A paperless HR department can be a very challenging prospect regardless of its benefits, especially when it comes to maintaining the security and accessibility of electronic records.

1. Enhancing the Security and Accessibility of a Paperless HR Department
Though electronic document management systems allow easy retrieval and
tracking of files, reduce costs and streamline workflow in a business office, it is not
that easy to implement such a system in Human Resource (HR) department. HR
sections need to maintain a large number of documents as well as comply with
various data security laws and regulations (HIPAA, FLSA regulations, and more). If
you implement a paperless system in haste in this environment, you may end up
facing serious legal issues rather than efficient document management.
Bloomberg BNA, a leading independent provider of legal, regulatory, and business
information for professionals, interviewed several employment attorneys and
practitioners on the issue of document conversion in HR. The experts pointed out
that a paperless HR office must have five basic requirements - security, accuracy,
reliability, accessibility, privacy and compliance with specific regulations. According
to them, a HR office implementing an electronic document management system
should “implement checks, balances and controls” to ensure that everything is done
the right way. Following are the implications of this survey that concerns about the
security and accessibility of the paperless system.
Things to Consider during Electronic Document Conversion
The respondents in the Bloomberg BNA survey recommend that, to reduce risks, the
following points should be given due consideration by HR departments that want to
go paperless:
 First, the organization should decide whether its HR department does need a
completely paperless system or just an electronic record of paper documents.
It is important to think about what documents need to be retained
electronically and to train employees accordingly. Otherwise, the electronic
systems would be more over-burdened than a bulky paper storage system!

Before the document scanning process is initiated to convert the paper
documents into electronic format, it is necessary to make sure that these
documents are legible, accurate and complete.

Paper originals of crucial documents (for instance, the employee’s agreement)
should be kept safe before converting them into digital format to prove
authenticity if litigation issues arise. However, electronic signatures on

2. documents are considered to be as valid as ink signatures under federal and
state law.

Select a professional recordkeeping vendor or a document conversion
company for managing the paper-to-electronic conversion process. Make
sure that they know basic regulations pertaining to the preservation of HR
documents.

Make sure that the document management system you are provided with has
the ability to perform all the functions that you require, not just for today, but
in the long run too.
How to Ensure the Safety and Accessibility of Electronic Records
Top most priority should be given to ensuring the electronic records are safe from
external threats and internal spying by employees or management.
Internal – Ensure that electronic records within your system are accessible only to
authorized employees or management representatives. For example, not everyone in
HR department needs to access the medical information of an employee and the
privacy of such kind of information is protected by the Health Insurance Portability
and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Such records should be kept in password-protected
folders so that only the concerned officials can access them. A supervisor who is
looking to fire someone should not be allowed to access that person’s medical data
which would contain information about race, ethnicity and age. Restricted access
should be imposed for employment contracts and salary agreements.
External – Implement security measures such as passwords, firewalls and
encryption to safeguard your electronic records safe from outside intruders. Security
concerns need to be heightened when the HR documents are preserved on a
computer that is not under the control of your organization, particularly in the case
of cloud computing. For instance, Google offers free cloud storage for cloud
computing system which is subjected to data mining, profiling and analytics. It also
offers a separate, paid system devoid of these kinds of practices. Cloud storage
systems are definitely not a safe option for storing sensitive HR documents.
The HR department should also have data retention polices in place, apart from
these security measures for the paperless system. A tailored retention policy is
imperative to retain the evidence and documents for any claims that may be brought
against the company. There may be additional concerns for the HR departments that
decide to save all their data permanently. They should remain very careful about
how their data is maintained, how much secure it is, the reliability of the security
measures and whether the information is on the server and would be subject to
crashing. The HR department also needs to backup its data and know how to retrieve
information from the backup
Preservation of Meta Data
The preservation of Meta data that involves the identity of the author, when the
relevant file was created and when it was last accessed is critical for a paperless HR
department to prove the authenticity of information. Normally, this information is
preserved automatically in Microsoft Windows-based documents. But, it can happen
that information is lost during Word to PDF conversion of paper documents

3. scanned into Microsoft Word documents. Microsoft Outlook or other calendar-keeping
software does capture much information about when a particular event took place,
which can be really helpful for litigation defense. However, IT departments routinely
erase hard drives of departing employees to make them ready for their new users so
that the Meta data is often lost in this case.