Three ways HRMS helps with HR data management tasks

An HRMS is effectively a data management tool, used to organize, secure, store and retrieve the information relating to your company’s employees. It stands to reason that this tool is equipped with the best means of managing your people data across your organization.

Your HR data is some of the most sensitive you might record, including names, addresses, social security numbers, and other unique personal identifiers, bank account details, plus, with the salary records from the period of employment, a section of each employee’s financial history.

Viewed like that, any tool that keeps such information safer or assists with its effective use is a potential boon to any organization. Here are three fundamental ways in which an HRMS helps you manage your data better.

1. It’s paperless

The pre-automation approach to HR data required paper and lots of it. The most common data management tool was the spreadsheet for recordkeeping and reporting. However, paper spreadsheets – and even computer-stored spreadsheets in the early days of business automation – were time-consuming and prone to human error. Paper copies of anything are easily misplaced or lost and are unlikely to be backed up the way e-copies are.

Guide: five ways HRMS helps you get more out of your HR data

Furthermore, paper records are at a much greater risk of being incomplete and therefore contravening one of the many legal compliance requirements relating to employee information. Ask yourself, which would you rather: go to the filing cabinet or access the information you need with the click of a mouse button?

2. The benefits of automation

Without technology, HR processes – including recruitment, onboarding, performance management, time and attendance, payroll, and retirement – are subject to much more human error and particularly the limits of the human attention span. From individual laziness and procrastination to simply having too much to do, people tend to forget appointments and deadlines. Machines do not.

Whatever the HR procedure, whatever you need the data for and wherever you need it, an HRMS will prompt that action. Streamlined processes and tasks are supported with automatic notification systems, vastly improving the efficiency of any organization by the simple expedient of sending a timely reminder to the right person at the right time.

3. Devolving HR data management responsibilities

Not only is the world full of information but in the age of internet shopping and social media, we’re all used to accessing and manipulating that information via digital means. In other words, most employees will be comfortable using the self-service functions in your HRMS to manage their own data.

This common HRMS feature effectively devolves the responsibility for managing personal data to the person most likely to know what is accurate and what isn’t: the individual themselves. This has been shown to greatly reduce the incidence of error in the HRMS and increase the ease of any future data-cleansing exercises.

A final advantage stems from the fact that your HRMS is unlikely to be a standalone system. The more functions that are integrated, the more you can capitalize on the data management efficiencies. When a single employee database is used by all connected systems and modules, the conclusions and insights in any reports will be based on the same dataset and be equally accurate and up to date.