Electronic Personnel Files - How do you do it?

[L3OUGH]

Hi all,

 

Looking for some advice from you all please...

 

Currently all of our school staff records are paper copies kept in filing cabinets in the head of Admin's office under lock and key. She's asked if we could make the transition to having these stored electronically. I totally agree with her and this would be a good move moving forward. I'm just curious on how the best way to store these files would be.

 

My first thought was a bespoke cloud solution, but that would come with a hefty monthly/yearly subscription based on staff numbers I'm sure. Then I thought why can't we utilise O365/OneDrive?

 

For those of you that do store your staff files electronically, could you give me a little insight into how you do it and what solution/services you utilise please?

 

Thanks

Liam

[DavR]

We keep most of ours electronically, but just in our file structure - Personnel Folder | Staff Records | (Team) | (Staff Name).

 

You could go more complex than that, but we haven't felt the need to.

 

You could also look at your existing MIS, most of these will have personnel functions under the staff aspect.

[psydii]

File structure in a Sharepoint site. If you want to be more secure, you can apply Information Protection Sensitivity Labels, and retention policies.

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/information-protection?view=o365-worldwide

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/retention?view=o365-worldwide

[L3OUGH]

Great shout Dave, our MIS system hadn't even crossed my mind!

It does have a personnel section that appears will fit our needs.

Thank you!!

[psydii]

Watch out if its SIMS since it doesn't allow you to adequately secure sensitive documents (unless you encrypt them with MIP before importing them)

[GrumbleDook]

If you are looking at Records Management advice I would heartily recommend membership of IRMS (https://www.irms.org.uk), as there is a lot of discussion and guidance on using M365 for management of documents, including a working group with Microsoft to look at this for the public sector. There are also discussions about using Google Workspace as well, such as the brilliant presentation at the IRMS conference earlier in the year about things to be careful of with Google Workspace.

[Oaktech]

We have an HR Restricted drive which contains all personnel records and we have a project scanning paper records into it. HoS, Business Manager and HR assistant are the only ones with access, HR Assistant also doesn't have access to the SLT folder within that.

 

We're waiting for our MIS to implement a promised feature request of a bulk upload/download facility and then we'll start using that.

[p858snake]

(Not a school, but gov department) We have a eRMDS (OpenText Content Server) which we use to store all our digital documents (and physical record management as well), which handles folder access, retention classification, document versioning etc

[pete]

Currently:

 

SIMS for the basics. Personnel folder structure appropriately locked down for the rest. As @pysdii mentions, SIMS lacks granular permissions to properly secure sensitive data and default roles/permission groups overlap unnecessarily.

 

Soon:

 

The trust is moving to Every Compliance & HR (http://www.weareevery.com). It is not cheap, but so far it's looking promising.

Edited February 11, 2022 by pete

[GemmaC]

Hi Pete, realise a long time has passed! Did you go with Every in the end? We are considering purchasing it.

[pete]

Hi Pete, realise a long time has passed! Did you go with Every in the end? We are considering purchasing it.

 

They did.

 

The compliance side is tolerable but the HR side (which is a newer product) is slow, poorly designed, the alerting is unreliable and the MFA implementation is flaky. Every are not responsive and the documentation is poor.

 

Unless you have a lot of political capital with your staff that you're willing to burn, pick something else.