Employee management is a crucial part of an HR’s job but some of it is time-consuming. As an HR, a lot of your time is spent on managing your employees’ time, mundane tasks that take time away from other, more important aspects of managing your employees like culture building and performance management.

With AttendanceBot, our goal is to take away the mundane tasks from your plate and help you automate them. Time tracking, leave management, and shift planning and management are pillars of your employee’s work schedule. But, these are also 3 tasks on your plate that take the most time. 

With our bot, you can track employee time automatically, set up and monitor leave management system, and build shift schedules. Let’s dive into how these 3 functions are set up on AttendanceBot.

Further Reading: Our guide on employee scheduling gives you a step-by-step look into setting up employee schedules using AttendanceBot to increase efficiency and productivity.

3 Functions of AttendanceBot For Employee Management 

1. Time tracking

The one feature that all of our users love to enable for their team is the time tracking system. By using AttendanceBot for time tracking, HRs don’t have to worry about manually tracking the hours that their employees spend at work. They can automate time tracking to ensure accurate records of their employees’ working hours.

Importance of Time Tracking

Traditional time tracking methods usually involve a biometric scanner or a spreadsheet. These two systems have limitations that make it tough to keep your employee tracking error-free. 

With biometric scanners, your employees who have to travel for their job or work remotely have a hard time punching in and out of work. These scanners are also an expensive investment in your office space, which is not likely to be a permanent space.

Spreadsheets, on the other hand, are riddled with errors. They take up your time, having to manually enter every employees’ in and out hours. What’s more, it isn’t a scalable solution. As your team grows, you won’t be able to handle the number of employees you need to track.

The solution? An automated time tracking system that is employee dependent and tracks work hours without it needing any manual input.

Setting up Time Tracking

Once set up, AttendanceBot runs on its own, right within your work communication platform— Slack, Microsoft Teams or G Chat. You just need to instruct your employees on how to check-in and out when they start and end work so that the bot records their work hours.

The employee needs to send an “in” message within the AttendanceBot chat window on their communication platform when they start work. 

If they are stepping away for a break, they can send a message “be back in 15” and the bot will instantly record the downtime. If they send a message saying “lunch”, the bot records that the employee took an hour away from work for lunch.

Finally, when logging out, the employee just needs to send an “out” message within the bot’s chat window and their hours for the day will be logged.

Monitoring Time Tracking

As HR, you don’t need to do much once this well-oiled system is set in place. You can check in on a weekly basis to ensure employees are getting started with work in a timely manner. Employees who are starting work late can be easily identified through the bot’s time tracking dashboard. 

If your employees are paid by the time they put in at work, your time tracking dashboard will calculate the pay they will receive at the end of the month based on the hours they worked.

2. Leave management

Current systems for leave management aren’t built efficiently. For most HRs, leave management looks a lot like this:

An employee sends an email with details of their leave and addresses it to their manager and the HR. The manager replies back approving the leave. As HR, you have to process this leave request, just like the other leave requests from your large team of employees. You have to manually update your spreadsheet to note the number of leaves the employee has taken. 

Ideally, such tasks need to be automated so that you don’t have to spend time on it and can instead, focus on the more important things. 

Importance of Leave Policy and Management 

Every company needs a thorough leave policy that gives employees their leave benefits while ensuring that you see fewer defaulters. This policy needs to be implemented within your employee management system so that you don’t have to go back and check how many leaves an employee has taken. A good leave management system automatically records and tracks the number of leaves taken, creating transparency and recording leaves without errors.

A smart leave management system will calculate and track leaves so that you don’t have to worry about overpaying employees for unpaid leaves. Your leave management must be automatic. It should ideally run within your communication platform so that even your employees can access it. 

Setting up Employee Leaves 

Before you put your leave management within a software to run it for you, you need to first define your leave policy so that your employees are aware of the leaves they are entitled to. If you haven’t already, you can create a leave policy by following this blog.

On the AttendanceBot dashboard, you can specify the types of leaves allowed to your employees and the quota they have. Ensure that you cover all the different types of leaves that your employee would need. 

Monitoring and Tracking Leave 

Raising leave requests is easy with AttendanceBot. Your employee just needs to request leave for the specified dates and their supervisor receives a message asking for approval. Once approved, the leave is recorded on the leave dashboard. You receive a message notifying you about the leave, keeping you in the loop.

Your AttendanceBot dashboard will show you the leaves taken by all your employees. It will also note down unpaid leaves taken so that you can quickly subtract those leave days when sending your employees their salary.

3. Shift management 

Roles like customer support or computer operators need to be available to customers and users 24/7. For this, many companies employ shift workers to manage round-the-clock demand. But, this shift management system is often tracked in a lousy manner and sometimes, without any pre-planning. 

Importance of Shift Planning

Shift planning can help you predict future shift needs and be prepared for the surges in traffic etc. By planning your shifts, your employees will be better prepared for their shifts and be able to report on time for their shifts. 

A good shift planner can help you run your shift schedule smoothly and ensure transparency for your shift employees. 

Setting up Shift Schedules

You can plan shifts within the AttendanceBot dashboard using its drag-and-drop features. You can replicate specific shifts across multiple days and move around the blocks to plan shift schedules quickly. Once set up, you can share shift schedules with your shift workers and get final feedback on their availability to set in place a shift schedule that works.

We’ve got some hacks within our guide to shift management to help you plan your shifts better.

Monitoring and Managing Shift Workers

Once set up, the bot sends reminders on Slack to your shift workers when their shift is about to start. Your shift employees can also query the bot within the communication platform to get their future shift schedules. 

Any employees that don’t show up for their shifts can be reassigned quickly, right through Slack or your communication platform of choice. This way, you can stay in sync with your shift schedule without having to manually go check in with your shift employees.

Ready to Use AttendanceBot for Employee Management?

We hope this helped you set up employee time and leave management system that is time-efficient and error-free. Automating your smaller tasks can help you focus on bigger picture items and help your team grow faster.