Your HR operations are growing increasingly data-driven as HR becomes a strategic partner. Employee data is the foundational layer under your hiring efforts, onboarding, performance management, and more. But can your HRIS keep up?
Inaccurate or incomplete HRIS data can create operational inefficiencies, reporting issues, compliance risks, and poor employee experiences. In most organizations, there’s a simple reason for that.
No one owns HRIS data management, the process that keeps data clean and standardizes the way it’s used. This guide for HR leaders, People Ops teams, and HR administrators will show you how you can better manage your HRIS data.
Key takeaways
Your HRIS (human resource information system) is to your workforce what a data center is to the internet. It’s where you record important employee information, from personal details to compensation. Whenever you need that information, you tap into your HRIS.
HRIS data management is a set of practices and policies that ensure the data in your HRIS is clean, easily accessible, and reviewed regularly. HR operations rely on that data for every decision and initiative, especially when HR is a strategic partner rather than just an administrative function. Think of HRIS data management as infrastructure that supports HR operations.
Employee data management is a subset of practices within HRIS data management, focusing on how you keep your HRIS data clean. Employee records management is a level down from that, specifically for handling the documents and files involved throughout the employee lifecycle (e.g., I-9s, offer letters, performance reviews).
Your HRIS is the repository for every bit of data an employee’s tenure creates. Data management ensures it stays usable.
Your HRIS contains all sorts of data, such as:
HRIS data is essential to improving HR operations. By keeping this data accurate, you get:
Data management comes with a set of challenges that are relatively standard across industries. Here’s how they can show up in your HRIS.
HRIS records are created by multiple people over time and across departments. Some might even be created automatically through integrations or workflow automation. It’s all too easy to have duplicate records for employees, compensation levels, and other data. Data management has to address duplicate prevention, detection, and cleanup.
Employee records are completed over an employee’s tenure, especially as roles or skills change. But that data doesn’t always make it into your HRIS. Anything from contact information to role titles and performance review results can go missing without strict data governance.
HR teams use multiple systems to manage different aspects of their operations. But, all too often, each system becomes a data silo, meaning it holds data you can’t find anywhere else and that data doesn’t move to other tools unless you copy and paste it manually.
In most organizations, no one owns HRIS data. HR manages some of the processes involved, managers contribute data, and IT might troubleshoot the system from time to time. But no one owns the processes that should go into keeping that data clean or standardizing the way it’s entered.
Does your HR team rely on gut feelings or on data? Poor HRIS data has a ripple effect throughout your organization, affecting every decision it makes, from its overall strategy to individual talent decisions.
HR leaders need reports to make more strategic decisions while people analytics can help identify talent trends that reinforce these decisions or signal a need to pivot. Much of the data that feeds those reports comes from your HRIS, making HRIS data management essential.
Inaccurate HRIS data can lead to mistakes and misunderstandings that negatively impact the employee experience. Mistakes like:
Compliance risks, like financial penalties, government audits, and lawsuits, increase when the data in your HRIS is incorrect or incomplete. Misclassifying employees, failing to pay overtime, applying policies inconsistently, and maintaining weak data security are examples of issues that can arise from unclear data governance.
Knowing what talent you have at your disposal and what you’ll need in the future requires data. Inaccurate HRIS data, like outdated roles and incorrect compensation, can muddy the talent pool, making it harder to plan around your workforce needs.
HRIS data management relies on best practices like clear data governance standards, standardized data entry, regular audits, and data integrations.
Data governance covers the processes and policies dictating how data is handled in your organization. In the context of your HRIS, that can cover anything from how access to the platform is granted, how data entry is standardized, and how data retention is scheduled. These standards should be decided on and properly documented.
Someone in your organization needs to own the processes and policies around HRIS data management. They don’t need to be the ones performing the specific tasks for this, but they need to be the ones accountable for improving the way data is managed, making decisions, and handling crises.
In most organizations, HR owns job architecture, payroll owns pay and benefits, IT owns HRIS access, and managers contribute data to the system.
Your HRIS is your central command center. It’s where all your employee data goes. That means data gets entered by dozens of people in different ways unless you actively standardize this essential process. Without that standardization, you can end up with data entry errors, inconsistent records, and other issues that can cause larger problems in your workflows.
Here are a few ways you can standardize data entry:
Data points that need this kind of standardization include:
Regularly auditing your HRIS allows you to keep your processes efficient, review existing records for issues, and update policies as needed. A full audit, done annually, can be a trigger for improving the way you manage your HRIS, but it’s lengthy and more involved.
Quarterly reviews are less in-depth and more regular, meaning they’ll allow you to find patterns and improvements without doing a full audit each time.
Spot checks can also be useful after specific triggering events, such as a wave of new hires. With so many new employee records being created, a spot check could ensure processes are being followed properly or identify opportunities to improve them. Exception reporting, either manual or automated, can also give you more insight into how your processes actually work.
Audits typically review elements like:
An employee’s tenure with your organization is full of data entry events, but they’re rarely standardized. Better data management practices improve employee lifecycle management by giving you the data you need when you need it. Processes and templates can ensure greater data accuracy for milestones like:
Your HRIS is like a data center for your HR initiatives, but it’s rarely the only tool you use. Essential employee data can be scattered across performance management platforms, payroll systems, or an ERP, leading to duplicate entries, inconsistencies, and the potential for human error.
HRIS integrations, such as those found in performance management platforms like 15Five, can keep data moving smoothly throughout your tech stack so records are always up-to-date.
HRIS data isn’t just useful at the operations level. Every strategy, every tactic depends on that data. Here’s how.
Your HRIS gives you the best picture of your workforce. That starts with an accurate headcount, which itself is a baseline you can use to forecast what your talent pool will look like next quarter or next year.
HRIS data can also give you better visibility into the skills at your disposal, meaning you can more effectively identify skill gaps and how to plug them.
People analytics gives you a data-driven process for everything from making better hiring decisions to improving employee retention. Your HRIS is the beating heart of that process, and data management keeps that heart healthy. That means more accurate reporting, better leadership insights, and improved trend analysis.
HRIS data doesn’t just prevent employee experience mishaps—it actively improves it. Clean HRIS data helps HR teams identify opportunities for personalized support, resolve issues more promptly, and communicate about benefits and compensation more effectively.
As you improve your HRIS data management processes, watch out for the following mistakes.
Too many organizations put their resources into a single audit, make some modifications, and then return to their old processes. Data quality is an ongoing responsibility, whether it’s owned by HR or IT. That means having regular reviews, improving data entry processes, and maintaining integrations.
In data management, a “source of truth” refers to a system someone consults when they need to answer a data question. When employee data exists independently in multiple platforms, you’ll invariably get conflicting information. This can affect every process that relies on HRIS data.
Someone in your organization needs to own the data in your HRIS. From that ownership, you can determine the standard processes you’ll use to keep that data clean and useful. If there’s no clear owner, there’s no data governance, and your HRIS starts to lose its usefulness. Data becomes inaccurate or scattered across your tool stack instead of being centralized.
Data management needs to be part of the standard training you give to your people. Every task an HR professional or manager completes creates data. If they’re not clear on how to manage, record, or reference that data, they can create data issues you’ll need to clean up later.
Proper data management doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Your tool stack can either help or hinder it. That’s where dedicated performance management software like 15Five comes in.
15Five can support both HR and managers in a variety of tasks, from running better performance reviews to improving employee retention. But it also plays a key role in your HRIS data management.
15Five integrates natively with popular HRIS platforms, ensuring that all the data created by your performance management, employee engagement, and manager enablement efforts feeds into this system automatically. That leads to better people analytics, manager effectiveness, and workforce planning.
Achieving stronger HR outcomes requires clean people data. The more you know about your people and the more accurate the data, the better your decisions. It makes the difference between sitting in a leadership strategy session knowing you can answer all the leadership team’s questions and clicking through dashboard after dashboard, unsure which numbers you can trust.
HRIS data management refers to the policies, practices, and standards used to keep HRIS data clean and accurate. It standardizes data entry, assigns ownership of HRIS data to a specific team, and introduces review cycles to keep data accurate over time.
HRIS data is at the source of data-driven, strategic HR. Accurate data leads to stronger reporting, a smoother employee experience, and better visibility for leadership.
Your HRIS stores a breadth of information, including:
You should run both quarterly reviews and full, annual audits. Reviews are especially useful for identifying short-term trends or seeing how processes have performed after high turnover or hiring periods. Annual audits allow you to go more in-depth, verifying everything from compliance to potential integrations.
In most organizations, ownership for HRIS data quality lies with either HR or IT.
Effective HRIS data management keeps your HR operations frictionless. Better, more accurate data improves the employee experience, creates better reports, keeps you compliant, and makes every business decision more strategic. Maintaining that data requires data governance, clear ownership, ongoing audits, and consistent processes.
Your HRIS is the foundation of your operations. Make sure the data in it is solid.
Ready to turn employee data into actionable insights? Book a 15Five demo here.