What is an Employee Master?
Similar to the other types of Master Data disciplines, an Employee Master (also referred to as Human Resources Master Data) is a centrally maintained repository that is an attempt at consolidating the final source of the truth for all the employees in an organization. The employee master serves an important function that helps human resources, leadership teams, functional and department heads to make swift, accurate and data-centric decisions.
Employee Master Data Management is simply the practice of ensuring data consistency of the employee data from disparate systems in the organization. It also ensures that adequate precautionary or governance systems are set in place to ensure the maintenance of this data is done correctly that allows for very accurate employee-centric decision making.
How Does an HR Master Data Help?
As companies scale and team sizes grow, it becomes tricky to keep a track of every employee and its associated data on traditional systems like an HRMS or a spreadsheet. The scale at which some companies operate with 10,000+ employees, dilutes the effectiveness of leadership decision making because it’s simply impossible to map skill sets, requirements, expertise and performance of an employee on-demand.
This is why ERP systems like SAP, Oracle and Infor began offering Employee Master as an add-on to their existing suite of the products.
This allowed companies to maintain up to-date and centrally managed information of each employee to aid decision-making across recruiting, talent management, project management and stakeholder management.
We have detailed some key benefits further below in this article.
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Data Points in an Employee Master
Along with basic information points, to make make the most in terms of benefits from any master data discipline, it is important to have a full view of a given employee record that ensures completeness, total reliability and full context of the employee to ensure decision making in the future is data-driven.
To facilitate this, it is important to create, populate and edit as many fields that pertain to employees.
Personal Information
This includes basic Personally Identifiable Information of the employee, including name, birth date, gender, place of origin, nationality.
Full Name: For identification and communication.
Date of Birth: Helps with benefits eligibility, retirement planning, and compliance with age-related labor laws.
Marital Status: Used for determining dependent-related benefits.
Contact Details
This entails basic contact information of the employee and details of his peers, family relatives to contact in case of the any emergencies.
Address: Required for tax jurisdiction, compliance, and emergency correspondence.
Phone Numbers and Email Addresses: For communication and contact during emergencies.
Emergency Contacts: Critical for crisis management and employee safety.
Legal & Historical Records
This entails legal information pertaining to the employee’s work history, including information from his past criminal records (if any), background checks that most organizations insist on etc
Work Permits/Visa Status: Crucial for managing international employees and staying compliant with labor laws.
Background Checks: Ensures legal and ethical standards during hiring.
Compliance Training Records: Tracks mandatory workplace training, such as safety or harassment prevention.
Financial, Tax & Compensation Information
Simple details to ensure compliance with Payroll, Compliance & Finance teams
Bank Account Details: Ensures timely and accurate salary disbursements
Tax Identification Numbers: Critical for compliance with tax laws
Deductions and Withholdings: Tracks deductions like health insurance premiums, retirement contributions, and tax withholdings
Base Salary: Used for payroll management and benchmarking salaries within the industry
Bonus/Commission Structure: Provides insights into performance-based compensation and incentives
Benefits Enrollment: Tracks health insurance, retirement plans, and other perks to assess employee satisfaction and cost management
Overtime or Shift Allowances: Used to manage workforce budgets and ensure fair compensation practices
Career Milestones
Historical career-related information pertaining to every single employee,
Promotion History: Tracks growth and identifies potential for leadership roles.\n – Internal Mobility Records: Monitors transitions between departments or roles.
Succession Planning Data: Helps identify and prepare employees for future leadership positions.
Academic Qualifications: Level of educational qualifications, specializations completed specific to the function etc
Expertise & Performance Data
Probably some of the most important data stored in the employee master – career milestones enable function heads and leadership to make critical HR decisions such as internal promotions, geographical assignment, hierarchies etc.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Tracks individual contributions to organizational goals.
Performance Ratings: Aids in promotions, raises, and identifying high-performing employees.
Skills and Certifications: Enables skill gap analysis, internal role mobility, and targeted training programs.
Completed Training Programs: Tracks professional development and compliance with mandatory certifications.
Goals and Objectives: Supports ongoing performance management and strategic alignment.
Attendance & Leave Management
To enable better planning during absenteeism of the key employees, general payroll management and workload management
Work Hours: Used to assess productivity and workload distribution.
Leave Balance: Helps manage time-off policies and ensure adequate staffing.
Absenteeism Patterns: Enables analysis of employee engagement and work-life balance issues.
Project & Assignment Records
Another critical data-point that helps ascertain the project performance. For example; excessive number of senior & junior employees mapped to projects with low ROI is questionable and such instances can surface easily in a well-maintained Employee Master
Current Projects/Assignments: Helps in resource allocation and project planning.
Previous Projects: Provides insights into past contributions and expertise.
Team Collaborations: Tracks teamwork dynamics and cross-functional efficiencies.
Health & Safety
To enable organizations to better manage employee emergencies like hospitalization, treating emergencies or health-related urgencies, organizations maintain health-specific records that include but are not limited to;
Medical History or Fitness Records: Ensures compliance with job-specific health requirements (e.g., fitness for physical labor).
Safety Training Certifications: Tracks adherence to workplace safety standards.
Incident Records: Assists in assessing workplace safety and reducing risks.
Blood Group: Specific Blood group in case of an urgent requirement to transfuse blood during accidents in or around the workplace.
These are just a few examples of how companies can maximize information availability specific to an employee, a department, business function, business unit or performance of any given region. Companies in specific industries would focus on some specific data points not listed above.
For instance, in the IT services industry, a lot of focus is set upon profit/employee or margin contribution from every employee in sales and delivery teams. Similarly, funded companies with a clearly defined growth trajectory would focus heavily on margin revenue contribution per employee.
Challenges in Managing an HR Master
Implementing an elaborate and complex system like an Employee master has its own set of challenges and an organization will encounter all kinds of difficulties during initialization and implementation.
We detail some of them below.
Internal Resistance
Since this implementation will require inputs and data from the employees themselves, employees and departments may view EMDM implementation as disruptive or unnecessary. The ROI from a program like this is also uncertain and pays dividend over a certain period of time.
Example: HR teams accustomed to decentralized management systems may resist transitioning to a centralized platform.
Data Silos & Systemic Issues
Employee data is often fragmented across multiple systems such as HR, payroll, and IT, leading to inconsistencies. Moreover, it’s entirely possible that different silos would have stored data in different formats, architecture or worse, stored conflicting information.
This makes migration of the data into a central repository quite tricky and difficult to implement.
Example: A multinational company may find mismatched job titles and department assignments across systems, which complicates centralization.
Scalability & Security
Growing organizations may find their EMDM systems insufficient to handle increasing data volumes. Moreover, Centralized databases become prime targets for cyberattacks if security measures are inadequate.
Example 1: A financial institution faces a data breach that compromises sensitive employee information due to insufficient encryption.
Example 2: A startup expanding internationally finds its initial solution inadequate for multi-currency payroll and multilingual support.
Customization & Industry-Specific Solutions
We’ve touched upon this earlier, an out of the box solution is not really an HR Master Data solution for any company. Most of these solutions require some sort of a custom implementation depending on the industry, client requirements, business type etc, which can make the implementation expensive.
Example: A consulting firm requires project-specific tracking that a standard EMDM system cannot accommodate without costly customization.
Data Governance & Data Cleansing
It’s one thing to define the requirements, architecture and technology stack for building an Employee Master. However, the trick lies in executing the data cleansing and building a governance discipline internally that results in a well-defined and reliable HR Master.
While the approach to this lies in defining SOPs, it’s a largely human-driven process. An absence of MDM-led technologies will result in slow adoption, mismanaged data upload and record creation or worse, upload of the wrong data.
Technology-led cleansing, enrichment and data governance solutions are non-negotiable to ensure a seamless management of an HR master with little human intervention.
HR Master Data Management Solutions
Considering the challenges detailed above, technology-first solutions, especially AI-driven solutions can seriously help enterprises implement a robust HR Master that can streamline operational capabilities, empower decision-making teams and build the enterprise on solid HR foundations.
Solutions like these, including the ones we offer here at Verdantis, fall into any or all of these three buckets. Companies excelling at HR Master Data Management typically have custom industry-specific solutions for all of these.
Data Cleansing
We’ve touched upon this earlier, data cleansing exercises can be tedious, cross-department data can be conflicting and incomplete. Often times, a specialist master data expert needs to be enlisted to consolidate and migrate the data from multiple sources into one single source of the truth, i.e, the golden record employee master record.
Solutions like these, including the ones we offer here at Verdantis, fall into any or all of these three buckets. Companies excelling at HR Master Data Management typically have custom industry-specific solutions for all of these.
Data Enrichment
Missing information is often the biggest challenge any MDM discipline, completeness in information is something that can be achieved from third party sourced, the employee or his or her HR partner or the employees reporting manager or function head.
Financial records, Tax Information, addresses can typically be enriched from third party sources if some key fields are already made available – like social security details
Data Governance & Maintenance
Considering the challenges detailed above, technology-first solutions, especially AI-driven solutions can seriously help enterprises implement a robust HR Master that can streamline operational capabilities, empower decision-making teams and build the enterprise on solid HR foundations.
An employee data governance solution will typically be a software-based service that integrates with most popular ERPs, deploys validation rules, enriches missing data automatically, identifies potential duplicates at the time of record creation and structures data at the time of record creation itself.
Moreover, user-approval configurations are available in the software to define an approval matrix, and hold data stewards accountable in case the employee master is “Compromised”
In Conclusion
An Employee Master is essential for effective employee data management. It enables accurate, data-driven decisions by consolidating information into a single source of truth.
As organizations grow, traditional systems often fail, leading to inefficiencies and poor decision-making. A robust Employee Master addresses these challenges by centralizing and enriching employee data.
Advanced tools, such as AI-driven data cleansing, enrichment, and governance, simplify implementation while improving data quality and efficiency.
Customizable solutions tailored to industry needs integrate seamlessly with ERP systems. This ensures reliable, secure, and scalable data management.
Verdantis offers tailored solutions that empower businesses to streamline operations, support growth, and build a strong HR foundation.
