Employee Database

What is an Employee Database?

An Employee Database is electronic storage where critical employee information is saved for various Human Resources (HR) or organizational functions. This database can contain information on both previous and current employees.

Typically, an employee database may include the following:

• Employee name
• Position
• Roles and Responsibilities
• Payroll information
• Hiring date

Companies may also practice keeping track of their employees' performance evaluations, track records, training needs, and leave notes depending on the company's size, function, and a number of employees.

Usually, an employee database is used by HR officials, department managers, and accounting officers to make certain decisions about the employees regularly or on special occasions.   

Why is it Important to Maintain an Employee Database?

An employee database may be incomplete or perfect, but maintaining one with appropriate information helps a business track its human resources better.

Below are a few reasons why keeping an employee database is essential:

• The HR department can efficiently maintain and monitor each company employee in terms of recruitment, salary, performance, training, appraisal, promotion, leave, and absence.
• An adequately maintained employee database enables HR to compensate each employee based on merit, performance, and growth.
• A secured employee database helps maintain confidentiality about employee identification and critical information.
• It aids in communicating with the management regarding employees making timely and fruitful decisions.
• It helps HR take unbiased disciplinary actions against any particular employee while rewarding the deserving one with due compensation.
• Making decisions about promotions, bonuses, and incentives, for each employee after a certain period becomes easier.
• Negotiation points between employers and employees regarding service contracts, job descriptions, payments, and appraisals stay transparent due to maintaining an employee database.

How to Create an Employee Database

Creating an employee database follows some typical steps below:

• Gathering employee information through resumes, interviews, emails, or telephonic conversations.
• Making entries of this information for each employee on electronic or paper spreadsheets or databases to create individual records.
• Applying filter and sorting features on an electronic database makes it more interactive and viable to retrieve necessary information quickly.
• Protecting the electronic database by setting a strong password so confidentiality isn't compromised. If it's paper-based, lock them inside a safe file cabinet, so they're out of reach of unauthorized personnel.

An HR professional or an admin executive can create an employee database. However, the database must be accessible to authorized personnel when needed.

Information That Makes an Appropriate Employee Database

An employee database should contain critical information about each employee so that company officials can track their human resources. Information that makes an employee database complete are:

• Personal Information: Name, date of birth, contact information, address.
• Job Roles & Responsibilities: Position hired for or title, hiring date, service contract.
• Compensation: Salary package, bonuses, incentives, salary review.
• Work Hours: Daily working hours, sign-in and sign-out, over time.
• Leave sick leave, casual leave, leave of absence, and holidays.
• Job Track Record: Previous employers, job positions, experiences, skills. Other Records: Academic certifications (copies), training records, endorsements, and references.

What’s an Employee Database Software?

Since paper-based documents and records practices are waning daily, companies are now well-versed in keeping employee database software. The complexity of such software may vary depending on the company's size, operation, and a number of employees.

Most importantly, maintaining an electronic employee database helps businesses to reduce paper costs while complying with the laws and regulations.

The way an employee database software works is as follows:

• Reducing data entry mistakes significantly
• Generating quick reports for HR officials and managers when needed
• Monitoring and controlling human access to the records
• Playing the role of a valuable business asset for human resources

Benefits of an Employee Database Software

Apart from securely storing employee records, employee database software benefits a company by:

• achieving efficiency by being an accessible cloud system to authorized officials from anywhere and at any time of the day
• helping employers keep track of regular and need-based recruitment
• empowering employees by giving them access to their records to a great extent
• making the HR functions a lot easier and time-efficient in terms of decision-making, communicating with the management, and other relevant actions

Maintaining Compliance with an Employee Database

Companies must remain compliant with state or federal laws and regulations when maintaining an employee database.

Following are some rules that a company must follow:

• A company must retain employee records in compliance with state and federal laws, such as EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) and FLSA (The Fair Labor Standard Act)record-keeping rules and regulations.
• Employees must have limited access to their records. The company policy should comply with state law while limiting access to the employee database to HR officials and certain managers only.
• Officials must follow theAmericans with Disabilities Act while keeping employees' medical records.
• The company should develop policies for data loss and retrieval, security, and access control.