Making Documents Available To Employees

As you may know, documents that are in the central company Library in HR Partner are made available to your employees on their portal, because your Library generally contains documents such as employee handbooks, company policies, common forms and others that your employees will need on a day to day basis.

But there are also attachments that are stored directly against an employee.  If you go to your employee view screen, then select File Attachments, you will see all files uploaded against this particular employee.  Note that some files are 'tagged' with the sub-module that the document was uploaded against (e.g. Training, Performance Review etc.).  You can click the tag to go directly to the record entry that the file was uploaded against.

These are documents such as employment contracts, sick notes, diplomas, interview transcripts and other items pertaining to just that employee.  By default, these employee documents are usually private, and only available for admin users to see.  But sometimes, you may have documents such as a training certificate or contract that the employee needs to have access to as well.  The good news is that you can make these employee attachments available to them on their employee portal if needed.

Setting Up

The first thing you will need to do is to enable sharing of documents with your employees.  By default, this is turned off in all HR Partner companies for security purposes, but you can easily turn it on by going to Setup -> Configure -> ESS Portal, and tick the checkbox which says "Enable employees to view some attachments on their employee portal".

Note: You can also tick the box below that which will allow the employee to upload documents into HR Partner.  It is up to you whether you wish to give the employee the freedom to do this, or else not let them clutter up your filing system.  A valid use case is if the employee needs to upload things like invoices or manual timesheet entries as a scanned doc file - in which case you would enable this.

Controlling Visibility

Once the above step has been done (and it only has to be done once), then you can selectively make existing (already uploaded) employee documents available to them on their portal.  To do this, do to the employee File Attachment screen as shown above, then when you click the little 'cog' icon on the bottom right of each file, you will see an option to either Show or Hide the file on the employee portal:

On the lower left of the file box, you may see a little 'eye' icon.  If the eye is showing, then it means that this document is visible to the employee on their portal, and you can click the 'cog' to hide it.  If there is NO 'eye' icon, then it means the file is private and won't show, but you can click the 'cog' and select to show it.  That is how simple it is to nominate whether your employee can see a file or not.

You can also change the visibility of a document during the actual upload process when entering a sub-module record.  For example, if you were adding a note about a company asset item that is being loaned to an employee, then when uploading a manifest or photo of the asset, you can click the little 'eye' icon on the bottom right just under the upload box to flag whether the upload will automatically be made visible to the employee or not.

If the 'eye' is crossed out, then it means that the file that you select to upload will be Hidden from the employee.  If you click on the icon to remove the cross, then it means any file selected for upload will be made available to the employee to see on their portal automatically.

Employees Accessing Files

Employees can access the files you make visible to them by going to the 'My Documents' section on their employee portal.

From here, they can view and download the files that you have made visible to them, and optionally, if you have allowed them to upload files as well, then they can upload documents by dragging and dropping them into the grey upload box.  Note that any document uploaded by the employee will automatically be set to 'visible' for them unless you change it later.