For many organizations in the past weeks, employees have changed their working conditions.  For TimeControl, this may warrant relooking at your timesheet and project progress capture processes.  This is a common occurrence when an organization merges with another or brings on a new department.

For most TimeControl clients, when they implement TimeControl, a process guide is created that covers all the different practices and procedures for events such as onboarding new staff or adding new projects or doing timesheet and project approvals.

In the last few weeks many clients have been shifting staff from working at the office to working at home or working at different hours in order to facilitate social distancing.  This might affect your regular TimeControl processes in a number of ways.

Perhaps your regular office hours are now flexible for anyone working from home.  Perhaps you have new sick leave procedures for your remote workers.  If someone has been tested positive for Covid-19 do you have new timesheet charge types for that person?

There are a number of TimeControl functions that processes that might need checking:

Filters

Filters are used throughout TimeControl to enable features such as restricting what projects are visible to what employees or how a validation rule should work.  If your business has been changed with some people now working from home or taking on new responsibilities, then these filters might need a review.  In particular:

Validation Rule Filters

Validation Rules can changed when working conditions change.  Perhaps you now have more staff working flexible hours or perhaps your current policies on personal time off have altered.  A review of the filters that are the building blocks of Validation Rules can help you adapt.

Employee Table Filters for Projects, Charges, Rates

In the TimeControl Employee Table, there are places to implement filters for each employee.  These filters determine what projects, charge codes and rate codes can be viewed by that employee.  If your situation has changed the way that projects and tasks are being completed, then looking at these filters to see if changes are needed makes sense.

You can find out all about Filters in the TimeControl Reference Guide.

Validation Rules

Have your Validation Rules changed?  You can deactivate a Validation Rule or change it to be a warning only instead of an error if your business conditions are in flux.  This can be done for each rule.

Projects and Charge Codes

Are you still creating projects and charge codes in the same way you done traditionally?  Also, are you creating certain project and charge code entries to identify the specific costs of the change due to Covid-19?  Being able to identify these costs specifically might become important in the near future because of insurance claims or government recompense for such expenses.

Assignments

With people not co-located, you may be rethinking how tasks are assigned. TimeControl’s Assignment function lets you assign or re-assign tasks and create budgets for them.  Perhaps your tasks and assignments should be rethought also in terms of your target completion.  It may take more (or less) time to get certain types of tasks completed.

Dashboards

While most organizations use email effectively to send out news, the Dashboard area of TimeControl is an ideal place to put persistent notices and relevant news in the Announcements area.  Announcements can have as-of and expiry dates and can be fine-tuned to be visible only to certain roles so not all announcements need to be seen by all employees.

TimeControl Mobile App access

Finally, the free TimeControl Mobile App may be more attractive than ever.  If you are using TimeControl Online then you already have everything you need to activate the Mobile App.  The App is enabled in the Administration Area for TimeControl overall then per Profile in the User Profiles area.  Users can download the App for free from Google Play for Android devices and the Apple Store for iOS devices.  If you are using TimeControl OnPremise, then you may have to configure TimeControl to be enabled for the Mobile App.  Contact HMS Support if you have questions about how to do that.

And more…

Aside from actual changes to configuration, what about your approval process and allowances for people who are not in their normal roles.  You may want to investigate delegation through the Alternate User functionality as well as how you are doing your approvals for both the timesheet as a whole and line-item approvals for projects.

What about new processes from HR for onboarding or offboarding?  Are there employees who might be temporarily not doing timesheets?  Are there any new rules from Payroll?

Typically such changes are quick to do in TimeControl but it is important to keep track of what you change because you are likely going to have to change it back sometime soon.

If you need assistance with changing your TimeControl, TimeControl Industrial or TimeControl Online configuration, talk to the HMS Technical staff at info@hms.ca.