Has Your HR Department Fallen Prey to the Paper Pileup?

Documents—love ‘em, hate ‘em, or indifferent to ‘em, it doesn’t really matter. They’re part of your life—and a big part of Human Resources.

Whether you create the document internally or receive it from an outside partner, HR departments today are in charge of more and more information than ever before. The trick is making sure your HR department is the master of that information, rather than falling prey to a paper pile-up that can seriously damage the efficiency of your department.

Not only does your HR department manage and control a large volume and different types of information, but that same information is often highly-confidential.

Employee records
Contracts of employment
Payroll information
Training information

Are all part of the data that comes into HR.

How much time do you spend as an HR professional trying to find and manage the information you need, rather than focusing on hiring, training, and developing employees?

M-Files, one of the software solution partners of 5i Solutions, Inc. conducted a survey of 100 decision makers from different companies, all of which had more than 50 employees. The goal was to better understand the challenges currently facing HR professionals as they cope with managing the vast amounts of data that are under the aegis. Some of these challenges came up loud and clear:

HR can’t find the data they need

41% of HR decision-makers questioned cited over 10 minutes per day searching for job-critical documents and information, according to the survey—with nearly half of them spending more than 20 minutes per day!

Why so much wasted search time?

HR Departments Still use Paper—

a Lot of Paper!

65% of those surveyed cited using paper documents, paper processes, and paper storage and archival systems. That means even today, for a majority of HR professionals, paper is still the ‘go-to’ solution.

So it’s hardly surprising that HR departments have a lengthy amount of time devoted to finding, sharing, and updating information. They are still tied to paper!

47% surveyed have made at least partial move to files and folders on network drives. This eliminates paper storage but opens up problems in and of itself: the risk of duplicate information; ensuring the latest version of a document is being used; searching folder by folder eats up a lot of time; the risk of duplicate information being stored across multiple systems/locations.

Paper Processes = Pain for HR

The survey asked respondents to identify the most inefficient HR processes. The top three identified were:

Employee reviews, salary data, & benefits administration
Posting job vacancies & managing applications
Interviews & the onboarding process for new employees

With heavy use of paper, the above manual processes are inherently time-consuming and inefficient. By digitizing these processes, wonderful things can happen– meaning many manual activities can be automated.

This alone can free up vast amounts of time for HR.

For example, a whopping 80% of respondents have a paper process for documents that require signature approvals—documents like employee contracts and offer letters. Digitizing data means that electronic signatures can be used, and electronic documents routed automatically to the person responsible for approval.

Not only has the process become more efficient, but there is now an excellent, verifiable audit trail. Compliance will improve almost automatically, too.

It is clear than the biggest challenges today with the HR role are handling manual document processing. 44% surveyed said printing, scanning, and hand-signing of documents —and then emailing those documents and locating them for storage in their proper place—was particularly challenging.

Don’t let Your HR Department Fall Prey to the Paper Pileup!

Want to learn more about managing HR information? Want to ditch your headaches related to manual HR processes? Check out this link to find 5 ways 5i Can Help HR Tame the Paper Pileup.

If you need a Document Management Solution that will give you the important data you need—instantly– 5i Solutions can bring it to you.