Attendance management of a team has always been a challenge for HR. Just a few decades ago, it was easier to keep tabs on team member call-outs and attendance. But as IT has increasingly become an integral part of modern organizations, this is no longer the case. With different people working on other projects in various capacities and often from different locations, just keeping in touch with everyone can be a major human resource management challenge.
The Team
The people at TeamSense weren’t trying to tackle this problem directly when they first started developing their platform. In fact, human resource management wasn’t even on the table when TeamSense first launched. TeamSense founders Jeremy Wadsack, Sheila Stafford, and Alison Teegarden initially got together to create a simple text-based COVID symptom tracker. The idea was to make a free solution that was easy for everyday employees to use in order to help manage the Covid pandemic back in 2020. However, as the platform received funding and got noticed within the business community, the founders realized that this tool they created could be used for a lot more than just Covid symptom screening.
The Solution
Without realizing it, they had solved a problem that all the latest advancements in technology had failed to address. They hit a major pain point that was being overlooked and paralyzed a huge segment of the working population across several industries. The struggle? The limitation in communication between team members in HR in industries where computers, e-mail, and smartphones aren’t used by the employees often.
In an era where office workers can’t start their day without coffee and the internet, there are still hourly workers disconnected from the company because they don’t have a company email address—or rarely check it. However, one communication option these people still do use often is text. That is where the founders of TeamSense realized that their product could address this problem and change everything. All TeamSense needs is the text-based interface available on all kinds of phones. It can deliver the functionality that these employees and employers need to streamline their HR operations.
But it’s not just as simple as attendance management, here are even more benefits TeamSense provides:
Bringing Everyone Together
The first step to building organizational culture is good communication that links every member in the company with one another. TeamSense is all that is needed to do the simple things like reporting absences, sending out birthday wishes, work anniversary reminders, notifications, and sharing links and files through a secure web portal. Through the simple text-based interface, a lot of information can be shared and spread into every department of the organization. Even if management uses different platforms to communicate amongst themselves, like company email or an intranet, they can now use text when they want to reach out to every hourly worker at the company.
Centralizing Support
In larger organizations, there are both horizontal and vertical streams of communication that need to be managed. Having platforms that permeate all levels of the organization helps to centralize communication for the HR department.
It also gives the employees a better sense of membership when they know that they can use a system that will get the results regardless of whether their direct boss or colleague is temporarily unavailable. It is a 24/7 system that is always available and constantly serves as the backbone of communication in the organization. Rather than waiting for other people to be present for a query to be addressed, employees can take the matter into their own hands and proactively find a solution through the ever-available interface.
Team member Development
In the open structure that modern businesses employ, it is the employees’ job to find answers to what they need and even find opportunities for themselves within the company. Such a self-service platform can serve as the ideal framework for companies to publish available positions and for employees to apply to them.
The tool can be taken a step further with live updates on the application status for both the team member and the employer. Moreover, it can be used for team member development by launching team member training, development courses, information about seminars, workshops, or any other kind of professional growth-related matter. Since it is a live system, neither the employer nor the team member needs to wait on an intermediary such as a human HR professional to manage this flow of communication. It can be done anytime, from anywhere.
Workflow Process Visibility
Another big factor in creating solid relationships and a strong culture is transparency. Transparency in all forms is possible. This kind of self-service system gives the power to the end-user to take action rather than placing them behind a veil of management.
If a team member wants to take a day off for PTO or sick leave, they can make the changes in the system themselves, update their record, post their reason, and get the time they need. Their manager will then receive the notification that the team member is requesting vacation time or will be out sick for the day. This kind of text-in attendance management system keeps open communication between the team member and their supervisor.
This absence management tool from TeamSense gives your team members control, which reduces operational costs and increases efficiency. There are countless tasks in day-to-day operations that can benefit from this novel approach to communication. Team members will appreciate this level of access while making things much less difficult for the employer and HR department.