How-To's

Manage Employee Absences in Space

Establishing a transparent process that helps team members meet their goals on a day-to-day basis is key to the success of any team. One side of this process is communication and planning. To plan, a team needs to track its members’ availability — you need to know when you and your teammates are all free to schedule an activity such as a meeting, a brainstorming call, and so on.

MaartenAbsences

The same principle applies on the company level: tracking and managing employees’ availability is vital for the company’s well-being.

Space helps employees, team leads, and the Human Resources department with the task of scheduling and tracking absences.

For team members

As a team member, you work with absences in two ways:

  • You need to schedule your time away from the office, be it a home office day, sick leave, vacation, business trip, and so on.
  • You need to quickly understand if a teammate is available to communicate and collaborate at a given moment so that you can plan your work.

Space helps you in both cases.

First of all, you can easily schedule an absence in just a few clicks. When you do, if the chosen type of absence requires your team lead’s approval, they will receive your request in Chats. After your absence is scheduled, it becomes visible to everyone in your profile and the team’s calendar.

New absence dialog

It works the same for your teammates. If you need to contact someone, you can check their schedule in their profile or team calendar. Also, when you message or mention a person in a chat, assign them a code review, a new task, or an item in a to-do list, you will be informed of their absence.

For team managers

As a team lead, you keep track of your team members’ current and upcoming absences. Space gives you the tools to stay informed and to manage the absence requests with ease:

  • When a team member requests an absence, Space notifies you about this in Chats.
  • If the absence type requires your approval, you can grant it right in the notification.

Absence notifications and approval request

For HR specialists

As an HR specialist, you need to continuously monitor employees’ availability. Also, you need to ensure that absences comply with the national and local laws and company policies.

Space lets you customize the types of absences that can be requested by an employee, and set the rules for approving each absence type.

abcences-type

You can also configure the notifications you will receive about specific absence requests.

Finally, Space lets you export absence data with the help of a REST API. As a result, you can process this data in other applications for analysis and reporting.

Team calendar

Whatever your position or role, the most convenient way to check a team’s availability status is the team calendar.

The team calendar helps you see who is around. You can filter it by team, location, and role.

We hope that the absence management features in Space will help you succeed with your daily tasks and improve collaboration in your team and across teams.

If you haven’t tried these features yet, check out the JetBrains Space EAP and let us know what you think!

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