Lessons from Naviant: How HR Distributes & Tracks Sensitive Documents Using OnBase

As with all organizations, our HR department has a lot of information to share with employees, including regulatory, plan structure documents, laws, as well as employee engagement pieces. One common thread is oftentimes HR wants to be able to validate that the information was provided to employees and have the ability for staff to acknowledge they read it.

This is where OnBase document management and workflow technology comes into play. We use OnBase Document Knowledge Transfer (DKT) to track that all of this key information was shared and read by employees. Some examples of documents that fell into this category for Naviant’s HR department are:

• Employee Handbook
• Company Policies & Procedures Documents
• Benefit Plan Summaries and Amendments
• Governmental Notices

Using OnBase DKT to help us with paperless HR, each of these documents are uploaded to the system and employees are sent an email notification. They are given a predesignated number of days to read and ‘Acknowledge’ the document before automated reminders go out for follow up. As the DKT Administrator, I am able to view the different document statuses (acknowledged, pending and unread) by employees at any time for any revision of a document. This process has not only created a paperless workflow for these documents but also streamlined the process of administration.

This also serves as an organized, paperless way for employees to organize the documents that they are receiving and acknowledging. The employee dashboard provides a look at what documents they still need to acknowledge and which ones are complete. They can also bookmark a particular document for future reference.

As the employer, what do you do when you have an update to these documents? No problem. We use the Revision feature in DKT which allows you to maintain one document that is visible to the user at any given time, but stores the previous versions of that document along with the employee’s acknowledgment of it.

Another feature we take advantage of is when an employee separation occurs, we are able to use OnBase to capture DKT acknowledgments and store that information in their electronic OnBase personnel files (more on how we use personnel files in OnBase in a future article!).