Looking to improve HR content management?    

When it comes to connecting everything that matters, different lines of business (LOBs) must identify the challenges within their unique and often complex processes. These…

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Lindsay Sterrett

May 11, 20235 minutes read

When it comes to connecting everything that matters, different lines of business (LOBs) must identify the challenges within their unique and often complex processes. These unique LOB processes and their challenges drive the type of connections or integrations needed to improve process efficiency and employee experiences.  

HR departments are a perfect example. They’re faced with improving business processes that often involve multiple documents stored across multiple systems that require a level of security to protect personal information—from resumes and employee contracts to benefit forms and promotion letters. most organizations jumpstarted their HR digital transformation – often in an ad hoc way – to cope with pandemic disruptions. HR leaders are now looking for long-term, comprehensive solutions to keep pace with the changing workplace, growing employee expectations, and complex regulatory requirements.   

By bringing employee documents and employee data together in a single, secure platform, HR teams can work more efficiently and HR leaders can enhance employee experiences by enabling easy, anytime access to all the documents that accumulate across the employee lifecycle. This becomes increasingly important in remote or hybrid work environments.   

To learn more about how eliminating paper-based legacy systems, simplifying compliance, and meeting employees’ demand for easy digital interactions, can impact an organization, we spoke to OpenText™ experts, Verna Tomkinson and Janine Wendling, who have nearly 35 years of combined experience in HR content management solutions.   

“HR is now a strategic stakeholder in an organization’s digital transformation, creating faster, easier processes that leave time for the crucial priority of building a positive employee experience.”
– Janine Wendling, Sr. Strategic Ecosystems Manager

Verna and Janine agree that now is the time for HR to build on pandemic-driven technology advances. “HR has often operated out on the edge of organizations, but that’s changing fast,” says Janine. “HR is now a strategic stakeholder in an organization’s digital transformation, creating faster, easier processes that leave time for the crucial priority of building a positive employee experience.”   

Janine points to manual processes for creating, storing, and finding HR documents as a top HR content management challenge. “Employees often have 30 to 50 documents scattered across paper files and different digital repositories,” she says. “Finding information for employee requests, routine HR tasks or reporting wastes a lot of valuable time and makes compliance a headache.”  

Accelerating HR productivity from a single hub  

One way to solve the challenge of HR content management is to centralize both content and processes in a single hub. For example, OpenText™ Core for SAP® SuccessFactors® consolidates employee documents in a central repository within the SAP SuccessFactors interface. “It’s an all-in-one place in the cloud, making it accessible to HR departments and employees no matter where they’re working,” Verna explains. “Instead of having to search for, print out, and mail forms and documents to employees, HR can provide digital access within minutes.”   

Automating manual processes – from creating and signing employment agreements to comparing old and new contracts – decreases the potential for employee error, reduces costs, and streamlines the whole HR operation. Verna describes one customer, a global law firm, that switched to SAP SuccessFactors and Core for SAP SuccessFactors partly because of the prohibitive expense of maintaining multiple legacy HR applications. ”They wanted to reduce administrative overhead costs as well as ensure the security of their employee records. They achieved it by modernizing with this solution. And they now have a single contract and support model for the latest employee document management.”   

The recruitment stage is another critical area where companies are looking for better processes. “Managing candidates and reducing employee turnover during the pandemic is much faster when processes are integrated and documents are easier to access,” Verna adds.    

Improving security and simplifying compliance  

HR departments spend a considerable part of their days managing regulatory and compliance issues. “Core for SAP SuccessFactors makes it easy to keep track of all the shifting rules around privacy for employee documents,” Verna says. “HR can assign retention policies that are specific to roles, document types or regions so that files are securely saved or purged in a timely way. It’s also simple to put a rule on any record to control who can see it, and you can check who’s accessed it at any time.”  

Automated tracking of missing and expired employee documents is another critical feature that supports compliance and auditability. For example, Verna recalls a major South American freight railway company that needed a secure, efficient way to manage personnel files in a distributed workforce. “To maintain its government contract, the railway had to prove it could monitor and quickly present proof of all train engineers’ certifications,” she explains. “Core for SAP SuccessFactors provided a simple, trustworthy process.”     

Enabling an improved employee experience  

It’s an employee’s market today, and one of the top things workers want is a consumer-like HR experience, Janine adds. “People expect everything they need to be at their fingertips, whether that’s generating their own HR documents or getting immediate responses from HR. Core for SAP SuccessFactors not only improves HR speed and responsiveness and enables more consistent, personalized communications, but empowers employees with a lot of self-service options.”  

The seamless integration between Core for SAP SuccessFactors and SAP SuccessFactors further enhances employee satisfaction. “Users access all the powerful capabilities of Core for SAP SuccessFactors from within the SuccessFactors interface for a simplified and familiar experience,” says Janine. “There’s no need for new passwords or additional training.”  

On the flip side, Core for SAP SuccessFactors frees up the time HR used to spend on manual tasks for more employee-centric activities. “Our customers tell us that they devote more energy to employee wellbeing and growth, which are vital for employee retention,” says Janine.   

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Lindsay Sterrett

Lindsay Sterrett is Senior Director of Content Services Product Marketing. With more than 12 years of experience as a software marketing leader, Lindsay leads a global team responsible for the product marketing strategy for OpenText Content Cloud, including OpenText Extended ECM, Documentum and Core Content, capture solutions, and diverse industry and business applications. Her areas of expertise include B2B and B2C marketing strategy, demand generation, partnerships, in-app product experiences and customer lifecycle marketing. She is based in Southern California and holds a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles.

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