5 compliance challenges in managing HR documents

Did you know 46 percent of companies use HR platforms to improve their HR compliance?

HR compliance ensures that your workplace policies are in line with legal regulations. It not only helps your business run smoothly by improving processes, it also protects your employees by keeping their data safe. However, paper processes and inefficient management systems make it difficult to adhere to the strict compliance standards.

To keep your compliance in perfect order, managing your HR documents efficiently is key. Let’s look at five compliance challenges to overcome in order to be compliant across the board.

1. Securing personal data

When you’re managing HR documents, you’re dealing with extremely sensitive data. You need to store and share it securely to stay compliant. There are several compliance regulations that govern the storage and use of personal data. They include:

• GDPR. The General Data Protection Regulation sets the guidelines for collecting, storing and using personal data. It applies to all industries within the European Union and European Economic Area (EEA).
• DPA. The Data Protection Act is the UK’s implementation of GDPR. It controls how organisations, businesses or the government use personal data.
• HIPAA. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act protects sensitive patient health information. HIPAA applies to companies that operate within the US.

Securing personal data is an important ethical and legal consideration affecting every industry. But, if you’re working in healthcare, utilities, or finance, you should take particular care. These industries are among those with the strictest data privacy laws.

2. Duplicating employee records

Storing multiple copies of an employee’s record doesn’t just cause issues in your document management. It can affect the employee too.

Duplication often occurs when an employee legally changes their name, switches roles within the company, or re-joins after leaving.

For your HR teams, duplicate records can lead to inaccurate reporting, as certain employees may appear twice in your datasets. This affects the quality of your data, making it less reliable for business decision-making. For your employees, duplicate records could lead to incorrect PAYE taxation which can be time-consuming to amend and cause them frustration.

3. Keeping documents up to date

Your HR teams deal with hundreds of documents every day. Whether it’s onboarding, employee appraisals, or leave requests, there’s an unfathomable amount of information to keep track of. Keeping everything up to date without the help of automation is quite a feat.

This poses a challenge to your HR department, as out of date documents can cause several problems.

• Retention risks. If a document is out of date because it’s no longer needed, you may be breaking document retention policies.
• Inaccurate information. Out of date documents may lead to inaccuracies in your files. For example, you might have the wrong information about your employees and send confidential information to the wrong address.
• Increased likelihood of error. Manually updating your documents often results in human error. This makes your data unreliable and poses a compliance risk.

Automated HR workflows remedy this problem by automatically updating documents as required and flagging potential issues. This helps you fix inaccuracies before they escalate to larger problems.

4. Locating documents

Did you know that more than 50 percent of office professionals spend longer searching for files than they do on actual work?

Poor document organisation wastes your employees’ time. This takes away billable hours from your business, and frustrates your staff.

But that’s not the only problem it causes. If you can’t produce the requested documents during a certification audit, you could fail. And this will result in the removal of your certification, which can affect your reputation.

5. Losing documents

Document loss is a serious compliance risk that could result in the breach of data protection standards. To avoid legal ramifications and reputation damage, it’s important to store and organise your documents correctly.

A variety of factors can cause data loss, including:

• Human error, where employees delete files by accident.
• Natural disasters such as fires and floods.
• Hardware failures such as corrupted hard drives.

Having disaster recovery processes in place, including backups of all your files, provides you with a safety net if bad luck strikes.

Meet the HR compliance challenge

Regardless of how confident you are with your HR processes, you’ll still probably run into a few compliance challenges. But, don’t see them as an obstacle. See them as an opportunity to improve.

With a Document Management system, you’ll have full control over your HR policies, enabling you to keep compliance risks in check. Our work with The Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust equipped them with a ground-breaking digital HR system. This helped them update their paper processes and implement process automation to ensure strong Document Management procedures. With this in place, they had full control of their records and boosted their compliance.

Eager to find out what we could do for your company? Book a meeting with us today by using the form below.