Your HR teams are busy. From performance management, payroll, employee engagement, recruiting, mentorship, to off boarding, there’s no part of a business that doesn’t have some touch point with HR.
Yet many HR teams are operating on manual systems such as spreadsheets, or even worse, paper trails, to keep track of the various data points for their workforce. These systems may work for 5-10 employees — even if still time consuming — but as your company grows, manual systems present a challenge for scaling businesses.
Employee database software is a tool often found within HRIS that opens up a world of possibilities for busy HR teams. By digitizing employee records, employee database software allows HR teams to easily communicate across the business, make timely updates to employee information, and access insightful analytics that drive business decisions. That’s not all, employee database software can also automate error prone tasks like payroll processing, performance reviews, and time and attendance tracking, saving your HR team valuable time, and reducing administrative headaches.
Key Benefits of an Employee Database Software
Simply put, employee database software is a tool that allows your HR department to securely store, organize, and manage your company’s employee data and documents. It may sound straightforward, but you’d be surprised to learn all of the benefits employee database software has to offer a business.
1. Centralized employee management database
As a HR manager, you have to keep track of massive volumes of data pertaining to your company’s employees. This is made harder when all that data is scattered across multiple spreadsheets and paper documents, making it harder to get the full picture.
With employee database software, you can unify all of your employees’ information into a single database, with complete, searchable and secure files that contain information such as the employee’s personal data, bank details, emergency contact and even records for leave management.
This design creates a single source of truth for your employee data that is easy to access, and streamlined for faster reporting and overall people management.
The cloud-based nature of employee database software also means that not only can you update your employee’s data in real-time, it also ensures that all records pertaining to that employee (such as IT information) are subsequently updated automatically, with perfect accuracy.
It also means that you can access the same employee database from multiple locations. This is useful if your company has established multiple branch offices in different countries, and especially so today, with more businesses adopting remote work arrangements with employees.
2. Highly customizable
The original advantage of manual employee data management was that you could customize your records to track exactly what was relevant to your business. But gone are the days when employee database software offered rigid data fields that left HR either collecting too much irrelevant data or not enough information to support their unique People needs.
Now, many employee database software offer a highly customizable database, in which you can modify each field, from employee information such as visa or vaccine status, to engagement driven initiatives such as birthdays or work anniversaries. With the right employee database software HR teams can gather all of the information they need, and leave out anything that’s irrelevant to their business. Shaping the system to work exactly to support their unique needs.
3. Empower employees with employee self-service portal
With manual HR processes, employees are forced to be dependent on their HR teams and managers to perform simple tasks such as access pay slips or calculate their time off balances, which not only creates additional work for already busy HR professionals, but hinders employees from managing and accessing their benefits — a driver in employee engagement.
Employee database software takes the administrative burden off of HR and empowers employees to access their profiles to manage their benefits and employee information with ease. Self service allows employees to track their leave accruals, manage time off, review payslips, and update information such as addresses or bank details.
Removing this barrier encourages employees to access their well-earned time off, which helps increase employee engagement and mitigate signs of burnout.
4. Increase employee engagement with key events and heightened communication
Employee engagement comes from various initiatives in your business such as your company culture, onboarding processes, and management styles. While these larger initiatives are huge drivers in keeping employees engaged, building a culture of belonging and making employees feel valued lives in the small gestures just as much.
Employee database software helps you easily track key events such as work anniversaries and birthdays, and it’s customizable nature means you can track anything from pet’s names to employee’s go-to coffee order. This data may seem inconsequential, but it’s these very details that show your employees that you care. You can leverage your employee database software to easily track and be reminded of these key dates to ensure you’re acknowledging important milestones for your workforce, deepening your culture and employee engagement, and heightening communication between your departments and teams.
5. Leverage HR data analytics
Employee database software provides immense value for your company in how it unifies employee data, and provides a single source of truth into the performance of your workforce.
The system makes it possible to effectively analyze relevant employee data to drive business initiatives, from calculating turnover rates, to tracking employee performance, and assessing personnel budgets, employee database software arms you with the numbers so you can make informed decisions that benefit your organization.
6. Provide visibility into your organizational structure
Last but not least, employee database software sheds light on your organizational structure, making it easier than ever to identify bottlenecks and communicate team structures.
Through features such as customizable org-charts and team calendar views, employee database software heightens communication abilities and offers a macro view of the inner workings of your organization which eliminates miscommunications and helps drive collaboration.
Considerations for Choosing Employee Database Software
Scalability and flexibility
Consider the growth potential of your business and choose an employee database software that can scale with your needs and accommodate your future business or personnel expansion. Flexibility in terms of customization and module selection can be a huge benefit as your company continues to evolve, making room for new data needs while sun setting other initiatives where necessary.
Complete employee lifecycle
HR teams know best, the employee lifecycle requires many features. Search for an employee database software that covers the full spectrum of the employee lifecycle, from onboarding to documents and e-signatures, performance management to payroll. By seeking an employee database software that encompasses the full end-to-end employee lifecycle, you can ensure accurate data management without having to patch together disjointed systems that aren’t built to communicate with each other.
User-friendliness and accessibility
Employee database software will be used not only by HR and management but also by your employees. Evaluate the user interface and ease of use of any potential employee database software. Look for intuitive navigation, well-designed dashboards, and customizable options that can be easily adopted by your HR team and employees.
Security and compliance measures
Pay close attention to the security measures and compliance features provided by an employee database software as it will be holding all of your employee’s sensitive data. Ensure they adhere to industry standards, have data encryption capabilities, and offer secure access controls to protect sensitive employee information.
Integration capabilities
Your employees are likely accustomed to the systems and softwares you currently use, and may be reluctant to change if your employee database software doesn’t support those systems. This causes an added strain on both HR and employees. So seek an employee database software that can integrate with other systems or software you currently use, such as accounting software or applicant tracking systems. Seamless integration reduces data entry duplication and improves overall efficiency.
Vendor support
Even the easiest employee database software will require an upfront investment to get up and running with your employee data. It’s important to find an employee database software that has a strong support team to aid in the adoption and implementation of the software, offering training and live support to ensure you and your team are adequately familiar and up to speed with the capabilities and functions of your employee database software. Further, some employee database software providers offer free implementation and local support, features that should be considered when determining which software is right for your business.
Streamline Your Business with Omni’s Employee Database Software
A cloud-based employee database software is a powerful tool for unifying all of the disparate employee data scattered across your company. As a single source of truth for employee data, employee database software streamlines your HR processes and makes them more efficient.
By applying data analytics to your employee records stored in the database, you can gain actionable insights that inform business decisions and shape your company culture.
Powering Asia’s fastest-growing, modern companies, Omni’s employee database software scales alongside your company so you can customize and leverage the system to meet your business exactly where you are — as well as where you’re going.
With a full suite of modules to support every aspect of your business, Omni liberates HR teams from administrative cycles by automating the entire end-to-end employee life cycle — from recruitment and onboarding to employee engagement and payroll and beyond — allowing you to redirect your time to strategic initiatives that drives your business’s growth.
Omni’s intuitive and fully customizable platform integrates with your team’s favorite tools for a seamless and timely adoption. And at only $3/employee/month, you can leverage HR automation to decrease administrative costs.
Book a demo with our team today to learn how Omni can help transform your small businesses HR processes.
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