HR departments are overlooked all too often. Yet, managing employees and keeping them happy and engaged is one of the most important aspects of a business—as important as your security systems. HR aims to protect employees and the company. It is, in itself, a form of security.  

Integrating your human resource and security tools is the first step toward empowering HR departments to manage data efficiently. Integrated systems can save your business money, time, effort, and frustration. 

This blog is a quick read to help businesses understand the hows, whats, and whys of integrating security and HR tools. So, let's get started!

What is system integration, and why is it important? 

Essentially, system integration is the act of connecting subsystems and components into one overarching management system. As a result, companies that opt for such integrations enjoy the benefits of automation and save on resources.  

For example, stakeholders would have to manually export data or pay for several platforms without system integrations. By integrating all your HR tools with your security system, businesses can get a complete overview of the organization and eliminate redundant and repetitive tasks.

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Benefits of integrating your security and HR tools:

Enhanced physical security

Integrating security and HR data allows you to better physically protect your premises. For example, sharing data between your HR payroll and access control solutions ensure the right people enter your property. Plus, with a visitor management system, you can verify the credentials of everyone who enters your premises and enter their details into your HR system for future reference. 

Elimination of avoidable errors

Automating data transfer between systems mitigates the need for manual work. While every employee may bring their best to work every day, human error often leads to costly and avoidable mistakes. 

For example, take the instance of where you might have removed an employee from the payroll system but not the access control system. If this goes unresolved, it could lead to security breaches. An easy fix would be integrating systems to ensure the free flow of data between systems. This would make life easy for your admins and minimize or completely eliminate such errors.  

Centralized access and storage 

The centralization of all your tools in one place makes it easier and faster to manage the company. Users can work from one system and access everything they need to without remembering different passwords or wasting time switching platforms. 

This will reduce time and money wasted on training employees to use different systems for security and HR. Instead, they will have an in-depth knowledge of one system, where they can handle everything they need to.

Savings on costs and storage 

Purchasing several different systems is a costly way to manage a business. Additionally, installation, maintaining, and updating each platform is a labor-intensive and time-consuming ordeal. As a result, companies in these situations often hire an expert to manage software and hardware. 

However, if you rely on just one integrated system, you'll only need to pay once. Additionally, one platform takes up less storage than multiple systems. 

Optimized onboarding 

Your HR tools document how you manage an employee's journey and progress from onboarding on the very first day to their experiences and milestones five years on. 

With everything in one place, you can see the lifecycle of an employee's time at the company in a single glance. This makes the process automated, efficient, and easy to track and monitor. Also, with integrated HR and security systems, organizing, verifying, and providing proper employee access becomes a breeze.

Better analysis

Systems that cannot talk to each other ultimately create more manual work for employees and blind important stakeholders from information that may be critical at times. Without integrated systems, employees have to download different data sets from multiple tools and sources, compare and compile insights, and then draw inferences from the resulting analysis - a long and cumbersome process. 

Manual data entry always comes with a high chance for errors and, consequently, may cost your organization dearly. However, an integrated system pulls all the necessary data into one place, allowing a holistic view and freeing up time for other tasks. In addition, you can quickly build new tools into your integrated system as and when you see fit.

Real-time data

Transferring data between systems is a colossal task, particularly if you have large amounts of data. By the time the security system has the HR data, or vice versa, it will be out of date. Anything less than real-time data is unwieldy and inefficient in today's fast-paced world. 

Only in an integrated system will you get real-time data transfers to enable you to make smarter and more cost-effective business decisions. Also, this will help more departments than just security and HR. Everyone from management to Finance will benefit from real-time data and updates. 

Closing thoughts 

Integrating your security system with your HR software is an excellent way to streamline your employee management operations. In addition, it can save your business expenses and prevent avoidable mistakes.