Paperless

lrobb

Has anyone gone through this yet. We are considering it. Any help or advise would be appreciated.

Peyton Irby MS

Many employers have done so or are considering going that way. Some are partially paperless. The primary issues seem to be security of the documents, both internally and externally, and retreival capability. The various agencies (wage & hour, EEOC,etc.) do not seem to have a problem with a paperless workplace as long as accuracy of the documentaion is assured and the ability to recreate a "paper trail" is in place.
Peyton Irby
Editor, Mississippi Employment Law Letter
Watkins Ludlam Winter & Stennis, P.A.
(601) 949-4810
[email]pirby@watkinsludlam.com[/email]

stilldazed

We have done it in one of medical offices. Employees in the office resisted the change but learned to love the electronic system very quickly. Major issues for us have been just how much history to transfer to electronic data. There was an attempt in the office to transfer all history for all clients, but it soon proved too overwhelming to accomplish on a reasonable timeline. An alternative was quickly implemented whereby client history was transfered as the client was scheduled for an appt. Other downstream issues have been smooth transitions for support staff whose work would follow the client visit (mostly billing for private insurance and workers' comp). Those issues have been minor and are being slowly resolved, and mostly result from changes in the processes allowed by the paperless system.

We have talked about it in HR, and no one (including me) is ready for such a change at this point. We're functioning well with paper, and my office seems to have a ton of it. So far the costs for the technology (hardware and software) far outweight the benefit of saving space and time.

best wishes

Cheryl S SPHR

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I wouldn't say we are entirely paperless, but our employee files are retained in an electronic imaging system. Many of the documents are imported directly in an electronic format; the hard copy ones must be scanned into the system.

I love it -- I can look up any information in an employee's file right from my desktop. I can also e-mail a document to an employee if they request something. We have used this for 3 years or so and have no regrets. They key is making sure your indexing is setup in a fashion that you are able to find what you are looking for without having to go through the entire file. Beats paper!

Cheryl

dixied

We talked seriously about HR going paperless, but decided against it at this time. The majority of the company is paperless. We would have to purchase our own system for security reasons.
The majority of our personnel information regarding wages and history, vacation sick pay, education, etc. is on the computer now. So, if we had a fire, we would have the information,but not the forms.

Rockie

Our medical practice is in the process of going to electronic medical records. It is very time consuming and labor intensive. In the end, it will be worth it to have electronic records instead of having to go thru paper charts.

As far as HR is concerned, we are making some steps in this direction. We have the capacity to scan our old HR files and I am thinking any files over 3 years old could probably be scanned with no problem. This is a project on the back burner to be gotten to later this year.

We have a recruitment package on our HRIS system which allows us to receive resumes on line and keep them in an electronic format without having to keep paper copies. I have a file cabinet full of paper resumes that we will eventually be able to dispose of and just keep the electronic ones. We still have some people who fax resumes or email them, so all the paper won't go away.