Harness the power of employee management software to motivate, manage and retain your staff.

Jennifer Walzer of Backup My Info! a company that sells hosted backup services to businesses, always tells me that her number-one concern is her employees. She says her employees’ number-one focus is Backup My Info customers. This is powerful. Unfortunately, many business owners don’t follow Walzer’s lead of pouring their primary energy into employees. If you have great employees who feel empowered, challenged, loved and happy, they’ll take care of your business and work to ensure your customers are taken care of.

A few weeks ago I sat down with Paul Albright, general manager, SMB and CMO for Success Factors, a company that sells HR and employee management software. Paul helped me understand the power of technology in managing and building a motivated and dedicated team of employees.

There are many components to building the right pool of talent. Much of it does not involve technology. However, technology can surely aid in retaining employees.

For instance, consider performance reviews. If your performance reviews are scattered in a variety of paper files, even if they are in nice and neat folders, you can’t get a transparent and global view of your employees the way you could if this data was systematized.

As your company grows from five to 50 employees, or from 50 to 100 employees, you’ll need a tool that can help you keep up with growth and manage employee performance.

Using technology to help you manage your employees means that good employees rise to the top and are clearly visible–you know who to promote. It also means employees who are not so good also become clearly visible, so you know who needs more training, needs to be reassigned or needs to be let go.

Project management software tools ensure each project is on time, profitable and aligned with your business goals. Employees are no different. You need to ensure that your goals and vision for the future are aligned with your hiring policies.

Part of ensuring that great employees are acknowledged and rewarded is giving employees (and others) the ability to praise or acknowledge other employees. An employee management tool makes this not only possible, but also easy to do. Imagine any employee being able to tell management what a great (or not so great) job a colleague has done.

According to Success Factors, performance and talent management software provides a holistic approach to maximizing your company's potential by helping your employees realize theirs. It encompasses a set of technological solutions and processes that help you:

• Identify your talent needs, your best applicants and your star players.
• Align employees' goals with the organization's goals.
• Evaluate performance, coach people to improve over time, and reward excellence.
• Eliminate favoritism and politics from the compensation process, increasing employees' commitment and engagement.
• Build motivation by giving employees responsibilities and challenges that spur them to higher levels of performance.
• Link succession planning with career planning and create a shared vision of an exciting future with your employees.

Some employee management software programs to consider are those from Halogen Software (halogensoftware.com), iEmployee.com, Softscape (softscape.com) and Success Factors (successfactors.com). Take the time to think about your needs and what you are seeking in an employee management tool. Then carefully assess what each software tool can do for you. The right performance and talent management program can help your business outperform the competition.

Ramon Ray is editor and technology evangelist for Smallbiztechnology.com.