On April 18, 2012, Zulfia Yupashevskaya, deputy Director, Department of Personnel Services of the BDO outsourcing division, took part in one of the forums held at the Personnel Moscow 2012 exhibition. She contributed a report on the pros and contras of the impending elimination of workbooks.
The pros included the thrifty use of effort by employers' personnel departments. The elimination of workbooks will enable employees to confirm their lengths of service and qualifications by providing letters of recommendation from even temporary employers. Employers will no longer be able to prevent employees' quitting by retaining their workbooks or threatening to make entries in them as to the employees' penal dismissal.
At the same time, the novelty involves a number of inconveniences. The number of documents necessary for the confirmation of seniority and qualifications is very likely to increase. There will be more paperwork when hiring or firing employees. Employers will have to request information from the Pensions Fund of Russia and employees will have to collect and keep employment agreements and letters of recommendation issued by all previous employers. At the same time, personnel services will lose access to important information concerning the former experiences and qualities of applicants. So far, the further ways of figuring out seniorities remain unclear. In our country, electronic databases are, so far, unreliable. The problem of figuring out amounts of pensions coming to employees will have to be paid special attention.
Mrs. Yupashevskaya also drew the attention of the attendees of the forum to that the elimination of workbooks will call for changes in certain laws and directives. Otherwise, personnel services will, once again, face discrepancies in documents.
Besides, she continued, young professionals regard workbooks as a vestige of the Soviet times. So its elimination will be another step on the way towards progress. Yet the elimination of workbooks without unwanted consequences will be possible only if the further functioning of human resources is well prepared and thought out.
