Keeping HR running smoothly is a serious challenge. Switching to electronic personnel files can help boost productivity in a number of ways.

Human Resource departments are incredibly important to any organization. On any given day, your HR team is working on a variety of responsibilities and dealing with a ton of paperwork. With that much paper-pushing involved, there is a lot of room to make things run smoother. Switching to electronic personnel files can help streamline your existing workflows and save your team serious time and money. Here are 3 simple ways electronic personnel files can help boost productivity across your entire HR department.

Instant File Retrieval
We all know how frustrating managing paper files is. Many of us envision bulky filing cabinets, overflowing with paper folders that are bursting at the seems.. And many times, this is HR's reality! No matter how often your team goes through and re-organizes everything, you can rest assured that your file draws will return to chaos quicker than you would like. This makes finding documents incredibly irritating and time-consuming.

Electronic personnel files allow HR to do away with disorganized filing cabinets. Instead, your personnel files are stored in an electronic system that allows your team to retrieve files instantly, from anywhere. Pull up files based upon the employee's name, ID number, department, or other identifying factors. You can even run filtered searches to pull up files based on department, document type, region, etc. With electronic personnel files, the documents you need are always right at your fingertips.

Paperless Onboarding
​Onboarding a new employee requires a lot of paperwork. From HR's perspective, this process is extremely inefficient on paper. Everytime a new-hire joins the company, your team needs to download, print, copy, assemble and prepare the onboarding packet for your new employee to sign. These repetitive tasks can be completely eliminated with a switch to electronic personnel files.

With paperless onboarding, online forms and esignatures take the place of pen-and-paper onboarding forms. Instead of filling out all of their paperwork in your office on their first day, new hires can review, fill out and legally sign all of their onboarding documentation before their first day on the job. Once finished, all completed onboarding documents are automatically filed in the new-hires electronic personnel folder. The best part is that it only takes HR about 30 seconds to send out an onboarding packet this way.. Simply select the appropriate onboarding template, enter the new-hire's name and email address - and you're done.

Automatic Audit Reports
Human Resources spends a lot of time ensuring that their records comply with state and federal regulations. One of the most important aspects of compliancy is making sure all of your employee folders contain all required documents and that everything is up-to-date. With a paper filing system, this can be a complete nightmare. With electronic personnel files, however, you can maintain compliance automatically.

Electronic personnel files allow you to run automatic reports on your staff folders. These reports will check to see that all personnel folders contain all required documents and that all time-sensitive materials are up-to-date...

Read more - 3 Tips for Boosting HR Productivity.