A Definite Guide: Attendance Tracking in Microsoft Teams

Proper workforce management is an important aspect of any business. Attendance tracking, in that sense, makes a vital part of every business operation. Simply – if they want to be productive and efficient, managers and business heads have to have a clear overview of their staff’s availability. They also have to ensure their employees are not burned out, and that there are no overlapping vacations among several employees from the same team.

To track leave properly, team leads and HR managers have to employ their organizational skills, but also be very detail-focused, and wary of their employees’ wellbeing. Now, when we know how much thought and time goes into attendance tracking, we realize why it is one of the most dreaded tasks of every HR manager. However, it shouldn’t be that way. Attendance tracking can be easily streamlined and fitted to your organization’s needs. You just need to know how to do it.

We decided to help your organization become more productive and efficient and show you a few ways that can help you make attendance tracking in Microsoft Teams easy, fast, and efficient.

How to make attendance tracking in Microsoft Teams efficient and easy?

If your organization relies on the use of Microsoft Teams for managing daily tasks and communication, you’d be glad to hear we have found a few ways to manage attendance tracking in Microsoft Teams. 

• Activate the status message option.

We agree this is not one of the most convenient ways for attendance tracking in Microsoft Teams, but it can be a good solution in case you don’t want to mess with a third-party app or as a temporary solution.

The idea behind it is to have a separate Excel sheet that will have columns with months, weeks, and days in a week for each team within an organization that will serve as a reminder when team members requested their leave. The employees should notify their managers about their preferred vacation days, sick leave, or any other leave type and type in the dates in the Excel sheet after they’re approved. After that, they can set up their MS Teams status to show whether they’re working or not so their coworkers can see them right away.

Even though it is a more complicated solution for leave tracking, status updates can be useful for those organizations that send their employees on-site, or have a hybrid workplace and need to know which employee works remotely for the day, who’s in the office, etc.

• Use the Excel sheets.

One of the ways to make attendance tracking in Microsoft Teams much easier is to use the good old Excel sheet. You can keep it within the MS Teams app, ensuring it’s accessible to everyone.

All you need to do is to go to your MS Teams account, find and click the “New” button and then select the “Excel sheet” option. After you do it, an empty Excel sheet will open, allowing you to make custom fields for months and days, employees can highlight and name to mark their vacation days.

• Have you heard of Vacation Tracker?

If you already searched for a leave tracking tool for Microsoft Teams, then you know this software doesn’t come with it. So far we showed you how you can track attendance in two less convenient ways, and we saved the best for the end.

Vacation Tracker is a leave tracking tool that comes as an Integration for Microsoft Teams that allows teams to track attendance in a few simple ways. By choosing Vacation Tracker as their preferred leave tracking method, businesses can easily manage their employees’ leave requests and have their staff’s availability easily.

According to the company’s needs, team members can choose from a wide variety of leave types including sick leave, time off, jury duty, etc. On the other hand, managers can easily approve (or deny) employees’ requests without even having to leave Microsoft Teams.

Vacation tracker allows its users to track attendance both via MS Teams or Vacation Tracker’s web dashboard, create leave policies that suit the needs of the organization the best, and manage multiple teams and locations by assigning several Approvers. 

Creation and editing of custom leave types are also possible as it ensures the needs of each company (and employee) are met. Furthermore, companies can set up a custom work week for the entire organization, or even customize work weeks for individual employees.

Finally, if you’re done with messy sheets and complicated procedures, and think that Vacation Tracker fits your needs just right, you can sign up for a 7-day trial to make the final decision, ensuring not a single dime is wasted.

Ana Mladenovic

A cat enthusiast and a cupcake maniac, Ana is a freelance Content Writer passionate about HR, productivity, and team management topics. When she’s not at her keyboard, you can find Ana in the kitchen, trying to make delicious cookies.