Paper files? What can go wrong!
There are many companies that still use Paper based HR files and forms. Based on recent surveys it was found that more than 65% of companies with 50 or more staff still use paper-based HR practices. The move to having paperless businesses is important, and of today’s companies are focusing on moving all processes to a paperless environment. HR should not no different. The 4th Industrial revolution is here, and so is Cloud based systems and processes. Not moving your Business processes to the cloud is a mistake, and even more so for your HR processes.
What is a Paper based HR system costing your business?
After a Recent survey in the United Kingdom, for companies that are 50 employees and larger, it was found that 41% of HR staff wasted up to 10 minutes per day searching for HR related paperwork. Of these participants more than 50% of them said that they spend more than 20 min per day! If we had to translate this to hours per month, you find that they loose as much as 1 full day of productivity. The question you need to ask yourself, is if your business is willing to pay for that inefficiencies. What is it costing you to run a paper-based HR department? If you have a few HR administrators, and each of them are wasting 8 hours a month on finding paperwork, that has a cost. But do not forget the other costs, printing is not cheap. Paper is expensive, toner for the office printer is expensive, even more so if you have ink printers. What about the other costs for storage space, filing systems, racks, office space, etc.
Calculating what it costs.
If you had to calculate the cost of all these items, you would be surprised. Another recent survey in 2018 found that the cost of paper-based employee files and HR was much higher that expected. If we consider all the aspects of Paper, we find the following: According to findings by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the average company spends around $20 in labour to file a paper HR document. Organizations spend about $120 in labour to look for a misplaced document and about $220 in labour to recreate a lost document. On average, 7.5% of paper documents are lost completely—and of the remaining files, 3% are misfiled. The Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance reported that the average office uses around 10,000 pieces of paper per employee each year. With the typical four-drawer cabinet holding around 16,000 sheets of paper, it costs around $2,000 just to maintain that cabinet each year.
It is time to reconsider your paper-based practices.
The impact of paper-based practices on the environment is massive: Pulp and paper mills contribute to air, water and land pollution and discarded paper and paperboard make up roughly 26% of solid municipal waste in landfill sites. Pulp and paper generate the third largest amount of industrial air, water, and land emissions in Canada and the sixth largest in the United States. Is it really that important to have a paper-based Employee file? The other large impact of paper-based operations is the impact of securely destroying the paper-based files. You cannot simply throw out an employee file, it contains important and private information. It needs to be destroyed according to regulations, and diamond cutter shredders, all costing more and more money.
The Solution to your dilemma.
Sign Up for an Online HR system like HRSimplified. Its simple, you can save money, reduce overheads, even have a smaller HR team since they are more efficient, while the rest of the HR team focuses on Employee Engagement. A Happier workforce will reward you in more ways than you think. Happy workers make for happy customers. If Employees are offered an online HR experience, where the interaction with HR and management is now Realtime, and they have access to their HR data, they can also be happier and more productive. Wasting less of managements time to supply HR data they could have accessed themselves is they had Employee Self Service.
