Overcoming 3 Challenges with Managing Employee Records

HR departments can easily become overburdened with file management tasks when they’re dealing with traditional paper documents. Digitizing paper records and embracing a digital document management system empowers HR departments to expertly manage employee files throughout the employee and the document lifecycle.

Three Challenges in Managing Employee Records 

HR departments deal with a few common challenges in managing employee records with traditional analog methods.

1. A High Volume of Records

When it comes to document management, a major challenge for HR departments is the sheer volume of records involved in the employee lifecycle. Consider all of the following documents involved in HR processes:

• Offer letters
• Pre-employment testing results
• Background check information
• Tax forms
• Direct deposit and payroll information
• Compensation plans
• Benefits plans
• Employee medical records
• Health and safety records
• Notification of position changes or raises
• Offboarding forms
• And more

From hiring to offboarding and every stage in between, the employee lifecycle necessarily involves a great deal of documentation. 

2. Incessant Manual Tasks

Managing each of these records comes with multiple tasks, such as:

• Generating the document
• Obtaining signatures
• Extracting data for your enterprise systems
• Filing the document in the correct place
• Keeping employee data secure and private
• Accessing the file as needed
• Disposing of the document when it’s appropriate to do so

Traditional methods of carrying out all of these document management tasks involve significant manual work. This time-consuming burden can keep HR personnel from committing more time to higher-value tasks.

3. Inefficient Physical Storage

Storing files takes up physical space. At the very least, this means filing cabinets taking up square footage in your office. For large enterprises, it can even mean expensive storage facilities dedicated to storing paper records. 

Physical file storage doesn’t just take up space — it also leaves files vulnerable to becoming lost, damaged, or compromised. Furthermore, files are only viewable from one location, making them inaccessible for remote workers or employees in satellite offices or other branches of your business.

Overcoming Challenges with Document Digitizing Services

Considering all the challenges inherent in traditional methods of employee file management, it’s no wonder that many companies want a better solution, especially at a time when HR personnel are overwhelmed with all the change that’s taken place over the last two years. 

The solution for easing pain points and embracing a better method of employee file management is to undergo digital transformation. Now is the time to make this change, but digitizing files can be a gargantuan task that requires an unfeasible amount of time and effort to complete in-house. 

Fortunately, you can bring in an outside vendor to scan your documents to help you go paperless. Although this is a helpful service, in most cases, digitizing services are limited to scanning in your paper files without making your documents intelligent and searchable. That means you’re still left with manual data entry tasks to turn scanned images into data you can feed into your HR management system (HRMS) or other enterprise applications. 

While these services only get you part way there, comprehensive document digitizing services, such as those offered by Ripcord, can help you completely digitize your files and revolutionize the way you manage employee records. Rather than just creating scanned images of paper documents, this process turns each document into an intelligent and searchable digital file, just as though it was created digitally from the start.

Realize the Benefits of Digitizing Employee Records

By digitizing your employee records, you can streamline your document management processes and enjoy easy yet secure access to all your files from anywhere. To learn more about how digitizing your records can help you overcome challenges, head over to our "Discover the Benefits of Digitizing Employee Records” blog post.