If you're a Softcat customer (and we may assume you are, if you are reading this!), you know how important our employees are to us. We even call it out as the foundation of our mission statement. We believe that happy employees make happy customers – that's the foundation of our success. We're not alone – most business are realising that people are their most important asset in a time of signficiant financial, technological and economic disruption. That makes your HR team one of the most important departments in your organisation. Unfortunately, there's a lot of documentation that goes with hiring, paying, developing and looking after your staff – especially through the onboarding process, where you are collecting a significant amount of personal data. Most of this documentation, in many organisations, is paper-based. This adds significantly to the administrative burden. We think organisations should work to free their HR teams from the shackles of paper, and give them more time to hire and develop the best people, to give them an edge in a competitive world.

Digitising your processes with Document Management

The foundation of digitising your HR processes is a Document Management (DM) solution. While you probably can't remove every last scrap of paper, if you work to digitise onboarding, payroll information and records management you will significantly reduce the administrative burden – making the processes faster and making the management of all of those documents significantly easier. HR headache – gone!
Document Management isn't only useful for simplifying your workload but will help your business stay compliant with legislation around personal data, and in particular GDPR. Arguably, it's easier to secure digital records than paper ones – and if someone hits you with a Subject Access Request, it's much faster to comply if those records are digitised and therefore searchable.

What are the other benefits to Document Management?

Providing a 'virtual filing cabinet'
This approach stops you having to physically search for documents in paper-based storage systems across multiple locations. The documents and information are held within your 'Virtual Filing Cabinet', enabling you to search intelligently across the business, . For example, if you need information on an employee from an overseas office, you can access it through digital search rather than waiting until the time difference allows for them to search through piles of paper and then physically transfer (securely of course!) the document in question.
Easier adherence to document retention policies
Digitising your documents means that you can automate the management of your document retention policies. If a document can only be legally kept for a certain period, then DM software can ensure it is deleted on the appropriate date. You no longer need to go looking for out of date pieces of paper that could potentially cause a breach of compliance.
Slicker processes
If you digitise your processes, those documents are always available – which means you are never slowed down by missing paperwork! That's critical in a highly competitive hiring environment, where candidates are judging you on every interaction. It also improves how you work with employees currently in the organisation – if for example you need their payroll information, it's available instantly.
Self-service for managers
Managers within your organisation will no doubt need data and docs on their employees. A good DM system will enable you to offer self-service document access for managers of departments outside of HR – potentially even integrating information from other services such as payroll and financial systems Clearly you only want to enable them to see documents pertaining to their own team, but if they can access this directly, they don't have to wait for HR to respond when they are busy finding the next great employee. Of course it also frees up HR's time to do just that!

Why Softcat for Document Management?

We understand that taking care of employees, your most important asset, is vital to the success and growth of your business. We also understand that you may already have invested both time and money in departmental software applications. Digitising processes doesn't replace them, instead DM offers a solution to help join the dots.

Get in touch

To find out how Softcat's Document Management team can help your busy HR department, as well as lots of other areas within your business.