HR Answers: Tossing out the paper

Human resources’ primary purpose should be the fostering of a company’s human capital. However, the operational side of HR can get in the way. As organizations grow, more and more burden is placed on HR, often without additional resources. More employees mean more paperwork—it’s inevitable in the human resources field. But while eliminating paper and moving to digital are excellent goals for any HR department, doing so isn’t going to alleviate the amount of work. There needs to be a dramatic change in thinking about how we accomplish everyday HR processes and responsibilities.

There are lots of intricate document processes involved in human resources. The record-keeping aspect of onboarding new employees is a time-consuming process that requires specialized file structures, the gathering of specific documents from the employee and sorting them into the correct locations for compliance purposes. Forms for nearly every event in an employee’s time with the organization need to be collected and filed. Reviews, promotions, write-ups, terminations—all of these need to be recorded on specialized forms that need to be manually filed.

The job of organizing all that paper is further complicated when manual processes lead to human error. It’s inevitable that files will be misfiled, even lost. This is another time drain that takes away from human resources’ more productive functions.

 

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