HUMAN RESOURCES
How Do You Know Your Employee Files Are Complete, Current and Secure?
The employee file is a system of record.
If you pulled a thousand employee files at random, what percentage would be complete, current, correctly secured and within their retention period?
Most organizations cannot answer that with evidence. They know their people. They are less sure of the files behind them.
Why the Employee File Matters
The employee file is where the organization proves what it agreed and what it did:
- Keeping too little is a problem: a missing contract, eligibility document or certification is hard to explain to a regulator or a court.
- Keeping too much is a liability: records held past their retention period, or seen by people who should not see them, are a privacy risk.
- Disputes turn on documents: when a decision is challenged, the file is the evidence.
The employee file is a system of record. When a document is missing, out of date, duplicated or exposed, the organization carries the risk.
What Goes Wrong
HR records build up across systems, offices and acquisitions. The same problems turn up again and again:
- Employee files with required documents missing, unsigned or expired.
- The same document held in three places, with no record of which is authoritative.
- Records for one person split across systems under different identifiers.
- Medical or disciplinary records stored where too many people can see them.
- Files of former employees kept long past their retention period, or deleted before it.
AI Raises the Stakes
HR teams are being asked to use AI assistants for policy questions, case work and file reviews. AI does not repair a repository. It inherits it.
- AI does not know which of three copies of a contract is the signed one.
- It will answer a policy question from a superseded version if nothing marks it as superseded.
- It will surface a medical or disciplinary record to someone who should never see it, if the permissions are wrong.
- It will summarize a file that is missing the document that mattered.
If you know your repository is poor, you don't trust it. If you don't know how good it is, you can't trust it. An AI assistant trusts it anyway.
Measure Against HR's Own KPIs
A health check starts with three decisions only HR can make:
- What to measure: The KPIs, in HR's own terms.
- How much each matters: A weight for each KPI, reflecting legal and operational risk.
- What is acceptable: A threshold for each KPI, below which an alert is raised.
The KPIs usually cover eight areas:
- Completeness: Does every employee file hold the documents its role, location and employment type require?
- Metadata quality: Are employee identifiers, document types, dates and signatures present, valid and consistent across systems?
- Compliance: Do holdings meet employment standards, eligibility, health and safety, and privacy requirements in each jurisdiction?
- Retention: Is each record class held for its required period and no longer, with legal holds honoured?
- Security: Do access permissions separate medical, disciplinary and investigation records from the general file?
- Governance: Does every collection have an owner, a classification and a recorded source?
- Currency: Can the current contract, policy acknowledgement or certification be told apart from superseded or expired ones?
- Duplication: Where the same document exists more than once, is the authoritative copy identified?
The result is one composite Repository Health score, with the breakdown behind it. An executive sees at a glance whether the repository can be trusted. Staff see where the work is.
Measure Without Touching the Official Record
The assessment runs on a secure replica hosted in-country. The official repository is never changed.
Keep Measuring
A workforce changes every working day, so a one-time assessment starts to age as soon as it is finished. Continuous monitoring keeps the score current as people join, change roles and leave:
- Monitor: Content is watched as it is added, changed, migrated, classified, retained or removed.
- Re-score: The health score is recalculated against the organization's KPIs and weights.
- Alert: An alert is raised whenever a KPI falls below its threshold.
- Remediate: Issues are worked in order of risk. Fixes of a type the organization has approved are automatic; everything else goes to staff.
Staff confirm, correct or dismiss each finding, and the system learns from their decisions.
It Never Makes a Decision About an Employee
The health check measures the files, not the people. It takes the repetitive work off the desks of HR and records staff, and leaves them the review, the exceptions and the decisions.
The white paper The Employee File Is a System of Record covers the method in full. See how it works for HR: Human Resources.
Find out your repository health
A Repository Health Check gives an executive a scored baseline for their own content, the detail behind it, and a prioritized list of what to do next.
Contact AITS to book a Repository Health Check info@appliedits.comON THE AITS WEBSITE
White Paper: The Employee File Is a System of Record: The method in full.
Human Resources: How the Repository Health Check works for HR.
Repository Health Self-Assessment: Sixteen questions and an estimate of your own score.
Repository Health Check: How the health check and monitoring work.
Sample Health Report: What an executive receives.
Solution Brief: Is Your Repository Ready for AI?: The Repository Health Check in two pages.
ABOUT AITS
Applied IT Solutions (AITS) is a Toronto-based consultancy founded in 2008 and led by its principal consultant. It advises government and Fortune 500 organizations on artificial intelligence, enterprise data strategy, document and records management, and business process improvement, with one aim: deriving tangible business value from the application of information technology. Most engagements are delivered end to end by the principal, from requirements gathering through solution design and delivery to train-the-trainer and hand-off to the client's own team. For larger projects, AITS brings in experienced consultants it works with regularly. AITS delivers globally. Out of this work, AITS developed the Content Tracking System (CTS), an AI-powered monitor that scores the health of a document repository against the organization's own KPIs.