Why Does Your Business Need An Employee Directory

Businesses all around the world invest in building and maintaining a comprehensive employee directory and making it available to every individual in the organisation. It is often an important part of any human resource management system. But why do businesses create employee directories?

This blog post will look at the reasons your business needs a directory, starting with what it actually is. Keep reading!

What is an employee directory?

An employee directory is a software application that helps you find contact details and other important information about your colleagues. It’s like a digital telephone book for your company which allows employees to search the database of the names, job titles, phone numbers, and other useful info about the people they work with. It can be also termed as the staff directory.

Employee directories can be as simple as a basic list of contact information or they can be more advanced, including personal information like nicknames, photos, skills, biographies, birthdays, locations, projects, and work experience.

Why does your business need an employee directory?

The basic reason for an employee directory is to help your staff easily connect with their colleagues.

It becomes more important to have an employee directory within larger organisations. The larger the organisation the more people require an employee directory to locate others and connect and understand their job role, knowledge and skills. They are particularly helpful for companies operating from multiple geographical locations and teams working remotely. In such cases, many employees might not have met each other personally but are required to collaborate with some of them based on the projects they are working on.

Employee directories help every employee gain some background information about their colleagues irrespective of the location they are based in. They are a preliminary requirement for running smooth business processes and promoting work collaboration.

What is included in an employee directory?

We have discussed what an employee directory is and why your business needs one, but what about the information that you need to display in it? What employee details are provided in the directory?

It can contain basic information such as:

• Name
• Job Title
• Department
• Contact details – email, phone, etc.
• Location

Apart from these basic details, an employee directory may contain employee attributes such as:

• Education
• Interests
• Skills
• Certifications
• Past projects

These details also allow employees to build better teams and connect with subject matter experts. It also helps create a professional and friendly work culture where employees can share their ideas.

What are the common uses of an employee directory?

Here are some common ways an employee directory can be used.

Looking for someone to contact

Essentially an employee directory is used to look up the contact details of a colleague. Some employee directories include a skills directory that helps employees search for colleagues with specific skillsets or knowledge. This can be really useful in collaborative environments that rely on the sharing of knowledge between employees.

Looking for an expert

Details such as education, skills, certifications, interests, and past projects handled can help managers build the right team for a project at hand. They can easily identify the right employee with the available information.

Understanding the organisational chart

The job title or designation of an employee helps understand their role in the organisation. Suppose someone wants to know the hierarchy of the organisation, it can be simplified with an informative employee directory.

Finding where someone is located

A lot of organisations are either working remotely or have geographical different locations. An employee directory makes it easier to find someone’s location and contact details, even time zone differences.

Onboarding new hires

A new hire will always need to know “who’s who” in your organisation. An employee directory will help make their onboarding experience less troublesome by providing some basic contact details of every employee.

Introduce Sentrient HR online staff directory to your business

Sentrient HR management system comes with a detailed online staff directory to help employees at every level of your organisation connect and collaborate with their colleagues for a better work experience. It is an integral part of the human resource management system. Contact us for more information today.

This blog post was originally published here.