How enterprise content management can help HR managers

When you talk to IT people about enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, it’s hard to understand how it can help specific aspects of your business.

However, if you think about it, ECM can play a special role within your human resources (HR) division, especially given the amount of data that your business handles.

By definition, ECM is a set of processes, strategies, and tools that help you obtain, organize, store and deliver critical information about your employees, business, and customers to relevant internal and external stakeholders.

Therefore, your HR team, which handles heaps of employee data, can rely on an ECM to build in some structure and control over how information is stored, managed, and accessed within the business. The structure and control, of course, are important, because of the various data privacy and management regulations that you’re required to comply with today.

Here’s a quick list of things an ECM solution can help HR managers with:

#1 | Security of employee data

As a business, you’re required to make sure that your employee’s data is kept safely and that access to certain kinds of data is restricted to only certain people in your organization.

For example, you wouldn’t want your recruitment executives to have access payroll data and you’d certainly want to keep personal information about your employees away from those dealing with appraisals. As a result, ECM is a perfect solution because it gives you a way to categorize, segment, and secure data appropriately.

#2 | Preparation for USCIC I-9 audits

Employee audits by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) known as I-9 audits are becoming increasingly rampant in the country.

Businesses need to be prepared if they want to avoid the US$1000-plus penalty levied for each incomplete employee-docket.

Using an ECM can not only club together relevant data for I-9 audits, but make it easy to identify missing information before an audit is conducted in order to help avoid fines and sanctions by the USCIS.

#3 | Management of employee records and compensations

Managing employee records is important. Using an ECM helps ensure that businesses can track, manage, and monitor their data appropriately.

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to managing employee and compensation logs is ensuring the sanctity of records, avoiding manipulation, ensuring records – of past and present employees are maintained appropriately.

There’s also important information about ex-employees and their compensation that needs to be maintained for regulatory purposes and to provide reference checks when requested, all of which can be better managed with an ECM.

#4 | Planning for data backups

When you use an ECM, you’re naturally going to remember to back up your data. It’s usually built into most software solutions today – especially if your ECM is hosted in the cloud.

What’s most important, however, is the fact that ECMs can help you take care of your data in the event of a natural disaster – automatically making it an integral part of your disaster planning and emergency management program.

#5 | Harmonizing company-wide employee policies

Did you know that Portwest operate across 120 countries worldwide and have warehouses and offices in Ireland, UK, Poland, USA, Australia, UAE, , New Zealand and Panama? pic.twitter.com/ePBU0VNxlg

— Portwest (@Portwest) May 4, 2018

The thing about ECMs is that they tend to allow you to group records together in a way that gives structure to even the most unstructured data.

As a result, when you’re dealing with multiple offices spread across multiple geographies, you’re going to be able to gain better insights into what’s one part of the business doing as against the other.

This is especially important for today’s fast growing companies, opening up new offices at breakneck speeds.

This will help you make sure privileges and benefits offered to employees of a certain cadre in one office are also offered to employees of the same cadre in other parts, thus harmonizing your employee policies and promoting equality, nationwide.