Author: Rakesh Rajan
Even if you are a 10-employee company or a small startup, it makes sense to have an Employee Data Management (EDM) solution in place that helps you store and retrieve employee data seamlessly to save time, efforts, and money. It is a basic and an important HR process. Getting this one important HR process digitized provides two major benefits:

• It lays a solid foundation for streamlining other processes, say for example, onboarding, and
• It makes it easy to manage, access, search, retrieve, and even integrate the data seamlessly, especially if you plan to digitize few areas of your payroll operations as you grow.

Creating, tracking, updating, and retrieving employee records is still one of the key responsibilities of HR professionals. Managing these crucial, sensitive, and confidential data manually using spreadsheets or paper documents is an outdated practice. It significantly curtails your HR team’s potential to focus on people that actually matters. Empowering your HR team with an appropriate EDM software can significantly reduce their burden and the data errors.

You Don’t Need a Comprehensive HRMS to Enjoy the Perks of HR Tech

A full-suite HRMS (Human Resource Management System) software will technologically support every aspect of your HR operations. However, that doesn’t mean that you need to buy a full-fledged, comprehensive HRMS to enjoy the benefits of the HR technology. There are solutions in the market that are built around your needs, based on the size of your company, and charge you only for those services that you use or choose.

These solutions are developed using latest technologies. The EDM solutions can either store data within your own company’s data center or can be stored in your vendor’s cloud storage system securely. A good EDM software will have the reporting and analytics capabilities; it will have good functionality features in terms of usability and intuitive navigation; and, it even lets you to try it out by offering either a free demo or a free trial before you commit to their services.

Besides features, the solution should fit your purpose and yet be affordable to fit your budget. In simple words, it should cater to your current needs as well as be upgradable to cater to your future needs to cover more areas of HR processes as your business scales. For instance, as a small and medium-sized business, you may not need Performance Management feature immediately. However, as you grow, as you add more employees, you may need it in future. To bring in efficiency, you may want to automate certain activities in the Performance Management process. At that time, your EDM software should be able to get upgraded, and run processes such as Employee Goal Setting and Employee Evaluation as part of appraisal activities.