Our team has always focused on an iterative, customer feedback-led product. What’s the point of building out a kickass tool if it doesn’t evolve with your needs?
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.