VELOCITY GLOBAL

Timesheets

Modular time tracking product to fit the needs of 30+ countries

  • Employees need to track time for compliance and payroll purposes. The existing process existed outside of our web-based platform.

  • Employees in 30+ Countries
    Managers

    • Capture time accurately & quickly

    • Allow managers to approve/reject timesheets

    • Automatically calculate Overtime

  • Lead Designer (me)
    Product Manager
    Engineering Team
    UX Researcher
    SMEs from HRx Team (Human Resource Experience)

  • 1 year

    Launched pilot in <2 months, followed with GA launch and iterative improvements

Before

Timesheets were being completed in excel and uploaded to a Google site, outside of our platform

Managers were only able to view timesheets if they were shared by the employee and approvals were untraceable

Overtime calculations required manual work by internal users

Entries were limited to a single start/stop time and didn’t allow users to accurately track their hours

Time off requests required dual-data entry

After

Timesheets in the Global Work Platform

Manager visibility and approvals within the Global Work Platform

Automated overtime calculations

Unlimited and flexible time entries allow users to track time accurately

Time off requests automatically synced to timesheet

What We Built

Ease of Use Features

  • Time Off requests automatically synced to the timesheet

  • Pre-filled values

  • Ability to copy and apply one day’s entries to entire week or timesheet

Automatic Overtime Calculations

  • Overtime is calculated automatically as the user makes edits

  • Overtime indicator appears based on the granularity of the rule

  • Overtime rules specific to country, state, and employee contract

In Platform Manager Workflow For Approvals

  • Once timesheets are submitted managers can view and approve them in platform

  • Managers have a high-level view of all timesheets

Notifications Every Step of the Way

Employees receive a series of emails:

  • Reminding them to submit their timesheet

  • Additional reminder if their timesheet is late

  • Confirmation their timesheet was submitted

  • Notified if their timesheet is submitted or rejected by their manager

Challenges

Quick to Launch

After a 3rd party software did not meet our compliance needs, leadership challenged the team to quickly launch and learn from a hand-rolled product in a pilot launch.

What I Did:

  • Led research sessions with employees that combined discovery and wireframe prototype testing to quickly gather insights and feedback

  • Collaborated with Engineering and Product to design a solution that met compliance, Engineering time constraints, and user needs

  • Tested and designed MVP in 2 weeks

Single Product, Multiple Scenarios

The product needed to flex to fit different time frames, country-specific overtime rules, and messaging about payroll implications.

What I Did:

  • Designed a modular system with UI that could be mixed and matched to create multiple permutations

  • Thought through variants outside of initial pilot launch from day 1 so that we could scale without reworking

Process

Research: Understanding all the variants

We spoke with internal Human Resource experts that were familiar with time tracking in different countries as well as existing users that were using the existing Excel method to understand the breadth of use cases. We found three main variants that the product needed to account for.

Payroll Implications

In some instances timesheets affected payroll while in other countries timesheets are collected for compliance purposes and did not impact pay.

Foundation: Design Principals

1. Accurately track time - Create an interface that allows user to accurately capture the time they worked. The UI will not block or nudge a user from making an entry

2. Self-Service - The product should give managers visibility into timesheets and a traceable approval workflow.


3. Automate Manual Processes - Reduce manual work by automating overtime calculations, programmatically solving for variations, and creating a notification system.

Overtime Rules

Overtime not only varied by country or state but in some instances by individual contract

Work Schedule

We encountered instances of employees having a consistent work schedule and needing to fill in the same hours every day as well as employees that worked irregular or ad hoc schedule.

Outcomes

  • Launched a pilot in 2 months

  • Launched GA 4 months later

  • Employee satisfaction with technology went from 80 to 94 in countries with new time tracking product

  • Detracting NPS comments referencing time tracking dropped to 0

What’s Next

  • Pay down tech debt with automation and UX improvements

  • Launch in 2 additional countries