3 Ways Intelligent Information Management Helps HR Departments Focus on The Bigger Picture
The human resources landscape has been continuously changing for several years now, and HR professionals continue to find themselves balancing the need for creative, big-picture solutions with the ever-present daily needs of their organizations. With drastic shifts in the employee value proposition, difficulties acquiring top talent, and a workforce that continues to need re-engagement, it can be difficult to find time to field questions from other departments, manage the onboarding of new employees, and ensure that your department adheres to mandated regulatory compliance standards.
Intelligent information management solutions can streamline and even automate many of these daily human resources tasks, putting time back into your day and opening opportunities to focus on overarching strategies that can grow your organization.
3 Reasons to Invest in Intelligent Information Management
1 Manage The Flow of Information
Nearly every task within an organization is fueled by information, but what happens when that information is difficult to locate? Human resources departments have tremendous amounts of data to manage, which are found across a wide range of documents, including employment contracts, compensation records, job descriptions, employee records, onboarding forms, performance reviews, and so many more.
With so much information to juggle, finding what’s needed for any given task can be a real challenge. Take employee reviews as an example. To complete this process, HR staff are often tasked with providing job descriptions, contracts, performance plans, and other documents needed to adequately assess an employee.
By indexing these documents with key data points in an intelligent information management system, HR staff can effortlessly search them using any combination of those data points. If you need past assessments of a specific employee, for example, you can search for assessments as a document type and the employee’s name or ID as an additional data point.
Having crucial data at your fingertips enhances HR process efficiency, drastically cutting the time it takes to complete tasks and allowing human resources staff to provide information to managers and other departments much more readily.
2 Enhance The Onboarding Experience
Another time-consuming process that HR departments oversee, onboarding documentation collects necessary employee information and protects your organization from liability. That said, it also typically requires regular follow-up from HR departments and, more often than not, comes with a slew of questions from new hires.
Government forms can be confusing and time-consuming, and HR departments often lack visibility into when these forms are completed, resulting in a need to check-in. In fact, According to Zippia, organizations with a strong onboarding process increase new hire retention by 82% and productivity by 70%.
Intelligent information management solutions can provide simplified onboarding using web forms that guide new hires step by step, eliminating much of the confusion. These forms can also automatically populate repetitive fields such as employee name and social security number that are repeatedly requested across several onboarding forms.
Once completed, the forms can be automatically routed to HR staff, who will be instantly notified. With this guided, automated experience, Human resources staff can take a much more hands-off approach to these forms with fewer questions and follow-ups.
3 Ensure Data Compliance and Security
Human resource regulations are complex and frequently changing, often making manual compliance a time-consuming and inefficient experience. Paper filing systems and shared drives lack the necessary controls to ensure regulations are also being adhered to.
These regulations include reasonable safeguards for protected data and mandatory document retention rates. Some human resources documents, for example, may contain personal health information protected by HIPAA, and failing to reasonably safeguard it can result in fines up to 50,000 according to HIPAA Journal.
Intelligent information solutions can enforce data protection in HR by granting document access solely to the staff that need it. This ensures all individuals with access are trained to handle such protected data and narrows the vulnerability points for a potential leak.
Documents such as I9 forms that prove employees are cleared to work within the United States must also be retained for 3 years after the employee’s hire date. If these forms are misfiled or misplaced, audits can be an incredibly time-consuming scramble to find the documents that are being requested.
Intelligent information management ensures that these documents are easily searchable and can even automatically dispose of them after their retention period ends, reducing your organization’s liability.
By reducing the amount of time it takes for staff to prepare for audits and enforce HR data security best practices, human resources departments have more time to focus on their overarching goals.
In Summary
Human resources departments are responsible for a vast array of tasks, and finding the time to adapt your strategy to a rapidly changing workforce can be challenging. But by effectively managing your information and using the right solutions, you can put hours back into your day and let innovative ideas flourish.
How Square 9 Can Help
Square 9 is a leading provider of AI-powered intelligent document processing solutions that take the paper out of work and make it easier to get things done. With digital workflows that automate many aspects of how you work today, we make it easy by extracting information from scans or PDFs, storing documents in a searchable archive, and building digital twins of your current processes through graphical workflows.
