 1
- 4. Find documents in less than 30 seconds
- 10. 6% 5 Confidence?
- 11. 100% Confident
- 12. Retention 6~Source: January 2013 Information Retention and eDiscovery Survey Global Results
- 14. Now what?
- 16. Think Outside The Box www.archivesystems.com info@archivesystems.com
- 17. To view all of our webinars click here
Editor's Notes
- Thanks for that introduction Melanie. As Melanie said, my name is Randall Sanders, Senior Solutions Specialist at Archive Systems and today’s presentation will include a slide presentation as well as a live demonstration.
- As a running theme throughout this presentation, I’d like you to think about compliance. The other day, I took a moment to Google the word compliance and checked out the recent news. If you weren’t aware, some very large organizations are in the midst of multi-million dollar issues. (http://blogs.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2014/07/17/the-morning-risk-reports-big-settlements-elevate-compliance-officers/) As one lawyer put it, “In this regulatory climate the role of compliance is becoming increasingly important.” (Adam Kaufmann, partner at Lewis Baach PLLC) Since compliance continues to impact organizations, we thought it would practical to explore the top 6 reasons that you should digitize your employee files. Most people probably don’t think about digitizing files when discussing compliance but the reality is, employee files, and the documents therein, are subject to many audits, regulations, controls, and specific retention periods.
- So let’s just jump right in. The first reason stems from one of the on-going struggles human resources departments have which is the inability to scale with the organization. Typically, an HR department will be one of, if not the last department to get requisitions for new hires. This means that “doing more with less” is their battle cry not an occasional statement. So it’s really important to understand how your employees spend their time. A worker spends, on average, 51 minutes per day looking for paper documents, files, and emails. 51 minutes. Over 4 hours a week. Lost. Over 10% of work time per week. To looking for documents. Imagine if you could have that time back? Think of all the things you and your team could accomplish. With all the other responsibilities you are managing, you don’t have time to waste looking through things like employee files.
- What if you could find documents in 30 seconds? Think about that… Imaging having all business critical documents available at your fingertips. Now image those documents in an organized and structured environment which allowed for targeted results so you aren’t spending time fishing through pages of results.
- The second reason encompasses process for organizations that are geographically dispersed. Don’t think this doesn’t apply to you because geographically dispersed can mean different states, towns, or even floors within a building. Typically hiring is done at an individual office while the paperwork is, or attempted to be, centralized. There are a couple challenges just with that process. The first one is logistics. How does the new hire paperwork from where it is to headquarters? How does the hiring manager get access to those documents again when needed? Do they end up keeping keep copies? How much back and forth occurs just to ensure completeness and that everything is filled out properly? Challenges continue to occur during the employee relationship in what I call employee mobility. Here’s a scenario: An employee is doing good work and gets promoted to a new department. How does the paperwork flow from the existing manager to the new one? Similarly, if that employee really excels and gets promoted between locations, business units, or even regions, how does the new manager get access to the parts of the employee file they need? And is HR creating multiple files for that individual? Since paper is the medium of choice in many organizations, the paper shuffle is constantly going on. And of course, when an employee does poorly or doesn’t show up at all: consider your turnover rates which, depending on the hiring process and amount of paperwork, can increase cost, risks, and the chance of being out of compliance by having missing or incomplete information.
- Yet another challenge is that Human Resource documents aren’t static. You need a way to easily share with internal people who need access to HR records to manage their employees. You also need to share these documents with external parties as well. The key is you need to share them in a secure manner. We recently took a survey of HR professionals, and found that 69% of those surveyed have to share important documents with 3rd parties at least once a quarter or more. 11% need to share at least once a week! Our poll found that 76% are using email as their primary delivery method, and 67% deliver physical files. Let’s take a moment and describe why this is a huge deal: first, the document is scanned from a multi-function device, it is now in your inbox. You forward that email, with attachment, to the individual who needs it. Now a copy of that attachment is in your outbox and in the persons inbox. Let’s assume you are super diligent and delete those 3 copies; guess what, they are still in the email server. Plus, you don’t know what the receiving party has done with that attachment. Printed? Forwarded? One document becomes 30 very quickly. Same with the physical files. Copies are provided to the requesting party but then what? What happens to those copies? The reality is these records should never leave your control. Period. Digitally or physically. And you should have a complete audit of who has viewed them, and when. You should be able to restrict access to view only, so no extra copies are made or forwarded.
- What if the people who needed that information had it readily available and you could control exactly what they saw and copies they made, without help from IT? What if your business users should only see parts of the file, not the entire set of documents?
- Let’s talk about your environmental issues; no we’re not talking global warming. No doubt that you probably have solutions that solve one or more functions. HRIS being the system of record, Talent Management, Onboarding, and possibly Review and Succession planning. These various HR technologies all serve a purpose but they have created information silos for organizations. The same documents or information could exist in more than one system and in some cases people are printing out documents from one system to get them added to another or placed in the personnel file. Unfortunately, paper becomes the common format all of these systems can agree on. Over the last few years there has been an increase in companies adopting onboarding or recruiting software. Forrester’s 2011 Research revealed 74 % of companies surveyed had 4 or more systems in addition to their HRIS system. Companies now-a-days may actually have less systems because the software companies began to consolidate and merge. These software ‘suites’ might claim they have HR document management but attaching a document to an employee record one document at a time is not what we are talking about. In addition, the capabilities of e-forms is limited. Since most of these systems were not designed to manage HR documents they don’t really help with compliant recordkeeping either.
- What if there was a way to connect these systems, and paper, have them talk to each other and feed one central repository; it would simplify the process of managing HR records. What if that system also had retention to maintain compliance?
- Ask yourself this question – “How confident are you that all your employee folders are complete?” Unfortunately our files don’t tell us when documents are missing. When you need a document is the wrong time to figure out you don’t have it. Can you say you or your business users are confident that you have a complete set of documents for all your employees? Or the most up to date versions? We took another poll recently where we asked business users that same question; what do you think their responses were? It turns out they weren’t very confident at all. Only 6% of respondents were Very Confident their employee files were complete. That means that 94% of respondents are missing some or parts of their employee files. It’s not too surprising then that many of the clients I speak with on a regular basis tell me they weren’t too confident and quite frankly never thought about it until I asked the question.
- What if you could get to 100%? Would that help you sleep better at night or be more prepared for that internal audit?
- Like any good organization, you have a records retention policy. According to a survey given to senior IT executives at 500 enterprises the recognition and the need to have a formal retention plan is certainly getting more attention. But the growth isn’t large enough. ~Source: January 2013 Information Retention and eDiscovery Survey Global Results (http://symantec.dcig.com/2013/01/cleaning-up-clutter-top-priority-2013.html) The issue with most organizations, and that of this survey, is the implementation of that policy. Due to the siloed information, paper records, and email as the primary method to share information; how can you be confident you are implementing that policy in a way that will govern all of the records and copies of those records properly?
- Specifically for Human Resources documents, HR Management and directors need to ensure that the records are kept it as long as needed. Conversely, CFO (the person ultimately responsible) wants to ensure that all records are destroyed as soon as they are eligible.
- My guess is that one, some or all of those reasons resonated in some way. So now that you’re convinced that you need to digitize your employee files to maintain compliance, where should they go? Remember, not all solutions are created equally.
- In summary, by digitizing your employee files and putting them into FileBRIDGE for HR, not only can you solve the challenges we talked about existing in your organization but reap the benefits of a compliant organization.