The five challenges of employee document management
HR teams will be familiar with the many challenges of keeping documents updated, secure, compliant and accessible, particularly for a global workforce. Many businesses have multiple systems for storing employee documents, data, contracts and policies with some still relying on paper documents. This can lead to inefficiencies - costing you time, productivity and money as well as the risk of regulatory fines for security breaches and non-compliance.
In an organisation whenever a person is hired, changes or leaves a role, or is absent, processes are triggered and documents are generated. Within most organisations, there are a multitude of different processes, document types and storage places, security roles and access levels as well as laws concerning the retention and access of documents. Without the best systems in place, even the most dedicated HR teams will struggle to achieve their full potential. To get the most out of your documents, you need complete control over how you handle and track them. Your business can save time, money and stress with the right platform in place.
Here are five key challenges companies face when it comes to employee document management and how these can be solved.
1. Poor Employee Experience
Within most organisations, there is typically a HCM, payroll and recruitment application and a separate document management system. For HR professionals this creates a disjointed experience with different documents held in separate locations. Likewise, employees cannot typically fully self-service because some documents are held in one system and others in a document management application, SharePoint or in paper files. Having documents held in various locations results in poor user experiences and HR teams lose time to repetitive and tedious admin tasks and fail to maximise progress on larger strategic objectives.
To optimise employee experience, productivity, and ultimately profitability, HR teams need to introduce new tools that can enable employees to self-serve. Kainos Employee Document Management (Kainos EDM) is a simple, innovative all-in-one solution that enables all employee documents to be held inside Workday. Leveraging the capabilities of Workday Extend, employees can see all of their documents by category, and HR professionals can view employee files in a single view, transforming their experience for the better.
2. Risks of fines for non-compliance
With more data residing in a digital format, governance rules across the world are increasing. Indeed, data from Gartner says by 2023, 65% of the world’s population will be covered by modern legislation. Using the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a model of best practice there is a shift to making information governance a priority globally. No less than 17 countries and regions are adopting a similar approach to GDPR and, as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development data shows, there are more than 240 separate, nation specific pieces of data protection in place right now. These laws generally have three common intents - To ensure data is only held for as long as it is needed/necessary; used for the purposes for which it was originally given and accessed by those that have a rationale to access it.
For organisations operating across different regions, countries, and states/provinces, it becomes difficult to assure compliance. It’s for this reason that Kainos EDM has created country-by-country, and category/type retention and purging capabilities. This means that irrespective of the different rules across boundaries an organisation can implement adherence to legislation and a standardised approach to compliance while also enabling your business to have documents readily available in the event of an audit.
3. Security breaches
Employee-related documents contain highly sensitive information, including bank accounts and personal details. There are several security risks businesses may expose themselves to such as data privacy breaches, if files aren’t stored in a safe location. Ever expanding rules on data access mean that CIOs are increasingly looking to rationalise the number of line of business applications that are used across their people function.
More applications means more quality assurance and information governance audits to validate that each is compliant for each country where data is held. As a consequence of the evolution of products to cover more and more functions, it is now possible for organisations to have a single application. The power of one, as often cited by Workday, is about enabling a single experience and a single consistent way of securing data.
Taking advantage of Workday Extend’s security functions, Kainos EDM links seamlessly with the security model of Workday meaning both data and documents can be secured in a common manner. HR officers can see functions, options, data, and documents that employees cannot. Employees can see only the data and documents that is relevant to them or their direct reports.
4. Stressful workload for HRIS teams
In an era where technology is ubiquitous in both our personal and business lives, we are seeing a transition in technology that focuses on enhancing user experience and productivity. A core component of this is a transition to business users being able to effect change without being technically minded. Rather than needing to go to IT to get things done, those that understand the business best can deliver the solutions themselves. With this comes enablement and a greater likelihood of automation. Currently, HR officers are either using solutions outside of HCM applications to generate complex documents like contracts or they are reliant upon IT to enable them to do this using technical reporting and mail merge style functions.
Kainos EDM helps organisations become more efficient and reduces the burden on HRIS teams by using familiar document editor tools: Microsoft Word, Google Docs and Apple Pages to create document templates that can be automatically generated with data inside/outside of Workday and conditional logic to show/hide content based upon data inside/outside of Workday. Using the comments function of these document editors, HR staff can indicate the fields which should be populated or show/hide sections. Non-technical HR officers can not only generate documents as part of business processes quickly and easily but they can also affect changes to templates without the need for technical support.
5. Automating processes
Documentation is an inevitable part of running any business, and as that business grows, so too do the number of documents. One of the most important challenges of document management is to be able to trace documents throughout their lifecycle. At any point, you should be able to determine the status of the document, what changes have been made, if it has been authorised or not and whether it has been shared with other stakeholders.
Kainos EDM gives you peace of mind that your employee files are up-to-date by automating a single process or optimising your entire document management system to eliminate inefficient practices. Kainos has already built automated processes that enable the mass creation of job requisitions, contingent workers and payments. ‘Extending’ upon this experience Kainos has built the means for non-technical HR officers to mass create any document within Kainos EDM, enabling the generation of thousands of documents in a couple of clicks, distributing them with a DocuSign envelope, have multiple signatories involved, and storing them against the users profile.