Modern way of managing leaves and attendance for Higher Education, Universities, and schools

Holidays are a time to take a break from teaching and modernize how the administration works to enter the following year with more efficient solutions. Moving with the times, schools and universities more often decide to implement modern software for employee time tracking and leave management. Check how much your educational institution can gain from such a solution.

Organized HR processes and a quick flow of information about them are the basis for being able to react quickly. They make it easier to find a replacement for an absent teacher or lecturer and to plan work. Employees in different departments need to stay up-to-date on each other's accessibility in order to work efficiently.

Thanks to the program for leave and attendance management, you can easily speed up these processes and ensure the flow of information on the availability of employees. All this translates into better organization and productivity.

In this article:

• you will learn the advantages of using the tool to record working time and leaves,
• you will learn about Calamari functionalities that will improve the quality of HR management in your educational institution,
• you will see the advantages of integrating the leave and working time management tool with those you use in your daily work.

How can time tracking and leave management software can help you?

Knowing which functionalities play the most important role in HR management in educational institutions, we have prepared a selection of the most interesting solutions to improve the working time and leave management at schools and universities.

Multi-stage leave requests acceptance processes

One of the main advantages of the leave management tool for educational institutions is the multi-stage acceptance processes and the possibility of providing a substitute in the application, thanks to which all persons responsible for accepting the application have a complete set of information necessary to make a decision.

In Calamari, you can, among other things:

• create multi-stage approval processes assigned to groups or individual employees,
• report your substitute,
• add a file to the request for leave,
• provide the reason for reporting the time-off,
• view the limit of days off when submitting the application,
• check persons absent at the same time when considering the application,
• send notifications regarding the acceptance of the application through various channels,
• enable auto-acceptance of applications.

Modern employee time tracking

Daily recording of worked hours by one of the seven methods provided by Calamari is another advantage of this software. It allows you to register exact hours and shows them in a clear report, automatically calculating the hours worked. This is not only convenient for employees recording their time but also for the HR department that prepares time-recording reports.

Calamari work time registration allows you to:

• register the beginning and the end of work,
• record breaks,
• record time worked on projects,
• create your break types and assign them to selected employees,
• receive notifications about the upcoming start or end of the work,
• check the worked hours,
• calculate the worked time,
• register irregularities during work (lateness, too short/long work),
• register working time using one of 7 ways: web application, mobile application, Slack, MS Teams, using QR codes, using iBeacon technology, via API,
• generate automatic work time reports.

Flexible working time

Hourly schedules of educational institutions employees can be very different. In addition to the administration or the HR department, which works at fixed hours, lecturers and teachers can work at different times on different days, which is why the possibility of setting flexible working hours becomes extremely useful. Thanks to setting different hourly grids depending on the employee, all data on worked hours in relation to the hours' grid can be seen in automatically generated reports, which greatly facilitates the work of the HR department.

It's also a convenience for employees, each of whom has a defined work plan according to the type of their contract and the nature of their duties. Employees can check their working time and control the hours worked conveniently from the web or mobile application.

At Calamari, flexible working time allows you to:

• choose one of 4 work models: standard, flexible, hourly or none,
• specify the working days of each work plan,
• depending on the selected model, it is possible to specify the start and end times of work,
• assign the number of hours to be worked for each working day,
• assign employees to their respective work schedules,
• create an unlimited amount of work plans.

Different leave type and remote work

In addition to setting your own breaks, Calamari allows you to create any number of leave types, including remote work, so all types of work exits, meetings outside the facility, guest appearances or sabbaticals can be conveniently recorded and automatically reported via the app. Thanks to the leave calendar view, employees can see when they are available when they are away, and when they work from a different location.

In Calamari you can:

• create an unlimited number of leave types,
• record remote work,
• settle leaves in hours or days,
• assign types of leave to selected employees,
• check your time-off limits,
• create leave types in different languages.

Calamari integrations that will improve your HR processes

Nowoczesna instytucja edukacyjna powinna być dobrze obeznana z nowymi technologiami. A modern educational institution should be well-versed in new technologies. New tools allow you to create more engaging teaching aids and conduct more interesting lessons and lectures. Online communication significantly speeds up the transfer of information and allows you to communicate in a more convenient way, and checking your e-mail has become a daily routine.

With so many tools, it's worth paying attention to making them work together through integrations. Calamari helps companies and educational organizations from 106 countries on a daily basis, thanks to which we know perfectly well how important a well-integrated tech stack is for the efficiency of an organization.

Microsoft 365 integration

Among the most important integrations, there was the one with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, which are most often used by educational organizations.

Through MS 365 and MS Teams, you can:

• record working time in Calamari,
• check the availability of your days off,
• check your scheduled leaves,
• check planned leaves of other employees,
• report absence (coming soon!).

Do you want to learn more about MS Teams integration possibilities? Read our article!

If the institution buys Calamari, it will be able to use the application's capabilities directly from Microsoft 365, MS Teams and MS Outlook. Thanks to this, you don't have to be distracted from work to perform an action in the application. In this way, employees can be more efficient.

It also saves time switching between programs to do something in them. In a situation where someone writes a message on MS Teams with a request, for example, to take a replacement for someone who is absent, that person can check their availability from the messenger level without leaving the website and respond instantly.

All actions performed in Calamari from the communicator level are automatically registered in Calamari app and immediately become visible to all authorized persons.

Google Integration

Google is another extremely popular environment often used by educational institutions, which is why it was among the popular Calamari integrations.

Thanks to this integration, it's possible to log in to Calamari using a Google account, thanks to which you don't have to remember all the passwords and logging in becomes faster. When an action is taken on a leave application (its acceptance, rejection or change), employees will receive an e-mail containing information about this action.

All leaves reported in Calamari thanks to the integration appear in the Google calendar. It's an extremely convenient solution that makes it easier to plan time based on your calendar schedule and the availability of other employees. The calendar view can also be shared with interested people, which becomes helpful when arranging meetings with people from outside the institution or with students as a work promoter for consultation.

At the end

if you want your institution to operate efficiently and be well connected, choose the Calamari employee time tracking and leave management software. If you decide to use the solution now, you can use it completely free of charge until the end of the vacation! Don't wait and introduce Calamari to your business today!.