Introducing RePloyee for employee documents

We released ReChive as our first module well over a year ago. As we watched its popularity grow after the release, there was a problem that it categorically could not solve.

Businesses would need to maintain a set of documents for each employee. For most businesses, the documents for a single employee are limited to a form of identification and a contract. In some cases, however, the requirements are much more complex, and the employer is required to maintain many different documents; failure to do so can result in financial penalties.

ReChive can record the documents you have sent or received perfectly fine, but its design revolves around communications and does not support the concept of a profile that has a series of requirements, against which a document might be missing or expiring.

Introducing RePloyee

To solve the problem of maintaining employee documents, we created RePloyee as the second module of Vieolo.

A business would need to maintain a set of documents for each of its employees. Even though each employee, based on their role, requires a different set of documents, the requirements of a single employee rarely change. What comes after defining the requirements is the continuous work of adding the missing documents and renewing the expiring ones.

RePloyee is designed around the same principle. An employee is added, their requirements are defined, and you get an overview of what's missing and what needs to be renewed. This workflow, even though it might sound simple, could be extremely complicated, time-consuming, and error-prone if managed manually or with a solution that was not properly designed for it.

Of course, RePloyee is much bigger than just a simple list, and we have added many more capabilities for it to be useful in real-world use cases.

Reusability of profiles

As the number of employees in a business increases, the management of every employee profile becomes cumbersome, and it would be impractical to change the requirements of 30 different employees because a new project was started or a new law came into effect.

RePloyee needed a way for businesses to reuse profiles for a group of employees and also be able to mix them, as one person might perform multiple tasks, each one requiring a unique document. So, naturally, we introduced reusable roles and requirements.

On a fundamental level, you can define a “requirement,” which is basically a type of document such as an employee contract, passport, or driver's license, defined along with its properties. You can assign a requirement directly to an employee, but most often, you'd be adding it to a role.

A role, as the name suggests, is a role that an employee takes on, coming with its own set of requirements. An employee may have multiple roles; in real-world operations, many employees partake in different parts of the operation, especially in more critical industries such as logistics, manufacturing, or mining.

A requirement may be optional or mandatory. In the way we designed RePloyee, the optionality of a requirement can be set based on the assignment and not the document itself. So, for example, a driver's license might be mandatory for a driver but an optional document for an office employee who may or may not be given a company car.

The mixture of roles and requirements can give you infinite ways of adjusting an employee's profile. But there are cases where an employee in a role may be exempt from a single document for some reason. In RePloyee, you can do just that. You can add a per-employee exemption to a requirement imposed through a role.

Presets

We have decided to take RePloyee to the next level and introduce first-party roles and requirements that we collectively call presets.

One of the shortcomings of many document management solutions is that they don't have any inherent idea about the type of documents they are handling. So, in their eyes, a document is basically a file and a bunch of metadata.

With the introduction of presets, RePloyee (and other modules of Vieolo) gets a notion of the nature of the document you're handling and the special needs and considerations that should be applied.

Presets follow the same reusability principle as the roles and requirements.

We have created a series of preset requirements that are commonly used documents across different roles. One example is the ID card. Almost all ID cards around the world have to be scanned from both the front and the back. Using the ID card preset, RePloyee asks you to upload both the front and the back under the same document entry. This small and simple consideration would not have been possible without a predefined requirement.

In the same fashion, we have also created some preset roles which provide a blueprint for certain document-heavy roles. As a first step, we have defined a series of preset roles for truck drivers in the Netherlands and Germany, as we are familiar with the industry in these two countries. But of course, we will gradually expand the number of preset roles to cover many more positions around the world.

Ready for you to try it

At the moment, RePloyee is available only on the web. Naturally, the module is only available for business workspaces, as personal workspaces don't have employees.

We would love you to try RePloyee and tell us what you think and what should be added to support your business needs.

We are continuously improving our platform, including RePloyee, and even though we use our product for our needs, we are always looking for user feedback, as our primary goal is to provide a good user experience and solve actual problems.