A good employee directory - Why not part of the standard productivity tool set?

In the past I already wrote a few blogs on very common gaps (i.e. gaps with which almost every employee is confronted with on a regular basis) in the standard productivity tools (like Microsoft Office, Google Suite, OpenOffice or iWorks), such as gaps in the digital agenda (https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/04/your-digital-agenda-cornerstone-of-your.html) or gaps in the video conferencing tools (https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/09/video-conferencing-vendors-get-us-out.html). It continues to amaze me, how these gaps are so easily accepted, while they cost millions of euros in productivity losses worldwide. With millions of users using spreadsheets, word processors, digital agendas, video conferencing tools…​ you would expect these tools to be nearly perfect. Unfortunately many of our day-to-day personal and professional tasks, supported by these productivity tools, are still organized inefficiently and can be improved considerably. With large multinationals having thousands of employees working day-in day-out with these tools (usually the Microsoft Office tools, like Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Teams), you would expect them to work hand in hand with the software providers of these productivity tools to rapidly close these gaps, as even small gains can have an enormous positive impact due to their scale effect.

One other such gap is the lack of an "Employee Organization" module, integrated in the productivity suite, which would give easy access to the organizational structures and contact and working details of your colleagues. Obviously several ERPs, CRMs and HR tools give an answer to this gap, but they are often complex to deploy and use, not very well integrated with your daily productivity tools (like e.g. Outlook, Excel or Trams) and often too expensive to acquire for SMEs.

This "Employee Organization" component should be a tool, just like the mail client (e.g. Outlook) or the chat/video conferencing tool (e.g. Teams), i.e. composed of

• a central server component, which is managed by the company and

• a decentral client installed on every employee’s computer, with which the employee consults and updates the central server component.

The tool should provide following features:

• Manage employees: obviously a company should be able to add and remove employees and update the data of an employee (see next feature) but should also be able to search easily on different search criteria for employees.

• Manage employee data: this consists of managing different levels of employee data, such as

  • Core employee data, which is typically quite openly shared within an employer (and with colleagues), like name, language, gender, email and phone number

  • More personal data like address, personal email, personal phone number, nationality, birth date, birthplace, ID card number, social media IDs, civil status, details of partner and/or child(ren), contact person in case of emergency…​

  • Multimedia data, like e.g. a profile picture, signature, copy of the ID card…​

  • Info about the knowledge, expertise and interests of the employee, like studies, certifications, followed trainings, skills, interests, hobbies…​

  • Obviously an employee should be able to manage his own data, but potentially also other people could update (part of) your employee data, like your manager or the HR department. This access level should be managed within the tool.

• Manage the position and role of an employee within the firm, i.e.

  • This would consist of managing info like the main office location of the employee, the employee’s function/level/role, the coach of the employee, his reporting manager(s), his back-up in case of absence…​

  • The tool should also support special cases, like an employee with multiple roles and/or multiple reporting lines, temporary role assignments to e.g. a project team…​

  • This data would typically be managed by the HR team or by your team lead/manager.

• Manage the availability of an employee, i.e. manage info related to the professional availability of an employee (colleague).

  • This would consist of managing info like working regime (full-time or part-time and if part-time, which moments not working), work location (when working from home, when working from office and which office…​) and management of unavailability due to holidays, trainings and illness.

  • Obviously it should be possible to easily input this data, but it should also be possible to import the data (integrate), e.g. from HR tools.

• Apart from this data management, it should also be possible to consult and extract this data, i.e. via overview screens, reports, exports and APIs, i.e.

  • Overview screens, like automatically generated organigrams, team holiday calendars or dashboards on the evolutions of general headcount or headcounts per department, on commute distance, on skill availability…​

  • Reports and exports on all above data and derived results. Typical examples would be exports to HR tools and Social Secretariats, but also exports to your phone to get automatically all colleagues in your phone address book or exports to be used in project and sprint plannings (to calculate capacity of the team)

  • APIs for services like "Search employee", "Get employee details", "Get superior of an employee", "Get backup of an employee", "Get all members of a team"…​ These APIs can be used by several business applications such as workflow and task management tools to automatically assign tasks to the right employee.

• Generation of automatic weekly mails with the availability of your team, upcoming birthdays in your team or changes within your team.

• Synchronization with other productivity tools, like:

  • Spreadsheets providing functions to automatically retrieve certain data about an employee

  • Agenda and Collaboration tools (Chat/Video call tool) automatically setting to absent for holidays and other absences

  • Automatic creation (and update) of team groups in Collaboration tools, based on team composition

  • The mail client requesting for:

    • Automatic addition of holiday / absence notification in footer of sent mails

    • Automatic adaptation of email signature details

    • Automatic activation/deactivation of your out-of-office (with pre-defined message, taking into account begin and end date of your absence and your defined back-up to be contacted)

    • Automatic management of employer mailing lists

  • …​

Considering how much time you spend as an employee in looking up contact details of colleagues, in replicating your absence in multiple tools, in inputting the contact details of your colleagues in your mobile phone, in communicating your availability/unavailability with colleagues and external world…​ you can imagine how much time could be saved with a user-friendly and well-integrated tool for managing those aspects. For large companies this could total to hundreds of working days saved in total each year. It is therefore time that corporations start working hand-in-hand with the productivity tool software vendors (like Microsoft) in resolving those gaps, potentially via open source plugins, which are jointly developed. Ultimately everyone would benefit of such a collaboration.