I once had a manager who was nearly impossible to find when I needed her. It was almost comical. There she’d be, sitting in her office with the phone glued to the side of her face, completely entranced in her conversation. With my desk a mere fifteen feet away, I’d listen for her to finish her call so I could approach her with my time off request or the scheduling needs of my department. Without a doubt, just when I thought I had her cornered, I’d get to her office only to discover that she’d left. Meanwhile, I’d run into an associate also looking for his manager to sign off on payroll, which had to be reviewed and approved and signed, then faxed to an alternate location to our
Beyond a loss in productivity, these scenarios were blasts of disengagement. It was frustrating not to be able to complete a simple business task, and I don’t think we realized how much that ultimately affected our other work that day. No one experiences bursts of creativity, builds relationships, or reimagines defunct processes while frustrated. Additionally, there is something very disengaging about moving through an assignment and then hitting a wall. We joked about the hallway stalking, but it truly felt like the only solution to our problem.
I think now of what it could have been like for us if we were using an automated time and attendance software platform. When I wanted to request time off, I could have logged into the system myself to first check and see if other employees in my department had been approved for time off during the same time frame in which I was hoping to go on vacation. With a company policy that no more than two people in each department could be out at the same time, all of that hallway stalking would be a complete waste of time if I learned I already had colleagues who would be on PTO. I could then request the time off with a click of my mouse, and my manager would receive an alert. When she opened my request, she would have been able to see both that I would have accrued enough PTO to cover my proposed vacation, and that no one else on the team was taking time off during that period. With a simple click of her mouse (or finger on her mobile phone, for that matter), she could approve my request when she was able to do so — at any time of day or night, on any kind of device.
The ability for me as an employee to have control over this business process would have positively impacted my working relationship with my manager, and would have kept me more productive and more engaged in the work I was doing for my organization.