With new and updated HR legislation coming into effect all the time, HR departments need to stay on the ball to remain compliant.
Mistakes in this area can have serious consequences and a negative impact in both a regulatory and employee well-being sense.
As a result, it can help if HR executives put their heads together to ensure that they are getting the details right.
As more people work together on the same documents and the workforce becomes increasingly mobile and email-dependent, collaboration processes that enable colleagues to work together from different locations are starting to become progressively important.
Moreover, as legislation becomes more complex, drafting and reviewing key documents can require input from a multitude of specialists. But the involvement of multiple users can make the limitations of programmes such as Microsoft’s Word apparent.
For example, if the ‘track changes’ function isn’t turned on, it can become impossible to determine which user has made what updates. This means that the contract review process can become a mammoth task involving numerous manual cross-checks between different versions of the same document.
Version control
From a financial perspective, just five minutes of wasted time per employee each day can equate to as much as $625,000 in lost productivity each year per 1,000 workers. Therefore, if personnel wasting time in cross-checking documents, it can ultimately cost the business a lot of money.
But, having ‘track changes’ turned on will not necessarily solve the issue of having multiple documents. A lack of adequate version control can mean that reviewers dealing with different policies or clauses end up modifying various versions of the same document.
The issue is only exacerbated with the widespread use of email to send and exchange information as different versions of the same document can likewise be passed around.
Recruitment is a classic example of where things can go wrong. Each vacant position will have numerous documents such as job specs and contracts associated with it, and these can go through multiple review cycles as well as generate hundreds of related emails to complicate things.
Without using a collaboration environment such as Microsoft’s SharePoint as a central repository to manage folders and email trails, it can be very difficult to deal with documents and almost impossible to refer to a complete email trail that incorporates every change.
But there are also issues around privacy to think about. Tracked changes or hidden information, otherwise known as metadata, can provide valuable insights into colleagues’ viewpoints, but it can also inadvertently reveal a lot of confidential internal information.
If macros or other hidden properties unintentionally show a comment from the recipient of a document, it can not only result in embarrassment or lead to competitive disadvantage, it can, in a worst case scenario, also end up in legal action.
Tracking change
Security of personal information from both an employer and employee perspective is likewise a serious consideration for HR. The issue is that, if a system is difficult to use, people are likely to avoid doing so, but in the process they also end up overriding the security processes put in place to protect personal information.
One organisation that has already started employing collaboration tools to enable its team to work together more easily is National Grid.
The power transmission network’s aim was to help its teams in the UK and US share and approve documents more quickly. Previously, there had been numerous versions in circulation, but it was a labour-intensive and manual process to ensure that they all matched up.
This meant that it became very difficult to track changes and ensure that both information security and compliance regulations were being met when documents were distributed both internally and externally. The risk of hidden metadata was another problem.
But by implementing a collaboration system, National Grid boosted staff productivity and ensured that there was no sensitive ‘hidden’ data in its documents. It is now also easier to make and view changes so that they can be accepted or rejected as part of the document approval process.
Constantly-evolving legislation means that critical HR documentation continually needs amendment and, as a result, ‘simple’ updates can often require input from multiple people with different HR specialisms. Failure to get the process right, however, could have regulatory consequences and a negative impact on the workforce.
Matthew Brown is vice president of marketing at Workshare.
