This tends to be the perfect time for HR to do some of their own spring cleaning for better order in the workplace. It’s towards the end of the year and the beginning of the new year where we may be managing open enrollments, setting budgets for HR, hiring new employees, finalizing payroll, and conducting performance reviews.

The following are 10 identified tips to help navigate your HR Spring Cleaning:

1. Clean up the employee files: Look through your employee files and purge those that no longer belong with the current files and relocate the ones for terminated employees to another secured storage location.
2. Record retention policies: If you do not have a policy for maintaining paperwork this is a great opportunity to create a retention policy or if you have one, update the policy so it reflects your current practices as well as Federal, state, and local regulations.
3. Organize your employment applications: Shred any applications that are past their retention date and then file the remaining ones either by position applied for or date of receipt.  If you are a government contractor, you must keep applications for 2 years.
4. Purge I-9 Forms: Ensure all I-9’s are filed separately and the terminated employees’ I-9’s are separated from the active ones and labeled with a retention date.  Remove any I-9’s that are past their retention date and shred them.
5. Review your employee handbook: If your handbook has not been revised in over a year, it more than likely needs to be updated.  Since regulations change on a continuing basis, it is important to update these to reflect the most recent changes in the law.  Make sure your policies match current best practices.
6. Audit benefit premiums: This is a great opportunity to review your current benefit premiums and ensure the correct amount is being deducted from each employee’s pay.
7. Update your compliance posters: Ensure your posters are easily visible to all employees and they are the most current for both federal and state requirements. If you have multiple locations you must have compliance posters at each location.
8. Federal required forms: Federal forms sometimes change each year or every other year so check to confirm you are using the latest version of these forms such as FMLA requests, COBRA notices, I-9 Employment Eligibility forms, etc.
9. COBRA administrators, and workers’ comp carriers: Review all required documents to ensure you are using the most recent documents such as the COBRA Initial Notice as well as review your current carriers and premiums listed on the COBRA notices to confirm the correct information is being relayed to your employees.
10. Review of Projects: Review the status of current projects as well as future ones helps in assuring goals will be met for the department and the organization by the designated timeframe.