The ability to work from home has been a blessing for many businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s enabled people to continue working and prevented many people from losing their jobs.

However, as with any new way of working, there have been teething issues. And one of the main ones businesses are encountering is how to manage storing and sharing documents.

You might not appreciate the importance of correct record management but it’s essential to allow your employees to complete their work, work collaboratively, assess revenue as well as to store employee and client information.

There are two main considerations when putting measures in place.

• Putting interim measures in place for now.

• Making sure everything is documented correctly when usual business can resume.

Or you’ll need to make sure the plans you put in place will work in the long run if you decide to work from home indefinitely.

When deciding on the right way for your team to work, you’ll need to think about:

• who needs access to the different records.

• How they’re stored; whether digitally or paper copies and if that can change.

• If they need to be shared with people outside your organisation.

• The security of any sensitive information.

The experts from BrightHR have provided the following advice for your own document storage needs.

Centralise your records

Taking all of your documents online is the easiest way to share them, keep everyone up to date and make sure they’re secure. 

To do this you’ll need a central database. 

Using a VPN to access a shared drive can help everyone store their digital files as they would in the office, but can significantly impact your employee’s productivity, depending on network capacity. An alternative would be to move your files to a cloud based system. This wouldn’t require a VPN and would allow your staff to access their data from anywhere while remaining secure.

It’s important that any documents shared between people are done through one of these options. Emailing documents causes duplicates on everyone’s device and makes it difficult to keep track of the most recent version.

This also creates a security risk, as there become multiple ways unauthorised people could access the records.

Under GDPR, individuals have the “right to be forgotten” and if each of your employees is creating new versions of files, it becomes a lot harder to comply with these rules and you could be fined.

Storing paper records from home

In some cases, a digital process might not be possible. In those cases it’s vital that you have a clear and thorough policy.

Your paper document policy should outline the documents that should be printed and any that should never be printed. The policy should also outline what to do with printed documents once they are no longer needed.

Those rules could include:

• Don’t dispose of paper with regular waste or recycling.

• Ensure records are shredded, inline with your shred-spec policy.

• Return the records to the workplace for proper disposal.

These steps can seem unnecessary but you have a duty to keep these documents secure. 

Your paper record policy should be clear on when to dispose of documents and the correct way to do so.

Streamline the process

It might not be possible to complete everything the way you normally would, so now is the perfect time to review your current processes.

That doesn’t mean finding workarounds for everything that’s become more difficult, you will need to keep certain records. But think about the current steps required for different tasks and you might find some bottlenecks that can be removed.

Particularly, think about any internal processes, for example how staff request annual leave. 

There are a lot of challenges to working from home, but it also provides opportunities to make your business more efficient.

Online HR document storage can simplify the transition and make sure everyone can complete their tasks efficiently and securely.