HR Document Management: Space, Security and Simplicity

One area where many companies feel the pain of paper and the need for a Document Management solution is in the Human Resources Department. When it comes to record keeping in the Human Resources department, two of the most crucial elements are privacy and legal compliance.

This often means making sure things are filed in the proper place, securely locked up whenever the Human Resources Manager is gone, and keeping boxes of old employee records at a storage facility either onsite or offsite in the interest of space. Adopting a Document Management system in the Human Resources department allows you to have all the space and security you need from your computer.

Space

Space becomes an issue because each time an employee leaves the company, the HR department is required to keep all of their documentation for a specific amount of time depending on the particular document type and what the state and federal laws require in their particular location. This probably means shipping boxes of files to a storage facility, paying the storage fees for however many years are required, and then paying to have them destroyed when the time requirement has been met. If information was required of a former employee, there would be another charge to ship the particular box back, find the document, and then ship the whole box back to the storage facility. This process is not very cost effective or timely.

Security

Human Resources Employees have to be very prudent about making sure they don’t leave confidential information on their desk or in any place where it can be accessed by anyone besides them. Having printed copies of these confidential documents leaves them more vulnerable to misfiling or being left out on someone’s desk.

Simplicity

If these documents were captured and stored in a document management system, they would be secure and easily retrieved in a moment’s notice. Even for a large company with thousands of employee records to manage, the ability to retrieve documents by index property values like social security number, name, document type or date makes searching for a particular document very simple.

Eliminating paper from the human resources department leads to cost savings, increased efficiency and increased security. The costs associated with printing, filing and off-site storage would be eliminated. Getting a needed document would mean typing in an index value rather than going to a file cabinet, finding the employee file then finding the particular document. Practices would always follow legal compliance because former employee files could be easily kept in the system, and the security would ensure that private information could only be viewed by authorized staff.

Many different areas of company operations are heading toward electronic storage, and for human resources departments, it is easy to see the benefits of having the storage, security and ease of retrieval that document management provides. As an example, DocLink, document management for Sage comes with an effective solution to store and manage documents securely for Human Resource Department.

If you are interested in learning more about Document Management, visit our learning center full of relevant whitepapers, webinars and recorded demos on the topic.