Testing the paperless waters

A listed South African manufacturing company, which has chosen to remain anonymous, is using its HR department as a test bed for a gradual conversion of its head office processes to a paperless environment.

The pilot project will eventually see all documentation, including worksheets, financial statements, e-mail and faxes, being stored digitally to provide instant access to critical information.

A move to a paperless employee performance management system seemed a natural first step. The company had been using a paper-based employee evaluation process for years - and it was gruelling, to say the least. As an employee-focused company, it recognises the need to invest time in employee development, but the mechanics of getting it done were simply excruciating.

The appraisals involved numerous spreadsheets and pages, and on completion, had to be printed and manually stored. There was no simple way to record who had completed their appraisal process. As a result, there was no time to work on actual career development paths between goal-setting and year-end reviews.

Our working environment has changed from a paper-based, people-intensive process to a paperless, systems-driven process.

HR manager

The firm also had disparate filing arrangements that could be different for each employee. A combination of Lotus Notes applications, other file servers and hard copy made it difficult to track and access important documents. This is being addressed in several ways, including the implementation of a sophisticated knowledge management system that tracks and retrieves information quickly and efficiently.

After the decision was made to make the performance management system paperless, a senior HR manager was appointed as the project`s champion. After several months of assessments and due diligence, the team chose the most user-friendly Web-based product suggested by the systems integrator.

"The product had to be easy to use, or it would be met with resistance from the rest of the organisation," says the HR manager. "Our main goal was to make the Web-based appraisals look as much like the paper version as possible, something which was relatively simple to do."

For added convenience, the product is hosted on the integrator`s environment, which she refers to as "absolutely seamless", as any changes that need to be made can be completed quickly and easily.

Because of the distance between the company`s various plants, one element of the project was training via Web conference. Previously, employee training tended to fall by the wayside because of the logistics involved. The HR manager rolled-out the new system to the management team of one plant. It was so well received that the team members mastered the system without any formal training being scheduled.

One of the highlights of the product, she says, is the built-in reporting system, which provides instant information at any given point in time. She can easily see where each team member is in the process, and employees can be sorted by division, office and skill level for easy comparison.

The system also provides a central repository that makes the most recent version of any document available to staff. They can even access documents remotely through the company intranet. These increased efficiencies should lead to the investment paying for itself within 12 months, she predicts.

"The development plans have also been a great help to us in building our training curriculum," says the HR manager. "We take the development plans and create specific training plans to meet the goals of our team members. This is a huge boost to our formal development plans."

Response to the paperless pilot project and the electronic evaluation system has been overwhelmingly positive, as it has given the HR department far more time to focus on employees - in this case, to set goals and create personal career development plans.

"The process was based on combining existing technologies and products in an innovative way. As a result, our working environment has changed from a paper-based, people-intensive process to a paperless, systems-driven process," she says.