HR Document Management Best Practices 2025
HR document management best practices are a collection of human resources organization processes that work at a universal level. No matter what technological systems and related tools you have for managing records, without these best practices in place, chances are the processes you implement to handle the life cycle of your documentation will go other than planned.
Human resources document management includes managing company policies and employee documents to ensure the storage of records, controlled access to documents, and on-time disposal of obsolete files. It also protects sensitive data, boosts administrative efficiency, and reduces risk for companies.
Best Practices for HR Document Management
Documents are the driving force of any company. They have a significant impact on a business’s future and development. However, due to the high volume of data, managing both paper and digital documents can become challenging for HR teams. In this post, we’ll discuss best practices for HR records management.
Organize HR Records
Office employees spend a good chunk of their time looking for information, preventing them from doing their actual tasks. This has many negative consequences for employee development and welfare. When analyzed with worker sentiment, the feeling that employees are working longer hours and are making limited progress starts to make sense. This is why HR document organization is paramount in today’s office environment.
One of the simplest ways for organizing your HR records is to create separate files for specific categories within each employee’s file. We recommend files for each of the following:
- Employee Files (including application, verification, onboarding new employees, employee record information, employment contracts, performance reviews, compensation records, unemployment records, and I-9s)
- Recruiting Files (anything about interview notes, job descriptions, resumes, and pre-employment testing results)
- Personnel Records (employee handbook, personnel files, agreements, policy changes, or defined HR policies)
- Training Materials (resources related to employee training programs)
- Payroll Records (attendance records, timesheets, and tax forms)
- Benefit Files (information about plans and enrollment documents)
- Leave Files (requests to get paid time off or paid parental leave)
- Security and Accident Reports (paperwork detailing medical information, staff compensation, and incident reports)
Organizing HR documents into their respective files enables employees to search for and access the information they need, saving your department time and unnecessary frustration.
Use the Local Document Shredding Service
While your office produces limited records each month, unlike other organizations, you still deal with day-to-day HR documents, such as offer letters, new-employee documents, employment agreements, employee personnel files, employee medical records, employee handbook, statutory documents, etc. When a single or multiple documents reach their retention end date, you will need to determine the proper destruction procedures.
If the files are physical, you should use a professional document shredding service in your area instead of spending valuable time shredding them yourself with the office shredder. The peace of mind and efficiency of the professional document destruction supplier are immeasurable, allowing you to shift your focus to important operations rather than tedious tasks. The document shredding service provider can place a shred console in the office for easy, quick, and safe disposal of paper records.
Benefit From Digital Document Management
A study by Harvard Business Review found that knowledge workers spend on average 41% of their time on discretionary activities that “offer little personal satisfaction and could be handled by others. One of the best HR document management practices to integrate into your routine is a practice that cuts out wasted time. Find out which activities you can automate.
Digital technology makes HR document management easier by enabling employees to store, manage, and route documents online. It can automate various tasks, leverage workflows, retrieve data from repositories, and generate alerts. For example, if you use a document scanning service, indexing documents by any key identifier will help staff search for information throughout the life of that record. With automation, businesses can manage documents and collect records. It also helps redirect different documents to the right members of the organization.
There are various software options available for companies of all sizes that are cost-efficient and can get the job done. Here are the top five HR document management solutions available in the market:
1. Revver
Revver is a secure document management solution to ensure your HR compliance with government and corporate rules. It is known for offering both on-premises and cloud document management software to improve file organization.
- Secure sharing for files of any size
- OCR for quick searching through documents
- Audit tracking and role-based user permissions
- Detailed document history reports
- Collaboration tools to handle HR document storage on an enterprise-level
- Accessible by desktop app or browser
- Training and in-app help resources
2. DocuPhase
DocuPhase is a valuable document management system for HR-related accounting files, given its strong focus on accounting processes. The automation tool provides different features to simplify digital filing and employee data management.
- Makes accounting and other forms
- Drag-and-drop documents in workflows
- Document organization in a central location
- Advanced search and accessibility features
- Stores sensitive data with advanced security protocols
- OCR capabilities support data extraction from documents and emails
- Dedicated data center support staff
3. DynaFile
DynaFile is an excellent option for scanning automation and file recognition. It is known for digital filing and management. The cloud-based file management of this system enables your team to access important information from anywhere, anytime.
- Online access and management of employee files
- Scan paper employee records and convert them into electronic files
- Batch process paper documents
- Control access to specific sections of employee files
- Encrypted document links to share files with staff and auditors
4. ZoHo
ZoHo is an excellent choice if you want a document management solution for creating, sharing, and collaborating on employee documents. HR managers, with their two primary functions of document storage and editing, can reduce paperwork and organize online files in a centralized vault.
- Store and preview all types of files online
- Share files within or outside the company
- Edit documents online
- Import files from other storage applications
- Sync offline documents online
Use Your Document Management System
Increasing efficiency is the main reason that there are document management best practices in the first place. If your team is unable to use your system in an effective manner, it will get in the way. You can ensure that your team is comfortable using your document management system if it is usable. An HR document management system may improve efficiency if it is easy to use.
Promote Product Adoption
An organization choosing to implement a new document management process involves the entire team. It is insufficient to say you are adopting a new methodology or solution – organizations must champion it. An integral part of effective implementation is to utilize all available educational resources for the team. Are there any webinar tutorials or eBooks? You should ensure that your investment in a solution provides access to the information needed to implement a new system. In addition to discussing the challenges your team faces during a software migration, you should also make a consistent, cohesive effort to train and support team members.
Provide Mobile Access
In today’s world, many people work on their phones, whether reading, sharing, or signing documents. So, accessing and sharing documents on a mobile device is an actual time-saver. Without an accessible document management system, employees have to wait until they are in the office or back at their computers. Besides wasting time and increasing approval times, this also worsens versioning issues. Best practices involve quick document retrieval while also meeting staff’s needs wherever they work from.
Considering the mobile workforce, you need an application that is flexible enough to meet the needs of remote HR workers. They can manage HR documents from anywhere, without working at their desks or being connected to the internal network. Add information on the system, so they can do their jobs with ease.
Refrain From Abandoning Paperwork
It is essential to ensure that you still use paper. The use of paper has decreased everywhere, but it remains a factor for many businesses. A Formstack study found that, in its survey, 73% of “optimized organizations” reported that all documents/forms are digitized.
This indicates that many organizations work in hybrid environments where paper and digital documents coexist. You need to ensure your technology can ingest documents that have begun as paper. Your digital document management solution is easier to use, but more expensive to add records.
Determine a Retention Policy
Document management professionals recommend that organizations implement a retention procedure as part of their record-keeping plan, whether for hard-copy records, electronic records, or both. Without an established document retention policy, it is impossible to manage employee documents efficiently throughout their mandated lifespan. Many times, organizations hold onto HR documents for much longer than required, resulting in additional storage costs, document loss, and overall disarray.
When setting retention parameters, here are some questions to consider:
- What are the most common forms of records the HR team produces?
- What are the retention guidelines for employee records in your industry and location?
- Which HR documents should you keep under which laws?
- For how long are records typically active, and who interacts with them?
- For how long can you keep the records?
- What events would activate archiving or destruction of documents?
- Which documents are now past due for disposal?
You need to assign expiration dates and trigger events for your employee documents. Triggers are events that begin the expiration clock ticking on records. For instance, senior HR staff will have access to an employee’s file for up to 7 years after the termination date. They will keep the documents for seven years after termination in the last employing department. And, after seven years, the staff will discard those records. Here, termination is the trigger for such documents.
The record retention policy aims to reduce future risk by controlling the number of inactive records stored in the cloud or on-site. Such policies improve compliance, keep employees organized, minimize overhead costs, and ensure long-term data security. However, it is important to put a policy in place for your business, establishing a process to destroy and archive the records once the maturity is reached.
With an intuitive human resources document management solution, companies can scan documents and save them on their platform. Companies can use programs to obtain these documents and store data through workflows customized to their unique requirements. Employee file management solutions also help create internal rules that retain records for a specific time frame and then route them out of the system when their expiration arrives.
Improve Workflows
Workflows, combined with notifications, are very helpful. Your system should help the HR team increase its efficiency. To address issues on time, the system should route documents for approval or review itself and generate real-time notifications. You must ensure that your workflows are configurable and applicable to all documents. In addition, workflows help give visibility over certifications. Many companies maintain certification requirements for their employees, which they have to record and update over time. This may include OSHA, ServSafe, or HIPAA compliance certifications. With a system, you can ensure no one is out of compliance by setting reminders for certifications expiring within a specific period.
Implement a Security Policy
Records management is getting out of hand as many companies are proliferating and producing a lot of confidential paperwork, leading to an increasing number of internal and external data security threats. If this happens, companies can get held accountable for any transgressions. So, it is important for every organization to approach security in a considered manner by tying security permissions to all documents that contain sensitive information.
Implement role-based security access to restrict unauthorized users from accessing, sharing, or destroying any important records. System administrators of the document management system (who are HR executives in most cases) can customize who can see what within the system and who can download which files. It ensures that only authorized employees have access to private information. This can include HR records, payroll documents, contracts, and so on. This feature helps HR managers meet OSHA certification standards.
Also, develop a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that outlines how employees can share documents, handle client information, and what they can download and send on personal devices. Invest in a solution that tracks activity, version changes to documents, approvals, and routing, so in the event of audits, you have a reliable audit trail of all records management. For file routing containing sensitive information, consider using SFTP or email encryption.
Ensure Regulatory Compliance
It is a critical priority for every HR department to ensure compliance of employee records with legal requirements. Legal compliance is a driver, according to Gartner, for moving to a digital solution. However, complying with new complex government regulations and business policies causes problems to HR professionals.
- Are you retaining documents as per the government and corporate rules and regulations?
- Does every personnel file have all the required documents?
- Are records up to date?
- Can you remain proactive in addressing the issues before they become problems?
Make sure you choose a solution with features that help you answer Yes to these questions.
Carry out a Thorough Audit
Auditing shares a direct connection with document management. It refers to the thorough assessment or inspection of the records. The audit ensures that everything is working out or progressing as planned. So, conduct an audit (internal and external) to make sure everything is coming along as needed in terms of HR document management. In truth, proper documentation management can also help with the business audit since it increases accessibility to the needed documentation. Also, it makes the workflow transparent and traceable for the auditors.
Final Thoughts
Whether you are thinking about how to implement digital document management for your company or just to enhance your existing system, focusing on the fundamentals and defining your objectives helps ensure success. Get a head start by following these best practices, and maintain your document management directory in a convenient and smooth manner.
