The COVID-19 pandemic injected intensive stress into business processes, from hiring and onboarding in human resources to managing employee benefits, payroll and training documents.

While advances have been made in recent years, HR departments remain one of the largest paper creators in most companies and are often trailing the pack behind other departments in eliminating time-consuming, paper-intensive processes. In fact, in a recent survey, 18% of companies reported storing all employee documents in paper format, and 74% reported that they store employee files in a mix of paper and digital formats.

This post will discuss four characteristics that your digital-first employee document management system should support to maximize your HR team’s effectiveness while managing remote teams.

Access to Employee Documentation & File Retrieval

When office doors were closed at the start of the pandemic, many HR teams struggled to get a hold of active paper files and sync that information with other digitally-born documents. That’s why your employee document management system should serve as a central repository for all employee-related files, regardless of origin. Your solution should allow for easy digitization of paper documents without specialized hardware and be available to authorized users wherever they are, whenever they need them and on any device.

Efficient HR Document Management Software

A central driver behind many digital transformation projects is to make organizations more efficient. HR teams likewise benefit immensely from spending less time on paperwork and more time on strategic initiatives and higher value tasks. Your employee document management system should include process automation, such as automatically indexing documents by metadata configurable to types, employees and other criteria. The system should automate repetitive workflows as well as provide self-service e-form creation and document uploading for employees and managers in order to free up staff for more strategic work.

Secure Employee File Management

Your employees are trusting you with some of their most personal information and it should be protected as such. Your document management software should let you restrict access at the role, feature, geography and document level, as well as permit customized access. When sharing documents inside or outside the organization, you should be able to set an access expiration date and restrict printing or downloading to minimize risk. For temporary auditor and attorney access to multiple documents, you should have the ability to create secure virtual review rooms. The employee file management system should encrypt data at rest and in motion and generate a complete document-level audit trail.

Personnel File Retention Compliance

Falling out of compliance with data governance regulations can cost your company – in fines, lawsuits and reputational damage. Your HR document management software should help your organization remain in compliance by automatically enforcing document-level retention policies and flagging incomplete files or outdated documents. It should also simplify the job of securely gathering and sharing documents for an audit or legal discovery by allowing users to pull specific documents across all employee files without searching for them across systems and physical locations.

Conclusion: Efficient employee document management requires an end-to-end digital solution

Companies that have undergone a digital transformation process often make the mistake of directly translating old paper workflows into their new digital processes. This means they gained all the expense of digital transformation while missing opportunities to gain efficiencies.

If your human resource employee document management system is missing one or more of the above characteristics, talk to one of our solution specialists today about CartaDC for HR Professionals.

CartaDC for HR Professionals offers fast, secure, compliant access to all of your employee documents in the cloud and integrates with your HCM, HRIS or other HR point solutions. The platform also seamlessly merges data and collects HR documents from multiple systems, saving time and ensuring document control while avoiding errors.

To learn more, download this informative eBook: HR Document Management – Closing the Gap in Your Digital Transformation Strategy.