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!

• You can now add more files to an applicant, it’s not limited to resume and cover letter anymore
• Jobs now have additional fields for “closing date”, “location”, and “# of open positions”
• You can define your job summary/teaser text as opposed to relying on the auto-generator
• Various vacation tracking UI tweaks
• New Annual Accrual and No Accrual options for automatic earning of time off
• New templating options for your Job Site (check out Miovision’s careers page for an example)
• Job application forms are now captcha-protected
• New AJAXified management options for job applicants
• WYSIWYG editor upgrades

In the next few blog posts we’ll dig into some of the design decisions in more detail. In the meantime, keep your eyes open for our next update, which will include some new tweaks to our Feedback, Job Postings and Vacation Time tools!

Now, when managing your company activity stream, you can add third-party RSS feeds to your site, and they’ll be automatically crawled and added to your activity stream.

Easy To Add Feeds

This option can be accessed by admins from two locations.

1. On your Overview page, in the header of the news & activity feed, you can click the “Edit Feeds” link, or
2. Click on “Setup” from the main menu, and in the “Customize” section, choose “News Sources” from your customization options.

In both locations you can choose to add, edit or delete existing feeds.

Keyword Filtering

When adding a feed to your site, you can also choose to add keyword filters. If you leave the filter field blank, then all posts in the feed will be incorporated into your site. If you choose to add any keywords, then we’ll only include posts that contain one or more of your keywords. This lets you include a subset of content from an RSS feed that you’d like to crawl.

If you like this feature, or have any other suggestions, please let us know! Comments here on the blog are welcome, as are comments to our Community Support Site and our Twitter account, @tribehr.

If you’re a follower of the Toronto Tech Startup scene, you may have heard about TechTalkTO coming to town and that the first speaker is Jeff Lindsay, who created Notify.io and was one of the first supporters of WebHooks.The first event is September 15, and you can sign up here.

The reason this is important, is that we’ve been a big fan of WebHooks for a while, and are jazzed to be able to say that TribeHR now supports WebHooks for your integration pleasure!

For those of you already familiar with WebHooks, click here to jump to the documentation. For those that aren’t familiar with WebHooks, they are essential HTTP POSTs that occurs when something happens in TribeHR. WebHooks allow you to specify a URL that TribeHR will POST to when a specific event occurs. For example, registering a URL for the event Note.Add, would trigger a POST to that URL when someone adds a note to a user’s file.

We have a long list of events that we support with WebHooks callbacks, and we’re looking forward to some neat and crazy integrations – so be sure to let us know what you come up with!

With this most recent update, we now support single-sign-on from your Salesforce account. All you need to do is enable this option in your Setup area of TribeHR, then add TribeHR as a Web Tab in your Salesforce account. Then, any time you visit TribeHR from within Salesforce, you’ll be automatically logged in to your TribeHR account. It’s that easy.

Of course, we have more detailed documentation available for you to reference.

The major benefit of this new feature, is that for those of you who have your staff logging into Salesforce constantly, you can make it easier for them to engage with other parts of your company and other employees without having to remember another username and password.

We’re always keeping our eyes open for more ways to streamline TribeHR for you, so if you have any other suggestions of things like this, just let us know in the comments or over at our Community Support Site.

Navigation Change
We’ve moved the “Org Chart” & “Job Descriptions” out from “Jobs” to under “People”, which essentially makes “People” a view of your current organization, and “Jobs” all about hiring.

Jobs Layout Changes
Since the Jobs section is now more about the hiring process, we’ve altered the layout of the “Open Rositions” page to be more about the jobs we’re looking to fill. This is more in keeping with other applicant tracking systems, so it’ll feel more familiar to those of you that have used other tools as well.

Stages vs. Status
Previously the “status” of an application doubled as the interview stage as well as the “active” or “inactive” status. We’ve separated that into “status” which can be any of an active, archived or hired candidate, and “stage” which is your interview workflow (e.g. “new”, “first interview”, “2nd interview”, “references” etc…). Also, in the Setup area you can now edit the stages of your workflow.

New Contact Candidate Feature
When reviewing candidates, there is a new “Contact Candidate” option, which opens up a simple email form – if you send an email using this tool, the body of the email is also added as a note to your review of the application. This is intended as a first step towards simplifying the sending of rejection and offer notes, and email piping integration (more on this coming in the fall!).

As always, we welcome feedback to our updates – please feel welcome to post a comment below, or drop us a line on our Customer Support Community

Bug Fixes

• “Duplicate Vacation Requests” bug was eliminated
• “Event Editing” bug was squashed
• “Navigation Inconsistency” bug was exterminated

Tweaks

• Skills editing can no be done in-line when viewing an employee record
• You can no longer revoke your admin rights if you are the only admin

New Features

• Spell Check (on Job Descriptions, Job Postings, Etc)
• Localization (Timezone and Currency)
• New “Private Notes” for employees to record their own thoughts or drafts

If you have any questions about these features, or others, please drop a comment below, or catch us on our Support Community.

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!

• 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.

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.