Employee Document Management Implementation Guidance & Best Practice

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Kicking off your Employee Document Management (EDM) deployment? It doesn’t have to be a complex or daunting project! This guide is aimed at helping our customers understand where to start and how to approach implementing Employee Document Management for your HR Service Delivery application. 

Let’s get started! 

Table of Contents: 

1. Overview of EDM
2. Recommended Design Principles
3. Preparation and Requirements Gathering
4. EDM Process Flows
5. Configuring EDM
6. Governance and Ongoing Maintenance

1. Overview: As a reminder, here are the key aspects of Employee Document Management 

• Centralise employee documents that are currently stored across multiple HR cases or even documents received outside of a case via ad hoc methods. 
• Automatically move employee documents from a case to the employee file. 
• Place legal holds on all documents for an employee (HR profile), or for all documents by document type. 
• Define who can access what documents.
• Define retention policies that determine how long to retain employee documents and prevent purging for legal holds. 
• Define when to purge documents. 
• Import legacy digital documents using the Bulk Import Capability from other repositories/HCM’s.

2. Recommended Design Principles: Every customer wants to understand what to keep in mind as they begin. We’ve validated these recommended Design Principles with current customers, who have already been through the journey! 

• Design with a Global perspective first, and then Localise where required 
• Keep it Simple – focus on simplicity and usability by only configuring and retaining necessary documents. Assess each document from a compliance and risk standpoint  
• Phase your implementation – for multinational organisations or complex requirements, begin with configuring one country at a time and roll out from here 
• Standardisation of Security and Retention rules where possible 
• Co-create with your employee/agents 
• Stick to Out of the Box features and functionality

3. Preparation and Requirements Gathering:Let’s begin preparing and understanding your requirements. The approach below should help you gather your document needs in a structured and simple manner.  

An easy way to get started, is by first recording the types of documents you wish to capture and retain. Taking this approach allows you to understand ahead of time not only the types of documents being stored but the retention rules that apply, who should have access to them and when they should be purged. You may identify opportunities to standardise security or retention rules across various document types. And this can lower time spent on overall configuration and maintenance. 

The format below has been created in excel and can be used as a model to record the types of documents and the corresponding details that need to be defined around them. Many documents are often captured as part of a case or service request. Consider which documents you would wish to map and associate these with the HR services that are already offered to your workforce. 

Depending on the countries you operate within, you may be subject to legislation that requires your organisation to retain documents for a set period of time.  We recommend reviewing any relevant local legislation or corporate policy that will determine your retention and security policies. (eg. GDPR)  

Employee Access is another factor to consider when defining your Document types. When a document is made accessible to employees, they will no longer need to request a document from HR but can instead self-serve and view the files in their Employee Service Center. In order to ensure these documents are visible in the Employee Service Center, administrators will need to configure and ensure the Document Widget is visible on the Profile page within the portal.  

Keep in mind that some documents will not be deemed suitable to be viewed or accessed by employees. These may be documents retained under an Employee Relations case or Investigation, as an example. 

4. EDM Process Flows:There is more than one way to capture a document within ServiceNow before retaining it against the employee profile. It’s important to consider these methods in order to ensure you are capturing all necessary documents and have configured the appropriate document types. 

5. Configuring Employee Document Management:Now that you have prepared your document types and have a clear view of what you want to configure. You can now begin configuring within your HR Service Delivery application.  

Remember to apply our recommended design principles throughout this project. For large multinational organisations, you may want to approach this with a phased implementation. Beginning with a country or location that captures the most documents, thereby helping to reduce the burden on your staff where they experience the most volume.  

The diagram below highlights the relationships between each element that you will need to configure, to support retaining a document type. This should align with the excel file and your documented requirements that you completed earlier. 

Before you begin configuration within your HR Service Delivery application, your administrator will need to activate the Employee Document Management [com.sn_employee_document_management] plugin. From here please refer to the instructions on ServiceNow’s Docs website where you are guided through... 

We also recommend reviewing these assets which walk you through Employee Document Management and how to get started. 

• EDM Ask the Expert
• EDM Bulk Import Ask the Expert
• EDM Bulk Import Configuration Documentation
• FAQ

6. Governance and Ongoing Maintenance: As you complete your EDM deployment, it’s important to consider the internal frameworks and governance that surround t Ensuring who is responsible for the overall governance of the solution as well as who owns the ongoing maintenance as legislated requirements or business policies change.  

Assigning an owner or set of owners who are responsible for monitoring changes to corporate policy or legislated requirements will help to ensure you remain compliant and lower business risk. We recommend nominating a Subject Matter Expert who will be responsible for maintaining legal compliance and will conduct ongoing reviews of document types and the relevant rules.  

Depending on your operating model and complexity, you may want to nominate a SME per region/country/group of employees or alternatively across various groups of documents. We recommend having a global owner that sits above these Subject Matter Experts and is responsible for overall governance and standardisation.  

Now that you’ve reached the end of this guide – we hope you feel informed and ready to kick off your Employee Document Management deployment! Feel free to share your insights in the comments section and book mark this forum, as we continue to release new information and guidance with our HR community.