One of the more interesting studies on employee engagement states that companies with highly-engaged employees and teams are 21% more profitable. The study explained that these companies experience 60% less turnover and 41% less absenteeism compared to their competition.
Another study found that disengaged employees cost US businesses up to $550 billion every year. Regardless of how these findings were extrapolated, the simple truth is that an engaged and motivated workforce is good for business.
Companies that make employee engagement part of their overall business strategy achieve several immediate benefits. For these companies, fully leveraging employee knowledge and know-how with clearly defined goals, objectives, rewards, and recognition empower their employees to perform their best work.
So, does this mean your company should adopt a similar mindset? In fact, yes, it does, and the tool that can help make it become a reality is employee directory software. A company directory may sound boring, like a yellow pages for your enterprise, but the reality is, as technology evolves, so does the hiring process.
With a plethora of benefits on both hiring managers and the employees side, its in your company's best interest to utilize directory software. Read on to learn the employee directory software advantages that can help you create a more engaged, motivated, and productive workforce.
What is Employee Directory Software?
Employee directory software lists employees' titles, positions, and contact information. However, a dynamic people directory is a step beyond. Simply put, it's an all-encompassing repository of all your employees’ skillsets, work history, education, competencies, experiences, and expertise. It’s your very own job board, uniquely-tailored to the needs of your organization, its managers, and supervisors.
A dynamic people directory provides managers a clear view of the kind of people data so critical for choosing the right person for the right job. This eliminates the need for working with outside search firms, temp agencies, or any other third-party resource that often adds weeks and months to any hiring process. Instead, you have all the information you need about the hidden talents of your existing workforce.
A dynamic people directory allows hiring managers to easily locate qualified employees that could serve as a perfect fit for the position.
What are the benefits of a Dynamic People Directory?
1. Lower Hiring Costs and Reduce Onboarding Times
How important is a proactive, seamless, and simplified hiring and onboarding process? When you consider that 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for a minimum of 3 years when experiencing a positive onboarding process, it’s not only important – it’s essential.
So many companies adopt a “sink-or-swim” mentality to onboarding. They bypass any reasonable plan or milestones that would make the onboarding a much simpler process. Sometimes they do this because of time constraints. Sometimes it’s because of limited resources. Sometimes it’s because of company culture.
Regardless of why it occurs, a poor hiring and onboarding process often goes together with a poorly structured organization focused solely on putting out one fire after another. It’s the difference between being reactive versus proactive.
With your very own internal talent marketplace, you’ll have access to a list of ready-to-get-started and more-than-capable candidates. You’ll reduce the time it takes to find qualified people and will be able to avoid those never-ending bidding wars so common when pursuing outside hires.
Your employees know your company’s culture. They know its business practices. They’ve become accustomed to the company’s mission statement and have used it as their guiding principle. They may have already interacted with people in the department they’ll be transitioning to.
Your current employees are far more likely to hit the ground running than an outside hire who would take months to get up to speed, regardless of any rapid onboarding process you adopt. The transition will be easier, but your existing employees won’t slow down the operational effectiveness of colleagues or the department they’re moving to.
2. Reduce Absenteeism and Increase Employee Retention
Some of the most common reasons for employee absenteeism and turnover include poor hiring practices, boredom, lack of purpose, little to no recognition or appreciation for one’s work, and no opportunity for personal and professional development. We covered the poor hiring practices above, but the others all relate to how individuals see their work roles and responsibilities and how they are valued and rewarded for that work.
We’ve all heard horror stories about people who dreaded going to work. We’ve heard about how they’ve spent 5, 10, or 15 minutes in their cars before mustering up the courage to go inside. Some of us might have experienced this ourselves during our careers.
If you’ve experienced this type of situation, ask yourself how it affected you personally. Think about how you might have done just enough to get by. Think about how low your motivation was. Think about how you were all too happy to leave at the end of the day. Ultimately, looking back, it’s easy to see that you were not achieving your full potential. It wasn’t good for you or your employer.
Employees need to know they’re appreciated. They need to see some indication that the company they’re working for is willing and able to invest in their future.
Your employee directory software should help you demonstrate that appreciation with reminders of employee birthdays, work anniversaries, and career and work milestones. It should also drive personal and career development through an opportunity marketplace. These critical features help managers fully leverage everything their employees have to offer while empowering employees to be their best.
Once employees feel recognized, it has a cascading effect; the entire organization will immediately notice when a coworker is recognized for their hard work.
Ultimately, it’s about providing a career roadmap that incentivizes employees to reach their full potential instead of just asking them to accept the status quo. You should want a hungry workforce constantly pushing the boundaries of their performance. That is motivation personified.
3. Solve Company-Wide Problems
Tribalism in business is a very real and costly problem. It’s common for department heads and managers to refuse to budge on even the most minor problems. Each side sticks its guns while issues persist. It slows things down and affects employee morale.
However, beneath each of these managers lies an untapped resource of ready-made problem-solvers. Their only interest is to work on solving the problem. These employees aren’t burdened by an “us-versus-them” mentality that often permeates department heads.
Faced with such issues, several companies choose to go the route of hiring external consultants. Not only are consultants extremely expensive, but the changes they implement are rarely, if ever, permanent. They’ll provide short-term results at the expense of long-term solutions.
An internal talent marketplace will provide the tools you need to create cross-functional project teams. It will allow you to gather talented individuals from each department. It will make it easier for these teams to work towards the ultimate goal of finding easy-to-implement and simple-to-follow solutions.
You’ll quickly determine who is suitable for the job, has the requisite skillset to make the project work, and has the follow-through capabilities to complete it.
4. Improve Training With Subject Matter Experts
How does your company currently leverage its subject matter experts? Do they help with after-sales support, marketing, and sales, or with training and improving the performance of co-workers? Companies often misuse their subject matter experts and thought leaders. Better yet, some companies don’t even use them, or worse, leave it to the employees to seek them out.
This issue worsens when multiple employees ask for the same thing at different times. Constant interruptions only frustrate these experts. Your subject matter experts are a continuous source of essential information. They can not only upgrade the capabilities of your workforce but they can also be positioned as customer-facing resources.
A dynamic people directory makes it all too easy to identify your subject matter experts. You'll quickly be able to ascertain which employees have unique skills and experience. You'll be able to identify those employees that have completed special projects, attained internal certifications, or whose experience allowed them to solve problems no other employee could. Once you've identified these experts, you’ll then be able to schedule training sessions that help to improve employee performance.
5. Identify and Resolve Your Perceived Talent Gap
According to a study from McKinsey & Company in 2020, upwards of 87% of today’s businesses are experiencing a skill/talent gap or expect to in the coming years. This issue, coupled with the fact that record numbers of people are quitting their jobs, means companies must do more to keep the talent they have.
So, does your company currently have a talent or skills gap or is it simply a case of not fully understanding the talent your organization currently has? Most companies rarely ask this question because they don’t have access employee directory software.
In fact, for these companies, the talent gap might just as well seem insurmountable. With no way of keeping track of its employees’ skills and talent, it’s more than likely this talent gap is worse than it appears.
By no means is anyone implying the talent gap isn’t real. It most certainly is. However, any company must first have a handle on the gap in their organization before enacting strategies to resolve it. Without a dynamic people directory, how do you know just how large your talent gap is? You don’t, and that’s ultimately the point.
An internal talent marketplace indicates your employees’ hidden talent, the size of your talent gap, and a roadmap to reducing that gap.
6. Build Employee Careers
Again, employees perform best when they feel they have an employer willing to go the distance in building their careers. Leveraging people data with employee directory software isn’t just about matching your best employees to your organization’s most urgent requirements. It’s about providing your employees with a roadmap to building their careers. It’s about creating career milestones and recognizing those employees who go the extra mile.
Momentum is critical in these situations. Employees who see coworkers getting rewarded and recognized are more likely to want to take part in that success. With the right software, employees can easily recognize coworkers with posts and mentions so that all are aware of an individual's contribution.
Your internal talent marketplace can be used to showcase your best employees. It can be leveraged to push employees to be their very best. In turn, other employees will follow suit. It’s good for the employee and good for the organization.
Raise the Bar on Employee Performance
Structural is a customer-centric supplier of talent marketplace software. Our software reduces turnover and absenteeism while building strong employee-employer relationships that increase worker engagement. For us, it’s about helping you get the very best from your workforce. To learn more about how our software solution can engage and motivate your employees, contact us now.
