Common Uses Of An Employee Directory
A corporate employee directory is a versatile tool.
It enables your people to do things they couldn't do before, since it contains information about their coworkers that they can't really find anywhere else.
A modern employee directory helps your staff with hundreds of useful tasks like finding expertise, putting names to faces, discovering who's who in their work network, remembering coworker birthdays, finding office locations, and more.
In this part of the guide you can discover some of the common ways employee directories are being used in organizations today.
What is an employee directory used for?
🤝 Getting to know your colleagues better. One of the main reasons people spend time browsing their company's employee directory is to simply learn more about their coworkers; names, faces, bio's, interests and other information that helps them relate to the people they work with.
📞 Looking for contact information. People don't want to be rummaging through email signatures looking for phone numbers.
🏢 Browsing your company's organizational structure and learning who fits where in the org chart.
👷♂️ Looking for a colleague's job title, seniority, and who they report to.
🎅 Finding out what your coworkers look like. Many remote workers have never met their colleagues in person, and new hires want to learn the names and faces of the people they work with.
📍 Discovering where your coworkers are located or where they're working from.
🔨 Finding people that have the skills and expertise you need for a project.
🤹 Looking for people with common interests and hobbies.
🎂 Keeping track of birthdays so you know when it's cake-in-the-office day.
What questions can an employee directory answer?
Depending on your role in your company you may need to answer certain questions to get your job done, and a well-designed employee directory can help.
Here are some questions an employee directory can help you answer:
🙋♂️ "Who is Maggie's assistant?"
📞 "What's Debbie's extension?"
👀 "Who worked on that project two years ago?"
👴🏻 "Was it Bill or Bob I met in Accounting last week?"
🏢 "How big is our Marketing department?"
👨💻 "Who can install the printer for me?"
📅 "Is Jasper in the office today?"
👩⚕️ "How many other doctors work in this wing?"
👨🏾💼 "Any other sales people in this office?"
🔖 "What was Sam's last name again?"
🎂 "Who has birthdays this week?"
💂🏻♂️ "Who reports to me?"
🚴♂️ "Anyone in this office into cycling?"
🌎 "Which office is Jason working from?"
🧔 "Who here is skilled in website design?"
🗽 "What's the phone number of the New York office?"
👩🏽🦳 "What does Amy's manager look like?"
🐦 "Anyone else on my team have a Twitter account?"
🤔 "Actually, who is my boss's boss's boss?"
These are just a few of the general use cases for employee directories. There are hundreds of specific uses for employee directories that span multiple job roles, functions, and industries.
Next: What Goes Into An Employee Directory?
