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Taking Time off on Slack

Problem Alignment
Core Problem Statement
Is this problem worth solving? What are its impacts?
Company Values (Assumption)
Constraints
User Personas
Behavior and concerns of users and relevant pain points:
Goals
Non-Goals
Prioritization for MVP
What solutions in the market do companies use today?
Solution Alignment
Solution (How it will work on Slack?)
Flowchart to implement the solution on Slack
Sample mock ups
Email to prospective users
FAQs

Problem Alignment
Core Problem Statement

🏁 Build a Slack application to make it easy for employees to apply for days off
and for their managers to approve them.

Is this problem worth solving? What are its impacts?

Employee takes a leave without intimation. Dependencies on him/ her are blocked
which may have low to high impact based on the work and responsibilities of the

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 person.

Employee forgets that they have no leave left and takes it without intimation. It will
directly impact their salary.

Frequently forgetting to ask for leaves and approval of them may create thoughts
and feelings of non-transparency and irresponsibility which may further impact good
team spirit and collaboration.

Considering the above mentioned impacts, this problem can have solutions that can
help mitigate the risks of such impacts.

Company Values (Assumption)

Time

Peace

Trust

Constraints
Business: No budget constraints

Technical: Use a slack app for solutioning

User: Time constraints from the users’ perspective

User Personas
Assuming that all employees of a company can be divided into various teams and then
within a team there will be two categories:

1. Reporting Manager (RM)

a. He/ She manages a team.

2. Team members (TM)

a. They are managed by their respective RM.

e.g. A team of 11 members will have 1 RM and 10 TMs.

Edge Cases:

1. There can be a TM who is RM of another smaller team.

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 2. There could be two or more RMs of a team in case of co-founders.

Behavior and concerns of users and relevant pain

points:
Employees of many companies have a limited number of paid days off (leaves) that
they can avail of every year. Employees may have lack of knowledge of leaves and type
of leaves remaining.

A. How many paid days off are left for me?

Employees forget to request for a day off and take a leave.

B. How do I remember not to forget to apply for a leave?

Employee has requested for day off but the reporting manager hasn’t approved it yet. If
they don’t approve on time, then the employee might lose one day’s privilege leave
instead of casual leave or some similar situation.

C. How does the system help the RM to remind leave approvals of their team?

D. If RM is not available or is on leave themselves, how does the system get the
approval for the employee’s leave?

Sometimes due to some reason, the employee is not on time but is willing to join late
after an hour or so, his RM and team might assume that they are on leave.

E. What does the system do when the employee is late?

Sometimes employees might just need a long break are might need to look for
upcoming holidays instead of taking leaves.

F. When are the next upcoming holidays?

Edge Cases:

Employee might want to request for leave from his upper management and approve
leave of his team member

G. How will the system incorporate both upper and lower teams?

There could be two or more RMs of a team in case of co-founders.

H. How will the system incorporate more than one RM of a team?

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 Goals
Awareness and Acquisition - The goal here is to spread awareness about the new
process.

Activation and user satisfaction - The goal here is to help the users to complete the
new process fast and easily.

Non-Goals
User Engagement - Our goal is not to increase the time spent by employees on
attendance apps or systems.

Prioritization for MVP

The letters used in the graph below are the pain point numbers listed in the respective
section above.

As displayed by the above Impact vs Satisfaction graph, the pain-points numbered

A,B,C,F, and G look high impact and high satisfaction for the users. Hence for MVP
solving them first makes sense.

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 What solutions in the market do companies use today?
Keka (Source)

Uses attendance regularization if the employee started their shift on time but
forgot to punch in.

Has a monthly fixed date on which all attendance regularisation and leaves
requests must be approved for correct salary disbursement and next month’s
availability of leaves.

Facto HR (Source)

Uses attendance regularization if the employee started their shift on time but
forgot to punch in.

Uses facial recognition for punch-in and punch-out.

Uses features like geo-tagging and geo-fencing

Uses multiple time zone support for incorporation employees from different time
zones.

Qandle (Source)

Uses chatbots to apply for leaves.

Uses mobile in-app push notifications to request for leave approvals and
rejections.

Qandle claims to integrate seamlessly with Slack. (Bonus)

Uses mobile in-app push notifications to remind user to punch-in or apply for
leave in case they forgot.

Uses auto check-in when the user enters office premises. (Need to schedule a
demo to see how they achieve it.)

HROne (Source)

Leaves can be marked and approved from mobile, WhatsApp or Desktop

Accommodates features like geo-tagging and geo-fencing

Product Value Template as per initial research

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 Keka Facto HR Qandle HROne

Must Have
Features

A. Knowledge of
Yes Yes Yes Yes
paid days off left

B. Reminder of
punch in or leave No No Yes No
application

C. Reminder to
approve/ reject No No Yes No
leave

F. Knowledge of
next upcoming Yes Yes Yes Yes
holidays

G. System
incorporates both
Yes Yes Yes Yes
upper and lower
teams

Integrates with
Yes No Yes No
Slack?

Performance
benefits

Ease of leave High (Uses

Medium Medium Medium
application chatbots)

Ease of leave High (Uses

Medium Medium Medium
approval chatbots)

Company Culture
and Value
Alignment

Feels
Low High Low Low
Micromanaging?

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 Solution Alignment
Solution (How it will work on Slack?)
Note: Using a chatbot for leave application and approvals is the most easy solution
particularly to our problem statement available in the market. (offered by Qandle)

User Flow (Employee)

1. Employee wants to request time off

2. Employee goes to Attendance Bot on Slack app

3. Employee asks for 'Leave' or a similar command

4. Chatbot confirms leave specific details

5. Employee replies with Yes or No

6. Chatbot confirms the leave

When Employee forgets to apply for leave or punch in on time on a workday and
30 mins have past since the work time started:

1. Chatbot sends a slack message to the employee asking “Hi Amit, you haven’t yet
punched in today. Are you on leave?”

2. Employee views the push notification sent by Slack and replies on it or opens the
chat and replies there.

3. Employee asks for a leave or does a punch-in via the chatbot feature.

User Flow (Reporting Manager)

1. Leave request needs approval from RM

2. As soon as the employee confirms the leave request

3. A slack message from Attendance bot is sent on the RM's desktop app and mobile
app

4. The RM can view the leave request and reason

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 5. RM can approve or reject the leave request in the notification itself or go to the chat
to do so

Flow (Chatbot system)

1. The chatbot receives a request for leave application

2. Chatbots needs two variables to ask for leave confirmation

a. Leave Date (Chatbot provides a calendar to choose date from)

b. Leave Duration (Chatbot asks First Half/ Second Half/ Full Day)

3. Chatbot gets both the variables from the employee and asks for confirmation

4. Chatbot receives the confirmation from the employee and applies for the leave

5. Chatbot sends slack message to the RM of the employee for leave approval

6. Chatbot receives an approval or rejection from the RM

7. Chatbot notifies both the employee and the RM regarding final decision.

Flowchart to implement the solution on Slack

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Taking Time off on Slack 9
 Sample mock ups

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 Email to prospective users
Hello Fyle team,

Greetings of the day!

We are very excited to launch our new solution for all employees to apply for day offs/
leaves and get them approved fast.

What's new?

We have added an Attendance chatbot to our Slack.

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 Employees can know available leaves, past leaves taken, and request for leaves for
future using a simple dialogue with the chatbot.

Slack messages and push notifications will be sent as a reminder to the employees
if they forget to apply for leaves or punch-in on time.

Slack messages and push notifications will be sent to the respective relationship
managers (RMs) when any of their team members apply for leave.

This solution shall mitigate the following problems:

1. If the employee forgets to apply for a leave on time.

2. If the RM forgets to approve the leave request on time.

Please find the link to the SOP and FAQs for the new process to getting started quickly.

Kindly contact me on this email address for further assistance.

FAQs
1. How do I get started?

a. Simply download the Slack app in your work laptops and mobile phones if not
already

b. Login with org credentials

c. Along with other employees of the company, you will also see a “Attendance
bot” in your connection list. Kindly approve its connection request.

2. How do I command the chatbot?

a. Simply ask the chatbot something like “Apply leave” or “I want to apply for leave
for first half tomorrow” or simply “Leave”. The chatbot is smart enough to
understand similar requests.

b. You can also select one of the options given by the chatbot if that suits you.

3. How do I approve leave request?

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 a. You as the RM will receive a Slack message from the Attendance bot whenever
any of your team members request for a leave.

b. You can type “Approve” or “Reject” to approve/ reject the leave request based
on the reasons mentioned by the employee or your mood :)

4. What if the chatbot doesn’t respond?

a. Quick fix:

i. Please check your internet connection

ii. Close and reopen the Slack app

iii. Uninstall and Reinstall the Slack app

b. Deep fix for bugs: Kindly contact the customer support at

[email protected] and send a screenshot of the issue.

5. How can I cancel a leave request?

a. Simply type “Cancel” to get out of the ongoing leave request procedure with the
Chatbot or to cancel previously requested and approved leave requests.

b. Note: Leave requests of days that have passed cannot be cancelled via
chatbot. Kindly contact your RM for the same.

Thank You!

References

https://www.keka.com/attendance-management-system

https://factohr.com/attendance-management-system/

https://www.qandle.com/hrms-best-hr-software.html

https://hrone.cloud/attendance-management-system/

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