Slack is not only one of the most popular business communication tools in the world. It is also a solid base for building an enclosed ecosystem to manage multiple processes in the company. Leave management is one of the most interesting integrations to check out.
Leave management is a serious challenge for companies around the world. According to the DMEC study, even a small or medium-sized company is eager to hire a separate employee to handle leaves. The study indicates that only 14% of companies sized between 50 and 99 employees don’t have a separate specialist to deal with leave management. Also, 84% of companies of the same size decided to put from one to three employees in charge of managing the leaves only.
Mismanaging leaves can pose a surprisingly big threat to the company. It can be about violating employment law, burning out the staff, or encouraging them to leave their job. Nothing from this list can be considered a thing to overlook easily.
That’s why companies are so willing to entrust this process either to outsourced teams or a dedicated online leave tracker that provides the HR team with a good deal of automation. Calamari’s leave management module is a great example of this type of software and provides a lot of relief for leave management specialists.
But what Slack has to do with that?
Slack is currently one of the most popular business communication tools in the world. The app had over 12 million users in 2019 coming from over 750 thousand companies, either paying or these using a free version of the software.
The company reaches beyond being a simple chat app used on a daily basis. Its full potential can be unlocked by plugins and integrations that enable companies to either use external apps in and from Slack or can modify Slack itself.
When it comes to integrating the leave management with Slack, key features include:
Slack is a key means of communication used in companies that decided to adopt this technology. By that, it means that the user is spending a lot of time being logged do the app and constantly monitoring the flow of information. An average user is signed in for about 9 hours each day.
Using an automated slack vacation tracker bot to request leave using a familiar platform with no need to log in to the external tool is significant automation in daily work. And it comes with other automation and advantages.
The other side of the same coin - if the request has been submitted by Slack, the user gets notified via the same channel. If everything is all right, there is little to no need to notify the user about the status change. Otherwise, omitting the message in the always-flooded mailbox can result in a lack of acceptance and information chaos.
Last but not least, entwining the whole process in Slack results in high automation of the whole process, with swift forwarding the message to each party interested, be that an employee, a manager, or HR specialist. If necessary, the slack bot can do the dull work usually performed by the staff. For example it can automatically set slack “out of office” status.
But the features listed above deliver only slight information about the potential benefits for the company in the same way a good pillow shows only a blurry vision of the benefits of good sleep.
While a feature is an entrance to the benefit, it is not always perceived as the same. Also, one simple feature of automation can bring unexpected benefits, including a significant impact on whole company culture.
Slack is one of the crucial communication channels in modern companies and employees spend a lot of time there, as mentioned above. Bringing a whole process to this tool makes applying for a leave much easier - instead of printing the documents or forwarding countless emails, the employee needs only to submit the request via Slack channel and wait.
The same goes for a manager, who can easily manage the leave requests in the same tool he or she uses for daily communication. This allows not only to do all the works “right now”, with the first notification received but also mitigates the risk of forgetting to log in into a proper tool.
Also, with a high level of automation, the company saves a lot of time and effort in endless forwarding and bouncing emails with people responsible for accepting the leave.
Slack integration helps to build a daily attendance list. It is highly convenient for multiple reasons, starting from access to a particular employee to a COVID-related safety. The daily list collected by and accessible via Slack is yet another way to reduce the struggle in HR departments.
This is further boosted by the slack holiday calendar that can influence the attendance of particular or offshore employees.
This can be considered a less obvious one. Leave management software automatically changes the status of an employee by giving it the desired icon - be that sick leave, vacation, or another leave type. With employees having a clear situation regarding others being available or not, tensions in teams are less likely to occur.
Following the greater transparency and the general easing in the leave requests, the company gets a less obvious benefit - a better culture. In a company where taking a leave is something visible and done by everyone, there is little to no room for a vacation-shaming or other toxic practices related to taking a leave of absence.
Having a culture that is open to resting and taking a time off brings multiple benefits when it comes to managing the team - from fewer burnouts to a reduced turnover.
One of the key problems in the modern workplace is the flood of communication further boosted by bloated processes. Thus, companies shift from “there is an app for that” approach toward a more sophisticated “one app to rule them all”.
As the practice shows, Slack can be “One app” assuming a good set of integrations and plugins. And Calamari is undoubtedly the best way to track vacation in Slack.
If you wish to talk more about the benefits of integrating Slack with Calamari and how to manage leaves in a team using Slack, don’t hesitate to contact us now!
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