For businesses, keeping track of employees becomes difficult as they scale.
Teams grow, departments change, and employees’ physical locations can make it hard to know who does what and they sit. Without access to useful information, valuable time is lost when people search for contact details or try to figure out the right person for a task when they can’t put a face to a name.
Simply put, an employee directory brings this necessary information together so you can find who you need as soon as you need them. From a 20-person organization to 2,000, nothing can beat seamless communication when everyone knows where to go to find who they need.
What Is an Employee Directory?
An employee directory is an internal company database that houses the contact details and company information for everyone in the organization. This includes a person’s name, title, department, appointed location, reports-to designation, and more. Often, directories include profile photos and/or areas of expertise.
Today’s directories are often synced with HR software or integrated with communications and collaboration software to ensure the information is always current, and anyone can find any one of their colleagues or the department they need without having to rely on outdated spreadsheets or ask somebody in a 20-email exchange who might do the specific job and where they can be contacted.
Why Businesses Benefit from Having an Employee Directory
An employee directory is more than just a convenient spot to house your coworkers’ contact information. It’s an absolute must in an organization because it allows employees to get their jobs done more efficiently without wasting time finding the people and information they need.
Employees are even able to make connections more quickly once they join the team. Rather than spending all day trying to remember names and organizational charts, someone can easily reach out to a team member or manager and get pointed in the right direction with an employee directory of their colleagues at their fingertips. That person will likely be introduced to many others during their first day of work, but having the org chart accessible and up to date will allow this person to understand their place in the organization and start working and collaborating with their team right away.
Support Your Productivity and Collaboration
In an increasingly connected work environment, giving employees the ability to connect quickly and seamlessly, knowledge is power. Your own employee directory will allow your team to have an immediate advantage when it comes to strong communication and getting their jobs done. Also, utilizing the ability to quickly search and filter employees helps ensure unnecessary productivity hits from simple, but costly-to-find, information are mitigated.
Directories also foster an open, collaborative environment where teams can discover each other to work. It’s nice to know if there is another team that is working on the same project, or someone who has experience with X or Y, or has had certain experience. An employee directory can lead to a searchable company wiki that can be used to store what new hire guides do, what teams people are in, project plans and ideas, and a host of other useful information.
When you make the data accessible, employees will actually get value out of it, rather than it being a “traditional” HR enterprise software that is hardly used or appreciated by staff.
A Simple Investment in a Powerful Solution
An employee directory might not seem like a complicated business system, but the benefits of one ripple through an organisation, increasing communication, fostering successful onboarding, connecting employees to work together, and making the right information easily accessible.
Today, many organisations are experimenting with hybrid models and operating with teams in the thousands across the world. People teams need to invest in the accuracy of their directories now more than ever. It’s all part of working in a more connected environment and making sure your employees find what they need 5x faster, so they can spend more time on the real work.