With that in mind, it’s time to let you in on a little secret. You have already inspired a few of our best feature iterations and we want to take this time to walk you through our latest.

Custom Leave & Hybrid Status Emojis

Yes, we heard a whole lot about how daily leave and work updates weren’t always enough for employees to keep track of who’s on leave and who’s working from home. 

That’s why we’ve made our leave and office status integration seamless with Slack. Now when an employee applies for any leave type or a WFH, their Slack status is automatically updated for those days with an emoji of your choice. 

The process is simple: 

• Go to Settings > Basic Settings > Available Leave Types 
• Click the Pencil Icon to edit the Leave Type 
• From there, it’s a simple matter of typing in your emoji, here is a simple cheat sheet that can help
  
  

Just to get you started, we include defaults: 

• :sneezing_face: for Sick Leaves 
• :palm_tree: for Vacations 
• :working-in-office: for Working from the Office

Now every time an employee looks up another to drop a message, they’ll be able to hover on their status to see where they are. 

Custom Birthday and Workaversary Announcements

With a rapidly changing workscape, it makes sense to celebrate even small wins, including employee workaversaries and birthdays. 

In its previous form, AttendanceBot allowed HR to queue celebratory messages that were formatted by us at HQ. But now, AttendanceBot allows you to create custom birthday and workaversary announcements to make your company communications consistent with your culture. 

Once again, the process is straightforward: 

• Go to Notifications 
• Click the pencil icon to edit any Birthday/Workaversary announcement
• Scroll down to Point 5, where you can add custom text in addition to our regularly scheduled Birthday/Workaversary announcement

Enhanced Slack-native Project Management 

As a SaaS business, project management has always been one of our passion projects. But now we’ve really got the time to stretch our legs and take a leap to make our Slack-native project tracking more robust. 

What have we changed? 

Mapping Projects to Clients

We know that a lot of our customers use project management for billable hours and projects that may need to be mapped to clients. Keeping this in mind, we’ve added more project-level settings to allow admins to map projects to specific clients and employees. 

We believe that doing so gives customers better summaries and employees a more streamlined project selection process. After all, having a powerful project management tool isn’t enough – it’s got to be easy to use. 

Introduction of Nested Projects 

We understand that sub-projects allow you to capture task-level work and map out entire project-scapes with ease. With the introduction of nested projects, we aim to solve the issue of too many small projects. 

Admins will be able to create and assign sub-projects within the Sub-Projects section of Project Settings. Employees can then track time against each sub-project that will be mapped to the larger project, and optionally the client. 

Self-Selection of Open Projects 

We’ve added a self-assign setting to projects, allowing employees to assign themselves the project and/or sub-projects. Using this setting employees can use AttendanceBot as a personal time management tool and create their own workstreams to measure productivity. You can also give employees more flexibility to choose their own projects per pre-defined conditions. 

Ramped up Project Reports 

We’ve always had a robust analytics dashboard for project management where you can view project and employee-wise breakdowns. But now, in addition to all of that, we also allow you to access dedicated project report downloads that include totals for wages & client billables.

More Slack Options for Shift Management

Shift management is something that businesses continue dedicating mountains of manhours to optimize. Although we’re proud of our solution, we see no reason to stop improving. In the past few months, we’ve introduced: 

• Robust alert options for any and all shift activity so you’re never blindsided. For instance, we can send channel notifications every time someone picks up a specific type of shift when overtime is assigned, or any time a shift is self-assigned or re-assigned. 
• Are you scared your open shifts won’t be picked up and you’ll be left scrambling to find a fill? You’re not the only one. After a lot of feedback, we’re introducing shifts that can be opened for a single day. So your employees can sign up for a single open shift on Slack.
• Add comments to shifts to provide special instructions for employees or additional insight into reporting.
• Sort your daily or weekly shifts by start time for quick browsing.
• Missed shift report. Time is money and people turning up late or leaving early can be a slow drain on resources. With that in mind, we now offer dedicated reporting for missed shifts, late shifts, and early sign-offs.

Beta Version of our new Harmonize software 

Nothing is more exciting than something exclusive. Our beta version of Harmonize is now available on request. If you’re interested in replacing the magic of AttendanceBot chat with one-click buttons in Slack, reach out to us at hi@harmonizehq.com to test it out for yourself and experience the magic. 

Reach out to us at hi@harmonizehq.com if you have any suggestions or if you just think Dwight is right.

The post What’s New in AttendanceBot? The Mid 2022 Edition appeared first on AttendanceBot Blog.

Remote working is proving to improve employee retention, reduce costs for companies, increase team diversity, and lower stress levels. But, when compared to in-office processes, remote teams still need to figure out the smaller team management system.

We want to help you with your biggest challenge when managing a remote working team— employee time tracking. When working remotely, your traditional ways of tracking employee active hours and leaves just don’t fit. You need an automated tool that does the time tracking for you.

Using AttendanceBot, you can automate daily time tracking, leave management, and shift planning, ensuring management happens despite the remote culture.

In this guide, we want to help you set up AttendanceBot as a well-rounded management system for your employee attendance.

Further Reading: Grab every kind of help you need with our complete guide to remote working.

Top 5 Steps for Using AttendanceBot as a Time Tracking Software for Remote Teams

1. Set up check-in and check-out routines among employees

The most simple but powerful way to use AttendanceBot is its daily time-tracking feature. Set up a routine for employees to check in when they come into work and check out when they leave. By just sending “in” and “out” to the AttendanceBot chat, the time spent at work is instantly recorded.

Employees can even send a quick message to the bot when they step out for a break or for lunch. The bot records these active hours within its robust dashboard, allowing managers and HRs to quickly look at work hours for any employee.

Managers can filter the time tracking dashboard by month, department, city, and more, and even set up auto-generate reports on a monthly basis.

This easy system for time tracking makes any other system for recording employee work hours obsolete. You’ll be spending less time tallying and figuring out whether an employee is short of work hours. Track employee time passively and only step in when it’s required.

If your team has the option of working remotely, the bot also allows you to check in as “Working from home”. Encourage employees to use these common phrases to allow you to understand remote working trends in your hybrid team.

2. Create a Slack channel for transparency about work hours

While an automated time tracking tool does capture employee work hours efficiently, you also need a system to give transparency about active hours within the team. Since you will have two employees in different time zones working together, you want to make it easier for them to plan their meetings.

As a rule of thumb, ask employees to announce their official work hours from the start. While some changes in their hours might be inevitable, a fixed schedule can help everyone plan meetings quickly. Having official work hours will also be helpful to set a routine and help employees stay more accountable.

If your team is semi-remote or has the option of working remotely, ensure employees message the shared schedule channel when they are working from home.

Also read: 10 ways to make your Slack channels more effective

3. Make leave management seamless

With AttendanceBot, keep your leave requests out of your inbox! You might find your traditional leave management a hassle with multiple emails going between three or four different parties. With AttendanceBot, here’s what leave management looks like:

1. Employee requests leave for specific dates within Slack
2. The smart bot sends a chat message to the assigned manager
3. The manager approves the leave by clicking on the automated button replies
4. The employee receives a message within the Slack chat with approval
5. The HR receives an info message about the leave days
6. The leave days are recorded in the AttendanceBot dashboard for easy access

With much of your leave management automated, you don’t have to keep track of your emails and update a spreadsheet. Set up leave management on this smart bot, assign managers accordingly, and let the bot handle it for you.

To ensure employees don’t overuse their leave days, you can set up types of leaves that your company allows and set the maximum limit for leaves within the bot. This way, employees can view their remaining leave days without having to reach out to you.

The bot also syncs the leave information with the employee’s calendar so that anyone trying to schedule meetings with them is informed of their days out of office. What’s more, you can set vacation autoresponders directly from your Slack.

Want to view the absence history for all your employees? The AttendanceBot dashboard logs accurate information about absences taken, types of absences and even lets you filter the data by department, city, etc for nuanced reports.

Also read: Your guide to creating and managing a leave policy for the millennial workforce

4. Simplify shift management

Shift planning or employee scheduling has always been a time-consuming job. But, with more shift workers dominating the workforce, it’s important that companies have a smooth system for shift planning and management.

Use the visual shift planner within AttendanceBot to plan shifts on a weekly or monthly basis, setting up recurrent shifts as you see fit. The shift planner smartly reminds shift workers of their upcoming shifts, keeps track of no-shows, and records this data for easy access.

Once your shift calendar is set, you don’t have to worry about the hassle of reassigning shifts. The smart bot shows you who can be reassigned to an open shift, making it easy to manage the multiple shift workers.

You can use the dashboard to understand how many hours each shift employee was working and generate accurate payroll reports without needing to tally the hours yourself.

What do you like best about AttendanceBot?

We use Attendance bot for both our in-house and remote teams so the shifts and tasks can be easily shared and scheduled. We also monitor the attendance and holidays scheduling and tracking with this tool. Our team managers really enjoyed how simple and user-friendly the system is when starting to work with it.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Scheduling and schedule sharing among teams, holidays scheduling and tracking. Analysing and tracking when and how much are our employees working from home or remotely.

– Sam S working in Computer & Network Security 

How can AttendanceBot help your remote team?
Find out by scheduling a demo today.

5. Put all your office FAQs in a help library

Smart time tracking for your remote working team is not just about monitoring time. It also involves ensuring no one has to spend time sweating on the small stuff. As a remote team, waiting for responses from co-workers or HR can be endless. It could be about where a document is stored or how many leave days are available annually. It just isn’t efficient!

What’s more, if employees stay in different parts of the world, time zone differences can keep you waiting for a response for hours.

This is where OfficeAmp can help. Set up an FAQ library that everyone in the team can access answers to common questions.

From leave days to reimbursement processes to file storage. Make sure employees don’t have to search for too long to find what they are looking for. If an answer isn’t in the library, employees can easily raise a ticket to solve the issue. These tickets can be created, managed, and cleared right within Slack, no other app required!

With such a help library, there’s less back and forth on the smaller things and more time spent discussing work.

We hope these 5 steps help you set up AttendanceBot for your remote working team. What time tracking tips do you use to manage your team online?

The post Guide to Using AttendanceBot for Remote Working Teams appeared first on AttendanceBot Blog.