The value of your HR department is in hiring the best candidates possible and streamlining the onboarding process. Limitations in technology go beyond impacting who and how you recruit. Improving the way HR processes paperwork increases departmental efficiency, while spending too much time on administrative tasks and paper-based filing holds back company-wide initiatives.
So, how does document management for human resources professionals help organizations become more agile, more strategic and more competitive in the marketplace?
When a new employee starts at your organization, they spend a lot of time completing a variety of documents, often times with a lot of their basic information being repeated on different forms. HR professionals spend even more time reviewing and processing these documents.
In a document management system, however, the use of electronic forms helps to streamline completing these documents: when an employee fills out a field, all other relevant fields are also populated. Then, these forms are split into different workflows and assigned to the responsible HR professionals. This relieves the HR department from countless hours of reviewing paperwork and focuses HR on processing the documents as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Electronic forms may be used across the entire human resources landscape, including documents related to employee screening and selection (resumes, applications, reference forms), onboarding (benefits, emergency notification forms), talent management (performance reviews, certifications, promotions forms), general information (salary, medical records, discipline forms) and others (unemployment, disability, safety forms).
In every organization, personnel files are confidential – from salary information to health information and benefits forms. When the most security you have is a filing cabinet, the larger your organization grows, the more your paper-based security becomes flawed.
Managing sensitive information becomes much simpler with easily searchable and retrievable documents. Security settings may be applied to each document for a transparent and controlled audit trail. Clearly see who viewed each document and how the document was changed. Plus, key executives may view relevant information digitally without needing to create more documents.
When your executives have easy access to essential HR documents, they gain a comprehensive view into the life of an employee, including all performance, disciplinary and salary information.
This kind of document management empowers executives to easily evaluate employees and make organizational decisions – restructuring or reallocating, for example – faster than ever before.
Empowering and enabling employees is a competitive factor for organizations focused on future growth. Keeping and delivering documents electronically may be a selling point in some situations.
Generally, with the right document management software, your HR professionals and your organization as a whole spends less time on managing documents and more time on developing employees.
Learn more about you can automate the entire employee lifecycle in this educational product webinar: