Tracking vacation time is a tricky business for many companies – every year employees are given an allotment to use, but in reality they don’t actually earn them until they have completed the year. Many companies let employees use this time before it’s earned, but not all. Every year their balances reset and some employees have the option to carry-forward a small balance, but others don’t. For some companies, it’s important that they know their balances at all times, for other companies they would rather hide the balances and just show their employees how much they have used. Either way, it seemed like our simple tools were doing many things incorrectly. Let’s start off with some of our design mistakes (and yes, these were all identified out by clients):

Mistake #1: Showing “Earned” Time as “Available” Time
On the TribeHR overview page, you can see how many vacation days you have available. When we first built the system, we thought it important to help employees understand that they need to “earn” their time – to do this, we’d show them how much they had actually accrued. This was great for some companies, but it was confusing for many users. Even those users that understood the idea, still preferred to know how much they would earn, so they could schedule their vacations accordingly.

Mistake #2: Accrual & Carry-Over
From early-on, we included tools to account for accrued time off. For example, you could specify that an employee would earn 15 days (3 weeks) vacation over a year, and each month TribeHR would deposit 1/12th of that amount into their vacation “account”. This was great for tracking your potential vacation-pay liability, but proved to be awkward for employees and managers. We heard questions like “What does it mean to have earned 0.417 sick days this month – don’t I get 5 this year?” We needed a way to address this issue.

Mistake #3: Forgetting That the Web is Automagical
Finally, we forgot that with the power of web programming, we can challenge the habits that people develop. For example, most companies shift their employees onto a common vacation calendar, to make it easier to administer. We built our systems with that assumption, completely forgetting that since we’re doing the math anyway, it didn’t make a difference if an employee started on January 1st or July 13th.

As for our solutions, here are some of the changes that we recently rolled out:

“Available” vs. “Earned” Time:
For employees we now always show them the time they can use this year, whereas for the HR Managers we show both totals (the employee’s understood available time, but also how much has really been earned). This adds information for the Administrators, but eliminated several issues for employees.

New Automatic Accrual Options
We’ve added new options to the time-off types, allowing administrators to specify a Monthly Accrual cycle (this is the same as our previous calculations – earn 1/12th of the annual amount each month), Annual Accrual (earn it all once per year) or No Accrual – which only tracks the time used (it doesn’t automatically allocate any “available” time). These three mechanisms suddenly make differentiating between Vacation and Sick time much more logical, and also make possible open-ended types of time off like “Absent”, “Professional Development”, or “Injured”.

Anniversary-Based Reset
Previously, Administrators could specify which month would be their reset month (e.g. beginning of the calendar year, Sept 1, or maybe their corporate year-end), but we now have the option of calculating vacation as of the employee’s anniversary date. For example, if an employee started on July 13th, they’ll reset the following year on July 13th, and they’ll earn any monthly accruals on the 13th of each month.

So in summary, we were a little off-the-mark with our original time tracking tools, but our recent updates have helped us make large strides in the right direction. We’re lucky to have customers that take the time to share their challenges with us, and we hope changes like these help improve not just their TribeHR experience, but also their own companies’ processes!

New “My Profile” Tab

Some of our community members have been asking for a better way to group their actions and information together. Previously, you could view your employee file through the “People” tab, you could set your profile picture through the “My Preferences” link in the header, and you could request time off from the “Overview” page. This update includes the hot new “My Profile” tab that pulls together your employee file, messages, time off, profile picture and our exciting new Goals page!

The old links are still there, just consider this one more way to make your HR experience easy!

New “Goals” Page

For those of you that either really like setting goals or really wish your team was more pro-active in setting goals, this feature’s for you. Introducing our new Goals page! This new page (click on “My Profile” then “Goals” to get there) gives you a complete picture of you and your colleagues’ goals landscape. Here’s a screenshot of the page in action, along with some highlights:

1. Quickly get to your goals through the “My Profile” tab
2. See a snapshot of the goals your Supervisor, Co-Workers and Subordinates have shared with you
3. Add new goals and choose who you share them with
4. Review all your past goals – both new and completed goals

With this new page, you can more easily set goals that you control, and that support your co-workers. This works well if your goal-setting activities are part of a regular review cycle, or if you want to set new goals as the year progresses.

As you can see, we’re working hard to make Human Resources more friendly – if you have any thoughts on our new Goals page, or on any other features we’re working on, let us know by posting a comment!

Favorite Features

• Employee evaluations: as the company grows it wants to ensure it has a process that is measurable but simple for each employee and manager so that they can develop the talent within the organization. Employees feel the process doesn’t change the small business culture and that it is fair and open.
• Vacation calendar: With more employees it is much hard to track vacation usage and coverage. The calendar feature and approval workflow makes it easy for employees and managers. Sick days and other types of days off work can be tracked as well.
• The dashboard: When employees log in they get an overview of what is going in the company and what may need their attention. With a quick list of what needs their attention the manager can take just a few minutes to get a clear idea of their HR related tasks that may be required that day.

With all the other easy to use features in TribeHR, a growing company can easily get better management of their employees and track some liabilities like vacation and sick days as well as helping with getting new staff on board (see the different TribeHR features highlighted in another post).

TribeHR is for a small design shop with only 12 employees that wants to document process, culture, and highlight staff achievements. With some positions turning over regularly, TribeHR can also help with on-boarding process offering an easy way to move applicants to employees in the system and provide those new employees easy access to orientation information and company forms.

Favorite features

• Resources tab: under this section upload information about the company, PDF or Word Document forms that new employees need to read and/or fill out, and other relevant information. Employees can acknowledge they have read the documents and a manager can see who has read the documents and who hasn’t.
• Public job site: using the public job site one can easily collect resumes, comment on them, and transition successful applicants from the application section to an employee. TribeHR can also keep notes on applicants in the applicant archive for quick reference if a position opens up and the position needs to be filled quickly.
• Employee profiles: using the notes section highlight staff members accomplishments and share them with everyone on the team.

With all the other easy to use features in TribeHR, a small company can save time and easily engage staff in other ways to help them grow and achieve the organizations goals along with their own.

• Improved Vacation Types – you can now highlight vacation types with different colours.
• Improved Calendar – you can see the different colours for vacation types, and you can filter for different types.
• User Invitation – you can now invite a user, rather than filling out all their details. We believe this change will make it a lot easier for people to just start using TribeHR as they don’t have to put in a lot of details at the start.
• Various UX tweaks – some improvements to where we link and don’t link to jobs, job titles, etc. More helpful hints around profiles and departments. These are primarily due to user feedback.

As always we want to hear what our users think. If you haven’t do so already, sign up for the beta and start using it today! We are on track to end our free trial and head out of beta by the end of May. We will always be free for organizations that are only up to 5 people. Speaking of pricing though…

We tweaked our pricing too!

We’ve had feedback from a number of people comment that our pricing is “odd” (there’s a jump in per-user cost between our Tall and Grande pricing). This was originally to deal with our expected higher support costs for larger installations. To address this we’re going to be separating out the support costs, and trying to standardize the pricing a bit more, so it follows a closer-to-linear pricing scheme at roughly $2 per user per month.

Our pricing will now be:

• Free: up to 5 employees
• $19 up to 15 employees
• $49 up to 25 employees
• $99 up to 50 employees
• $199 up to 100 employees
• $399 for unlimited

We have some big plans for TribeHR. Coming out of Beta with our first version is just the start! Can’t wait to talk more about our big plans.

• Managers now have access to reports covering their employees
• When submitting a vacation request, the number of days off is now automatically calculated and suggested for you
• Custom profile pictures (upgrade from Gravatar support)
• Improved vacation/sick time workflow

We’re also hard at work smoothing out more rough edges, and over the next few days you can expect to see upgrades to the Org Chart functionality, in addition to more Vacation Calendar enhancements.

As always, your feedback is important, so please take the time to send us any suggestions or ideas you may have!

And yes, our Beta is still Free. Anyone that signs up for the Beta will have access to any level for free until May 31, 2010, at which point our pricing plans will kick in. Of course, you’re more than welcome to sign up for your subscription before then, but you still won’t be charged until May 31. We hope you like free.

In terms of development, some of the exciting recent features that have been included in this latest update include:

• Automatic Org Charts
• Streamlined Employee Setup
• v0.1 of our REST API
• Embeddable Job Site Options

While we’ll be focusing our energy on making sure we can respond quickly to our new beta users, we’re also ramping up our development on a few new features that are getting us pretty excited. Over the next few months, keep your eyes open for new options for creating Job Descriptions, improved Applicant Tracking and Automated Reminders!

Again, thanks for your patience, and welcome to a world of Friction-Free HR Management!

Setting Up Vacation & Sick Time Tracking

The first thing that you should do, as an administrator, is make sure you set up all of the appropriate types of time off for your organization. We’ve added “Vacation” and “Sick” time for you, but some people will also track “Personal” or “Training” time as well. To change your time off options:

1. Click on the “Setup” from the menu, which will open up your Setup => Customizations area
2. Click on “Types of Time Off” from the customization options on the right
3. Edit, Add, or Delete types from this list

Note: On the Tribe dashboard, users see the number of vacation days they have left; you can change which type of time off is shown on the home page from the Setup => Customize page, under “Vacation and Sick Days”.

Adding Vacation Time for Existing Employees

The best place to change how much vacation time an employee has every year is from their details page. To get there, click on “People” from the menu, then click on the employee’s name. From that page, click on “Edit User’s Time Off” just below their profile picture. This will pull up the list of vacation and sick allotments they get every year. If you click on the allotment, you can change how much they get in a year and how much they can carry-over at year’s end.

If you’d like to change the amount of vacation or sick time that an employee has on their account (e.g. they forgot to record some vacation time or you’re giving them a one-time bonus) then the best place to that is the Time Off Ledger (“Setup” => “Time Off Ledger”).

Editing the Time Off Ledger is a lot like a bookkeeping process. Each time someone earns new vacation, a Credit is added to their account. Each time someone uses (or loses) vacation time, a Debit is taken from their account. The same applies to any other types of time off that you track (e.g. Sick or Personal time).

To add a transaction, click the “Record a New Transaction” button at the bottom of the page. Choose which type of time off, the user, and how much to adjust their account by. Clicking “Submit” will immediately apply the transaction to their account. Don’t worry – you can always come back later to edit the transaction.

Note: It’s quite common to find that you have to add a transaction to each person’s account when you first start tracking time off using Tribe. This is generally part of the setup period, and doesn’t need to be done any more beyond the initial configuration.

Adding Vacation Time for New Employees

Previously, setting up Vacation Time for a new employee was just like doing it for an existing employee: you’d first add the employee, then record a transaction. However, today we released a new tool to help you do it as part of the employee setup process.

Generally, it’s still best to configure your default settings first, (see Setting Up Vacation & Sick Time Tracking above) but after that you can rely on the “Add a new employee” screen to and avoid the Ledger going forward. To add a new employee, click on “People” from the menu, then “Add new employee”. On this page, under “Compensation”, you’ll see a new link: “Set Employees Vacation/Sick Time”. Clicking this link will reveal the fields necessary to specify the annual allotment of and the carry-over for each type. It also provides a field for the existing balance for the employee. Depending on whether you enter a positive or negative number, it will add a credit or debit accordingly.

For example, if all of your employees get 2 weeks vacation a year (typical 5-day work week) and can carry over 1 week per year, you’ll want to enter “10.0″ under “Annual Vacation Days” and “5.0″ under “Max Carry Over”. If the employee you’re adding has already earned 5 days of their time (let’s imagine it’s 1/2 way through the year) and they’ve already taken 4 days vacation, then their Current Balance is “1.0″.

Again, don’t worry – you can always dip into the Time Off Ledger to make changes to their account.

Note: Time Off accrual happens on the first of each month. When you’re calculating the current balance, be sure to remember that your employees will have already earned part of their annual allotment.

So there you have it – managing and setting Vacation Time for new and existing employees. If you have any questions about the above steps, please post a comment here, or on our Get Satisfaction User Community.

Under “Positions” you’ll find a new menu option, “Org Chart”, where you can find an automatically-generated organization chart built with Google’s data visualization libraries.  What’s most exciting about this new feature, though, is the “Reorganize” tool that’s included: you can now restructure your organization right from within the org chart view.

To make a change to your organization structure, simply log in as an Administrator and follow these steps:

1. Click the “Reorganize” link
2. Click on the employee whose branch of the chart you would like to move
3. Click on the new manager for that branch
4. Repeat steps 3 and 4 as many times as you want
5. Click “Save Changes”
6. Show off your exciting new Org Chart to your friends and family!

Step 6 above is optional, but this new feature is so much fun that we’re sure you’ll want to share it’s coolness around.