Streamline HR and Overcome Information Overload

It’s no secret that organizations today are swamped by information. Conservatively, an employee wastes 3 hours and 27 minutes per week dealing with information burden. Add to this the massive and immediate shift to hybrid and remote working in the post-pandemic era and the impacts of information overload compound exponentially.

The quantity and speed of the information that’s coming at is often more than legacy HR processes can handle. The impacts are felt in every aspect of doing business today, with two-thirds of office workers saying the volume of data they must manage negatively affects their job. If your organization prioritizes strategic human capital management, you’ll need to face this challenge head-on.

Overload Requires Us to Streamline HR Efficiency

Human Resources is an area where the burden of information overload is keenly felt. A prime example of this is the onboarding process for new employees, which entails a multitude of crucial documents that must be managed effectively:

• Tax forms
• Benefit enrollments
• Background checks
• Employment contracts
• Direct deposit forms
• Non-compete agreements
• Non-disclosure agreements
• Employee handbook acknowledgment forms
• Confidentiality and security agreements
• And many others

Undoubtedly, an employee file can grow to hundreds of pages, making it a substantial challenge to manage effectively. And despite the increasing digitization of business today, much of this information is on paper. It’s challenging to deploy modern automated data processing solutions to efficiently organize this information when so much of it is on hard copies that can’t easily be structured, processed, analyzed, or shared. This can require a lot of manual data entry by your team — if you have a digital system in place to record it (many organizations still rely on spreadsheets).

The status quo is deeply inefficient. Information that is captured in structured digital formats from the start saves everyone time during onboarding and accelerates other HR processes. However, this still leaves the challenge of transferring pre-existing paper documents into a digital system.

Revolutionizing Document Management: Overcoming the Paper Era

There are modern methods and intelligent data processing solutions that can provide HR with some much-needed relief from the challenges posed by paper-based processes. One example comes from Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont, who signed an executive order back in 2019 that directed state agencies to streamline HR operations in an effort to reduce bureaucracy and implement efficiencies.

Governor Lamont updated the order in 2021, stating: “From digitizing hundreds of thousands of pages of files, to eliminating backlogs, to building new teams with specialized skills, this is a modern HR effort that supports each and every one of our dedicated state employees and an environment that gets work done.”

Josh Geballe, commissioner of the Department of Administration and the state’s Chief Operating Officer further added: “This initiative is a great example of the opportunities we have in state government to improve the quality of the service we provide and use technology to help us become more cost-efficient.”

Digitization Saves Millions

At the heart of the state of Connecticut’s effort is the digitization of over 100,000 paper files, totaling over 1 million pages. This is a substantial sum, expert digitization partners like Scan-Optics are well-equipped with the bandwidth for even tasks of this magnitude. Scan-Optics digitally transforms a total of over 4,000,000 documents every day. 

In advance of an expected wave of retirements in 2022, Connecticut’s state government commissioned a study that identified as much as $900 million in potential cost savings. These savings would be realized through a combination of the elimination of paper documents and the rolling out of more efficient digital document management processes.

The Future of Work Is Now

The improvements came at a good time. One added benefit of digitization is that it centralized the state’s Human Resources data as well as the team’s communication. This has bolstered the ability of state agencies to work together more quickly and streamline HR processes, especially during the height of the pandemic period. “Our HR team has been a critical part of the pandemic response, ensuring that agencies can quickly work together to address new challenges,” added Geballe.

Moving Forward: How to Streamline HR Processes

What can you do? Scan-Optics helped the State of Connecticut with this important initiative. We enabled the state to take data that was unstructured; then digitized, organized, and optimized the files so they were searchable and easily retrieved through their document management system. 

To learn more about how we help organizations globally use Intelligent Data Processing solutions to reduce the burden of paper, overcome information overload, and gain a competitive edge, explore our HR services or see how it works in this video.

BONUS

Get an in-depth look at the first step of Intelligent Information Management (IIM) where it’s all about your content – creating it, capturing it, and collaborating with it.