Tracking Time With flair: A 3-Part Success Story

Out of all the excellent tools flair provides its customers, the Time Tracking feature has proven to be one of the most effective and productive for flair’s clients.

We wanted to know how three exceptional companies, bestsmile, Hair&Skin, and Properti, have improved their daily operations and employee experiences thanks to the addition of flair’s Time Tracking tool.

Before we get into how these companies resolved their professional challenges with flair, we should first enjoy a working understanding of flair’s Time Tracking tool.

flair’s Time Tracking Tool: A Brief Guide

flair’s Time Tracking tool operates within its Employee HUB, where one can activate time tracking with a single click. An employee can add notes to the task they are working on and justify things like breaks.

Image source: flair

The Employee HUB provides an overview of entire teams’ working weeks while handling automatic overtime and break calculations. If an employee needs to revise or comment on a task that they worked on, they can send a request to their manager to do so.

From The Manager’s Perspective

Whenever a manager logs into the Employee HUB, they will be greeted with the current pending time approvals within the Time Tracking tab.

Managers can see exactly which team members are working within the Time Tracking tab, all in real-time. This understanding allows team leaders to know exactly how close they are to reaching their target hours for a task and even an entire quarter.

Managers can also enjoy year-long time tracking reviews of their employees on a case-by-case basis.

Image source: flair

From The HR Professional’s Perspective

flair provides HR professionals with a clear window into their employees’ work lives through the Timesheets feature.

This Timesheets feature is a showcase of minute approvals that are often requested by employees, such as overtime. HR professionals and managers can then evaluate whether such requests count as overtime or not.

Image source: flair

Not that managers need to be too involved with this evaluation process. flair automatically moves overtime entries into an absence category, from which employees can request their overtime compensations.

flair’s International HR Reach

Recording and evaluating time tracking can become tricky for managers when overseeing various teams in different countries. With flair, HR professionals can establish personalized time frameworks that cater to any legislation an individual employee might need to satisfy.

Once an HR manager has confirmed that their frameworks adhere to the relevant legislations’ working hours and break length parameters, they can create a new workload template.

Image source: flair

A flair user can set this new workload template to function on a weekly or monthly basis. While the workload template will automatically run, managers can edit parameters like working hours and minimum break times whenever needed.

Please note that one can continuously redefine their workload templates’ effective duration to any required period.

Regarding Hourly Employees

Last but not least, any hourly employees that managers have contracts with can easily be accommodated through flair.

flair will automatically calculate these contractors’ payroll runs by adding up all the hourly time entries. These more complex entries will be integrated with your Salesforce account and employee-related data.

Now that we’ve unpacked flair’s Employee HUB and how its Time Tracking feature works, we can introduce the three outstanding businesses that implemented flair into their general HR processes.

Introducing bestsmile, Hair&Skin, and Properti

Let’s meet the three companies we interviewed for this Time Tracking case study, bestsmile, Hair&Skin, and Properti.

bestsmile

Company size: 200+

Industry: Health care and orthodontics

Location: Winterthur, Zurich, Switzerland

Bestsmile is a Swiss dental consultation business that facilitates its clients’ discreet and affordable teeth straightening procedures with high-quality Veneers and braces.

With more than 20,000 happy clients and over 35 locations throughout Switzerland, bestsmile redefines how people perfect their smiles. Bestsmile began giving its clients their confidence back in June 2018 and has steadily expanded its presence throughout Switzerland since.

Bestsmile was awarded the Swiss Economic Award in September 2020.

Hair&Skin

Company size: 50+

Industry: Cosmetology

Location: Winterthur, Zurich, Switzerland

Hair&Skin is a leading Swiss hair and skin analysis and treatment business that provides its clients with procedures like hair transplants and autologous blood treatment.

The Swiss cosmetology company provides its customers with free consultations followed by detailed skin or hair analyses by experienced doctors. Customers can then begin their tailored and private treatment plans that end with follow-up consultations for sustainable beauty and health.

Properti

Company size: 50+

Industry: Commercial real estate and investment and IT

Location: Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

It is difficult to pin Properti down with a single industry, given that this company provides services in the real estate, social marketing, and automation industries.

Despite its complex nature, all of Properti’s services are focused on enhancing and automating the social marketing efforts of property and investment firms and businesses.

Properti will handle much of their clients’ listing efforts with AI-powered marketing and advertising campaigns.

Now that we’re all better acquainted, let’s investigate the obstacles that bestsmile, Hair&Skin, and Properti recently faced.

Challenges

Running a business is a complicated process fraught with challenges. Despite how successful bestsmile, Hair&Skin, and Properti are, they experienced various operational and HR blocks.

All three companies did not have any form of time tracking software before partnering with flair, other than web browser-based apps with limited functionality and service.

These companies and their employees wasted much valuable time manually tracking their daily activities and tasks.

Without an adequate time tracking system in place, these companies weren’t billing their clients as efficiently as possible. Bestsmile, Hair&Skin, and Properti’s employees and managers didn’t organize their time to their full potential or supervise their teams as productively as possible.

In bestsmile’s case, its HR professionals were looking for a way to manage overtime balances better. They wished to track and resolve these cheques and balances in a less strenuous and time-consuming way.

"In previous experiences, I found time-tracking to be very manual. We had to manage a lot of timesheets for ourselves. When it comes to absences, it involves a lot of direct approvals with the manager. The appeal of flair was that everything is handled in one system, and it was just a click away!"

Sarah Kolly, Junior Salesforce Consultant (bestsmile)

The New EU Mandatory Time Tracking Rules

In May 2019, the European Court of Justice established a new ruling that rocked European businesses in general.

This collective stipulation maintained that any employer within the European Union must uphold an employee time tracking system that regulates employees’ work times, daily rests, breaks, and annual leave.

Many companies across the EU struggled to adapt to these new employee regulations, and bestsmile, Hair&Skin, and Properti had to find a way to stay in line with this challenging time tracking directive.

Solutions

With their time tracking challenges at hand, bestsmile, Hair&Skin, and Properti turned to flair for efficient and profitable solutions.

Amazingly, Hair&Skin began its business alongside flair, and its management team was able to onboard flair’s services for an enjoyable and rapid growth.

Bestsmile’s managers and employees enjoyed increased transparency and control, meaning that team members and leaders could clearly appreciate and track each other’s progress while having more autonomy over their own work.

"With the help of the shift planning feature of flair, we can do the planning very easily, generate the schedules for our employees, and send them out very fast."

Dominic Schär, Head of Retail (bestsmile)

This visibility and autonomy are facilitated by flair’s Employee HUB. Any team member can access HR-relevant data and the Time Tracking tool in this consolidated system.

Employees can set and track their weekly goals, overtime balances, and essential statistical data neatly organized in daily distribution graphs.

Bestsmile also migrated its previous overtime balances over to flair, allowing the dental care business to address and settle these often complex payments.

Check out this short video for a more detailed and inspiring insight into bestsmile’s success story with flair.

A Comprehensive Time Tracking System

Incredibly, all three interviewed companies use flair’s Time Tracking tool across multiple departments and projects. This extensive usage makes sense when considering how versatile flair’s Time Tracking tool is.

Employees and managers can record almost any task or process with flair.

flair’s Time Tracking tool doesn’t just foster unity between teams. It also improves efficiency.

Bestsmile, Hair&Skin, and Properti’s employees and managers can spend less time organizing and fulfilling mundane and repetitive tasks, allowing for an abundance of space and time to work on the things that matter most to them, professionally and personally.

Efficient Time Management Means More Value

Employees and managers alike now have more time to focus on their more meaningful and enjoyable tasks and personal lives.

Now that bestsmile, Hair&Skin, and Properti can meet their deadlines and dedications faster, they have increased capacity to go on vacations and spend more time with their loved ones.

In many cases, the interviewed companies reported that their employees worked at an accelerated pace from Mondays to Thursdays before clocking out early on Fridays.

Being afforded more personal time in your job might seem like a lofty or idealist notion, but anything is possible when your entire company is streamlined at a high level.

A Single Source Of Truth And Support

Managers need to keep track of their employees and their daily tasks; that is no mystery. But what might be less clear is how employees spend their time in detail and where they might need support.

Of course, a company’s leaders will also want to know how their budgets are being spent and whether funding is appropriately and adequately allocated.

With the transparency that flair provided its clients, the three reviewed companies’ managers were given precise insights into how their employees’ days were divided and how their budgets were being spent.

These managers could also see where employees need support and guidance without obvious indicators.

Keeping In-Line With The EU Time Tracking Directive

We know that companies across the EU had to adapt to the new mandatory time tracking directive. But how did the interviewed companies meet these new rules?

flair aided bestsmile, Hair&Skin, and Properti to align with the overtime and break legislation.

Earlier, we outlined how flair allows its HR users to create completely compliant templates and workloads that satisfy the legislative requirements of employees, regardless of their geographical location.

With flair’s Time Tracking tool, these companies ensure that they compensate their employees correctly. Managers can provide these notices at employees’ earliest convenience and notify them of their breaks timeously.

The clients can also create automated breaks using flair, meaning that their employees will automatically and regularly be notified when it is time to take a break.

Bestsmile, Hair&Skin, and Properti’s adherence to the new EU work time-related regulations stopped these businesses from incurring fines, but it accomplished so much more for employees.

Being paid fairly and taking much-needed breaks regularly does wonders for staff morale, satisfaction, and productivity.

Conclusion

The way teams operate has changed significantly over the last few years. Employees, HR professionals, and managers alike are continually looking to automate, streamline, and simplify as many of their professional processes as possible.

Companies like bestsmile, Hair&Skin, and Properti are three leaders in this revolutionary approach to work, and flair is honored to have been part of their transformation.

The three presented examples of what flair can do for a business show just how much value one can get from their time. The better an employee optimizes their daily workload, the freer their lives become, professionally and personally.