Could Your HR and Safety Onboarding be More Efficient?
Safety training is a crucial part of any employee’s journey within your firm. Making sure that your workers are properly trained right from day one and kept up to date with any ongoing training requirements is key to keeping incidents and accidents in the workplace and on-site to a minimum. This is particularly important for high-risk industries such as oil and gas, transportation, and construction. How you manage the paperwork and documentation relating to your training and HR processes can make all the difference to the overall safety of your company.
It can be tempting, particularly when incorporating new hires, to cut corners when it comes to HR paperwork and safety training. Often, it’s a case of needing to get the new employee up to speed as quickly as possible, meaning that certain processes may end up left by the wayside during onboarding. Switching to cloud-based digital folders for your paperwork, however, could both save you time while also ensuring that your workers tick all the relevant HR and safety boxes.
Here are some of the main ways digital storage can streamline and improve your safety training and HR:
Accessible from Anywhere
It’s no longer necessary to be on-site or in a specific office to access HR paperwork and safety documentation. Cloud storage means that your digital folders are accessible to anyone with the relevant authorization wherever they are. All they need is an internet connection. This is extremely useful if you need to access a document while you’re away from your main computer or device. It also makes the onboarding process much more efficient. Instead of flooding the new employee with an avalanche of forms the moment they arrive on their first day, documentation such as tax forms and onboarding material can be provided ahead of time by simply giving the new hire an account with access to the relevant digital folders. Not only does this reduce the chance of important documentation being overlooked, but it also speeds up the overall onboarding process, meaning that your new worker is prepared and ready to start when they arrive on day one.
Searchable
Most paperwork these days is produced digitally. However, that doesn’t automatically mean that finding the document you need when you need it is easier than in the days of cluttered filing cabinets. With more and more paperwork being added to computers every day, things can easily be lost, misplaced, or very difficult to locate. Switching to digital storage and folders allows your team to save everything right to the cloud. This comes with user-friendly, built-in search functions, so anyone with access can easily search and find the relevant document from wherever they are. You can also set access permissions so that folders or files are accessible by your entire team so that no one needs to save anything to a separate device. And with everything stored in the same place, updates, revisions, and amendments can be viewed by everyone in real-time, meaning no one is looking at an outdated version of a document.
Version/Access History
Many cloud storage companies offer not just space to store your documentation and paperwork but also information regarding the history of each file or document. This means you can see who has accessed what and when, and also the various versions of a document that have existed. This can be very useful in several scenarios. For example, if something is a matter of legal significance, then being able to see every version of a document can make all the difference in proving or disproving a claim. Also, you can see if a particular employee accessed a safety document at a given time. Access history allows you to check if a document has been viewed by the intended recipient as well as track any changes that are made to it along the way.
Switching to digital folders and storage can streamline your onboarding and overall HR and safety training processes. The fact that your files are accessible from anywhere means that new hires can complete the bulk of their sign-up paperwork before they ever set foot on-site. Advanced search functions make it easier than ever to locate the document you need at any given time. Being able to view access logs and the various versions of any particular file mean that you’ve got an insight into the entire history of the document whenever you need it. With advantages like these, it’s no wonder that overstuffed filing cabinets are being left in the past.
