Remote work has become the norm across industries. A report by Upwork shows that 73% of all companies will have remote working teams by 2028 — driven by measurable improvements in employee retention, team diversity, and operational costs.
But managing a remote team requires different tools than managing an office. Traditional ways of tracking work hours, approving leave, and planning shifts don’t transfer cleanly to distributed teams across time zones.
AttendanceBot automates daily time tracking, leave management, and shift planning inside Slack and Microsoft Teams — so your team management infrastructure works regardless of where people are working.
This guide walks through how to set up AttendanceBot as a complete management system for your remote team.
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.
How do you use AttendanceBot for remote working teams?
AttendanceBot helps remote teams manage time tracking, leave, and shift scheduling entirely inside Slack or Microsoft Teams. Employees check in and out with a simple chat message – in or out – and the bot records hours automatically, routes leave requests to managers for one-click approval, syncs approved leave to calendars, and generates payroll-ready timesheet exports. No separate portal, no manual spreadsheet, no chasing approvals across email threads.
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:
- Employee requests leave for specific dates within Slack
- The smart bot sends a chat message to the assigned manager
- The manager approves the leave by clicking on the automated button replies
- The employee receives a message within the Slack chat with approval
- The HR receives an info message about the leave days
- 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.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can AttendanceBot Be Used for Remote Teams?
Yes — AttendanceBot is specifically designed for remote and distributed teams. It runs natively inside Slack and Microsoft Teams, so employees in different locations and time zones can check in, request leave, and manage availability through the same chat interface they use for everything else. Managers get real-time visibility into who’s working, who’s on leave, and who’s scheduled next without requiring anyone to log into a separate system.
Does AttendanceBot Work in Microsoft Teams as Well as Slack?
Yes. AttendanceBot works identically in both Slack and Microsoft Teams. The same commands — in, out, break for X mins, leave requests — work in both environments. If your remote team has migrated from Slack to Teams, or uses both, AttendanceBot covers both without any additional configuration. Our Microsoft Teams time tracking guide covers the Teams-specific setup in detail.
How Does AttendanceBot Handle Leave Management for Remote Teams?
Leave requests, approvals, and balances all happen inside Slack or Teams — no email chains or separate HR portal. Employees request leave in chat, managers approve with one click, and the leave is automatically recorded in the dashboard and synced to the employee’s calendar. Leave types, accrual rules, and balance limits are configurable from the settings panel. Our leave management guide covers how to set up policies before configuring the bot.
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?
