The Top 5 Challenges of Satisfying HR Email & Correspondence Retention Requirements

Retention requirements for employee records can be onerous. From recruiting, interviewing, on-boarding, payroll, benefits administration, and employee reviews, Human Resource professionals must retain all correspondence and documentation, whether in paper or electronic form. Because most HR departments are not currently systematically capturing email correspondence, they are at risk of being out of compliance with industry regulations, and possibly federal and state laws. This could lead to bad audits, fines and liability from lawsuits.

Fortunately, third-party email correspondence modules like Email Manager from CMA now offer a way to ensure all relevant email and attachments are coupled with other records in your document management system.

HR Records Retention Requirements

Below is a table that illustrates typical legal retention requirements for HR records:

Records

  • Accident reports, injury claims, settlements
  • Applications, changes, termination
  • Attendance records, clock records
  • Correspondence
  • Daily time reports
  • Disability & sick benefits records
  • Earnings records
  • Employee contracts
  • Employee service records
  • Fidelity bonds
  • File, individual employee
  • Garnishments
  • Health & safety bulletins
  • Injury frequency charts
  • Insurance records: group, employee
  • Medical folders, employee (after termination)
  • Paychecks
  • Payroll records
  • Pension plan, applications, claims, correspondence
  • Rating cards
  • Salary & rate changes
  • Salespeople auto records
  • Salespeople expense accounts
  • Salespeople performance records
  • Time cards, tickets, receipts
  • Training manual
  • Union (collective bargaining) agreements (after termination)
  • Withholding, exemption certificate
  • Workers’ compensation reports

Retention Requirement (years)

7
3
4
6
5
4
Permanently
7
Permanently
3
3
7
4
10
6
30
Permanently
Permanently
Permanently
5
10
2
4
Permanently
7
Permanently
Permanently
3
11

We recommend having your CPA and attorney review the records retention requirements of your state before putting it into practice.

All of this makes the documentation process critical for everything HR does, both for legal purposes and to ensure the smooth function of the department. Management of all of this documentation, much of which is via email and attachments, can be very time challenging.

The Top 5 Challenges for Managing HR Email Correspondence

  1. 90% of all business correspondence is conducted via email, much of which includes attachments
  2. Virtually all correspondence with prospective and current employees is critical and should be considered a business record or document
  3. Correspondence typically is not associated with the documents they reference yet they can be with appropriate tagging (i.e., employee’s name or employee number)
  4. Classification, filing and archiving email with current technologies is unorganized and difficult to implement
  5. Critical email correspondence isn’t integrated with existing back-end systems

Extend Document Management with Email Correspondence Management

Email Manager from CMA allows HR users to incorporate all email and attachments into their document management system to satisfy all records retention requirements and to provide a more complete employee records—all in one easy step called “tagging.”

Using the Microsoft Outlook Plug-In of Email Manager, you can tag every email with employee number, name, and/or document type and let the email management software do the rest. Email Manager will then automatically tag all emails previously sent in the thread and all those emails that will be sent over the life of the thread. In doing so, Email Manager automatically stores each email, subsequent replies and attached documents to the document management system where they are stored in a secure, single location.

What are you doing to ensure your HR email, correspondence and documents are being properly tracked and archived?