As a business enterprise owner, you’d be well familiar with the importance of HR Record Management. Along with the transactional records of the company, they pile up rapidly and might seem tedious to manage. However, less known is the significance of preserving the HR records! As an organization that deals with tons of data, in print and digital formats, here is what you need to know about the Retention of HR Records.
Retention of HR Records: What You Need to Know?
Types of Information in the HR Records
HR Records contain crucial information that can be categorized as follows;
- Personnel Records including Recruitment candidates, employee records, and Identity records.
- Training documents, performance sheets, attendance sheets, Payroll records, etc.
- Surveys, call logs, Interview records, and Employee communication letters
- Employee security, PPF, ESI, and other employee benefits
- Annual Confidential Reports
The above is not an exhaustive list and can contain more crucial records. These are usually stored in papers, Cards, files, blueprints, folders, CDs, Videos, Audio and other digital/physical formats. This information is directly related to Workforce, Partnerships/alliances, Third-party payrolls, transfer, promotion, recruitment & onboarding, deployment, lay-off, learning & development, training, deputation, employee benefits, salary and disputes.
The above documents not only serve the purpose of reference, but also act as recorded evidence of any interaction or activity of the organization with the employees. A meticulous HR Record management can, hence, save the organization from legal fallouts and business disputes.
Why HR Records Must be Precisely Retained?
It is imperative for your organization to manage and organize crucial HR Records for quick retrieval. This is majorly meant to for;
Productivity Insights: Timely-secured and organized records can give you important insights into your HR team’s productivity. You can access recruitment rate, attrition rate, employee retention rate, employee job-satisfaction reviews, and the management efficiency of your HR team.
Quick Talent Dashboard: Your properly arranged HR records are a real-time window to the company’s pool of talent, skills, capability and caliber. You can view the manpower potential of your workforce with carefully retained Human Resource records.
Say Bye-bye to Lawsuits: As any organization is a human-powered system, problems lurk from every nook and corner. Law suits and legal claims are quiet common. Companies that adhere to proper processes and record management have sufficient evidence of interaction and activity with their employees. This even includes day-to-day premise activities recorded over CCTVs! Such organized records of past performance, reference checks, performance, identity, and payroll of employees can potentially save you’re a lot of time & money from lawsuits.
Hiring Strategy: Many companies find it tedious to maintain a high Employee Retention Rate due to ‘n’ number of reasons. To strategize for this hiring challenge, companies can always ‘dig’ in the previous records of high-performing employees who had a long-working tenure. This will give them enough information to keep good talent in buffer during tough times.
What are some Usual Challenges in HR Record Management?
As mentioned earlier, maintaining accessible records of the personnel is hard. It becomes even challenging when the organization is operating at a large scale with hundreds to thousands of employees. Following are the challenges that your HR department might have faced while doing the same;
Non-Standard Formats: Frankly, there is no ‘Standard’ format for the employees or HR teams to store their records in. Employees arrange the documents as per their convenience and usability, HRs struggle to store them in an accessible format.
Organization: Organization of Personnel records, especially in print format, is super-challenging. The documents have to be individually clubbed, grouped, and stored. Then, during the time of retrieval, it becomes tough to locate the right set of papers from the plethora of records!
Integrity of Data: Papers and files go missing all the time. Moreover, the stored HR records have to be protected from the dust, liquids, and even termite attacks In case of old records.
Security: Documents related to the Employee Identity are classified as sensitive information. If they are accessible to other employees/staff other than the HR team, then trouble might ensue.
What Can You Do?
To effectively manage your HR records and unburden your HR team for maximum productivity, you can hire a professional records management company like us. We come in to your rescue and ensure that your records are always safe, accessible and intact with us in both the Digital and physical format. Go on and upgrade your HR record management system today!
