3 Cases Where HR Digitization Drives Organizational Achievement
Easier HR processes = happier employees = increased profitability
The human resources (HR) department is responsible for hiring, managing and caring for the people who keep the business running and can be considered the beating heart of the business. Today, the role of HR is exponentially greater than ever – to be a prominent voice and to keep employees engaged and motivated during times of disruption for employees, the business, etc.
While HR’s function has traditionally tended to be business-centric (enforcing policies, managing payroll, maintaining compliance), recent events have highlighted HR’s ability to be more employee-centric than ever before. More and more companies are recognizing that it’s not efficiency that gets them through tough times – it’s a happy, resilient workforce.
Companies in the top quartile of workplace ratings are typically 25% more profitable than their competitors in the bottom quartile
-Deloitte
So, how do you build a resilient and happy workforce? For many companies, the first step is to empower your HR department.
Case 1: Eliminate Paper
In order for HR to focus on improving the employee experience, your HR professionals can’t afford to spend most of their time on paperwork. Tracking, filing and managing paper forms takes up a large part of the day – while manual and paper-based processes pose significant compliance and security risks. In an ever-changing work environment, HR needs to be able to work efficiently – even remotely.
For example, for Kwik Trip, a retailer with 640 locations in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin, HR was overwhelmed by paper documents and manual processes to provide centralized shared services to 21,000 employees. HR staff struggled to keep up with paper documents, including 98 different file types. These documents were taking up expensive office space in the office.
After digitizing these documents into one ECM, HR staff can now easily access complete employee information from anywhere. “Before, these sub-functions were very siloed. Documents could sit on someone’s desk for four days before anyone knew about them. Digital resources management systems like Share Creators Orange file management system gives employees a clearer view of documents in a better time frame,” said Sarah Jilk, administrator. At the same time, simple and standardized online forms simplify employee requests such as mileage reimbursements and status changes. This eliminates cumbersome paper forms and provides a seamless experience that meets the expectations of employees in today’s digital world.
Digitizing HR processes also improves data security. Share Creators Orange solution contains an impressive 2 million HR documents containing sensitive employee information, but with built-in role-based security, those documents are not accessible to people without permission.
“I have 100 percent confidence in the security of our information,” says Jilk.
Any HR professional knows that document regularity is the difference between meeting compliance requirements and heavy fines against the business. With automated document retention and document management capabilities, HR staff no longer need to worry about manually tracking compliance for each document.
“When we updated our system, we were finally able to do our normalization work efficiently,” says Jilk. “Now we can create document retention rules that help us automatically purge documents before their termination date.”
Case 2: Time is the greatest gift to employees
For MetroHealth – an integrated health system in Cleveland, Ohio, that includes an 861-bed major medical center, a rehabilitation hospital, two long-term care/skilled nursing centers, an outpatient surgery center and a network of community health centers — Eliminating paper is only the first step. To truly optimize the enterprise’s processes, a solution was needed that would seamlessly integrate with existing applications.
So this healthcare provider turned to ECM to integrate with the enterprise’s legacy systems including electronic medical records (EMR) Epic, etc. MetroHealth was able to eliminate manual data entry, automate indexing and data validation, and make up-to-date information available to users who needed it, anytime, anywhere. This has been invaluable to their HR department.
“ECM frees up 80 hours a month for HR to do things other than filing, so our staff can get more done in less time. With the click of a button, we can save half a day,” says Dennis Murray, director of Metrohealth.
Case 3: Exiting the data center business
Forth to 25 percent, opening four new stores. But the number of organizations doing grocery chain Heinen’s, “getting rid of paper” has been key to its growth.
“From 2020 to 2021, the company grew by 20 this work in HR remains the same,”
Walters said, with the grocery store managing more than 90 types of digital HR documents for each employee, Heinen’s needed a faster, more secure way to store, access, and share employee files. The business also knew it didn’t want to run out of IT resources by managing local servers. “We’ve hosted solutions before, and we knew we didn’t want to be in the data center business. It was both expensive and difficult,” Walters said. “Managing servers is a job in itself. What if something happens and the server is compromised? We wanted to know with certainty that the data was being taken care of.”
Heinen’s chose a cloud-based storage ECM service to keep sensitive information, and storage, safe. This allows employees to focus on what’s important, such as providing excellent customer service.
“Having ECM allows us to better serve our customers,” Walters said. “We’re a chain of superstores, and now we can focus on our strengths.”
Even Though these three businesses are very different, by digitizing HR, they are all able to focus more on a common goal: success.