Best Practice for HR folders - are we making it too complicated?

asked on May 16

Hello. We're very new to Laserfiche and without knowing about the functionality, we told our service provider to set up subfolders for Active, Inactive, and Terminated employees. Then within each subfolder is a subfolder for each employee or former employee. Our document template has meta data that includes whether the person's status is Active or Inactive.

My question is, is this too much? Is there really a use case for this many subfolders or should I just have one folder for all personnel files and then use template meta data to distinguish between active and inactive. Also, is there really a need for each employee to have their own individual folder given that each document has meta data that connects to the employee info?

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replied on May 16

We've been using the Laserfiche Repository for HR file storage for 14 years, and here's what we do:

Employment Files - Active
- Employee Type (for us, this is Civil Service, Faculty, Extra Help, etc.)
  - Last Initial
    - Last Name, First Name - Employee ID Number
Employment Files - Inactive
- Employee Type
  - Year
    - Last Name, First Name - Employee ID Number

That's more layers than you have, but with so many files built up over almost 1.5 decades, it's necessary.

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replied on May 16

I agree with Jennifer's layout. If you don't use the subfolders of Last Initial or Year for Inactive, when you go to open a folder after several years of using the system, Laserfiche will have to try to pull back thousands of employee folders all at once. This causes a huge strain on the backend components to display to the end users. I worked with a Laserfiche customer that was a college that didn't use this layout and they complained every time you talked to them about how slow the system was, but they weren't willing to change it to make it better.

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replied on May 16

Thanks Jennifer, for the quick reply and visual description of your repository for HR.

Question: how do you "move" folders to Inactive. Is it done via a workflow once an employee separates?

Blake - Thanks for the reasoning behind justification of multiple folders and the lag time to retrieve. As a new user, I wouldn't know that it's an issue.

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replied on May 16

I know you asked the question to Jennifer, but in the past, I have done it using a Workflow. We would query the HR database for employee status changes within the last 24 hours and then update the status of the Employee's folder and files and move them to inactive.

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replied on May 16 • Show version history

We implemented a folder structure much like Jennifer outlined for our HR department a couple of years ago. In our environment the personnel documents go to a folder structure based on the document type (e.g., Benefits, Employment History, Payroll, etc.) so the groups in HR handling those documents and see them all in one place, then we use shortcuts to point to those documents that for a given employee in their employee folder so you can see all the various document types for a given employee in that employee's folder.

As for moving folders, I have a nightly workflow that queries our ERP for all employee's who have a folder under "Active" to see if they are indeed still active or if they have a termination date set (which in our case is only set once the employee has actually separated). If they have a termination date, the workflow moves their folder to the proper place in the Inactive folder. Since "Separation from Agency" is also one of our cutoff instructions (for Employment History records for example), the same workflow invokes another workflow that then performs the set event date and record cutoff on all of the records for the now separated employee that have "Separation from Agency" as the Cutoff Instruction.

Best regards,
Jeff

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replied on May 16

Our HR staff manually move the employee's folder to Inactive as a part of their exit process. We could build something as Blake describes, but they've been just dragging the folder over for years. Maybe I'll suggest some automation to them...

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Best Practice for HR folders - are we making it too complicated?

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