3 HR Nightmares that DMS Could Prevent
There are a few situations that every HR manager dreads having to deal with. Some of these situations can’t be avoided, but others could be prevented or at least simplified by having a good document management system in your office. So let’s use our imaginations for a moment and picture how the following situations could be different if a DMS were used.
Wrongful Termination
You have an employee who has caused persistent problems over the last several months. Clients have complained about their interactions with this employee. Other employees have had issues with this person as well. Overall, their performance has been far below subpar. After making several efforts to improve this employee’s performance, they are finally let go.
A few weeks later, you receive notice that the employee is suing the company for unemployment due to wrongful termination. Of course, you know that this employee was terminated for good reasons. They received ample warnings. But now, you need to prove that the termination was valid. As you search through the employee’s folder in your filing cabinet, you realize that you have no written record of any of the complaints. You can’t remember if they were never recorded, or if they were just misfiled. Because of the lack of documentation, the employee wins their suit against your company, despite their poor performance on the job.
Now, imagine how much more smoothly this would go with DMS. You receive word of the employee’s claim. You quickly pull up the employee’s personnel file on your computer and navigate to the subfolder called “Performance Warnings”. There, you find recorded documentation of every complaint and performance warning the employee received. You quickly send every record to the unemployment office, showing the termination was warranted.
Much simpler, right?
Compliance Audit
As you likely know, if you handle any records for employee health information, then you must comply with HIPAA’s regulatory standards; additionally, you’re liable to be audited by HIPAA at any time to ensure your compliance. Imagine that it’s happening to you right now.
You sit down with the auditor, and they ask you to show certain records for a certain employee. You search for the employee file, then dig through the stack of papers in that file. After several minutes, you breathe a sigh of relief as you extract the needed document.
The auditor immediately asks for another document, and you begin your frantic search again. Except this time, you can’t find what you need. You can probably imagine the implications of this for your audit, so we won’t spend time dwelling on the details.
Instead, let’s talk about turning that nightmare compliance audit into a smooth and easy experience for both you and the auditor. The auditor asks for a certain employee’s health insurance record. You click into the search box, type the employee’s last name and the words “health insurance” and the requested record is immediately in front of you.
Plus, you can show how these records are only accessible to certain users based on their roles, and that you properly utilize retention policies. Your audit is done in record time and you pass with flying colors.
Of course, an audit still isn’t something you’ll look forward to, but at least it won’t give you nightmares to think about it.
Lost Paper work
Office fires and natural disasters can quickly turn into HR disasters for your company. A fire breaks out in the server room over the weekend, which is right next to your file room. The fire quickly spreads to your filing cabinets, lighting up all that flammable paper like a pep rally bonfire. The fire department gets there quickly, but you’ve already lost several cabinets’ worth of paper.
And the rest? Well, everything that’s not burned suffers extreme water damage from the fire suppression system. Very few of the papers are still usable. So now what? How do you go about replacing all of that valuable information and documentation? We’ll let you mull over that while we talk about how DMS will spare you from this nightmare.
The fire that was in your office damaged equipment and other office structures, but all of your paperwork and documentation is safe; it’s preserved in a Cloud-based document management system, and all of your information is unaffected by the fire.
Now that your office needs some repairs, some employees may need to work from home, but that doesn’t matter. All of the documents they need to do their jobs are available from the same Cloud-based system that saved your documents in the first place.
No stress or frustration over trying to replicate or replace your old files. Sure, an office fire would still be a bit of a nightmare, but from an HR standpoint, it will all blow over pretty quickly.
Hopefully thinking about all of these potential disasters didn’t cause any undue anxiety for you. But if it did, then you probably don’t have the tools you need to handle these situations. Fill out the form on this page, and we’ll show you the best way to confront and overcome these nightmares.