COVID-19 has forced entire offices to work from home almost overnight and consumers to change their behaviors. This has left HR and internal help desk teams struggling to cope with a deluge of queries and requests, often from across time zones. Forward-thinking companies have turned to chatbots to ease the load.

With employees telecommuting and staff numbers depleted due to self-isolation, chatbots have emerged as a key support system to help desk and HR teams. The technology deals with first-line inquiries, providing automated answers powered by artificial intelligence. This frees up teams to tackle more complex questions and keeps information up to date. The latter is extremely important in a pandemic where information and advice are changing fast.

Adapting to drastic changes can be arduous at first. The increasing need for integration between employees, their peers and their managers, means that HR and IT teams must centralize and easily manage communication processes to ensure coordination between teams.

These processes must be implemented quickly and easily so that HR teams can deploy them without technical problems.

So, how can you do all these and make it easier on your HR personnel as well as your help desk team? Why, with Workativ of course!

Workativ is an AI-powered no-code workflow automation platform for building contextual chatbots with automated workflows for various business apps. Workativ’s chatbots are easy to add to your business’ communications hub like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Employees can self-serve their IT issues on-the-go by just having a quick chat with Workativ’s chatbot without logging in and out of a convoluted self-service portal. Sounds simple, right?

If your business is using HR tools like Deputy for workforce management, it’s high-time you connected it with Workativ and transformed it into a conversational self-service platform via Workativ’s chatbots.

Here are some of the Deputy tasks that Workativ can take care of for you.

1. Onboarding/Offboarding

Manual Onboarding/Offboarding of employees on Deputy involves not only the employee but also the HR personnel, with the same information being entered repeatedly – multiplying the chances of manual errors. Automating the process with Workativ’s Deputy AI chatbot ensures that employee information (i.e. name, date of birth, social security number, etc.) gathered from the HR by the chatbot is loaded into the various fields so that HR need not repeatedly fill in the same information. Automated processes can also help ensure that an employee’s departure from the organization is handled efficiently and tactfully.

2. Deputy Payroll

Managing and assisting employees in knowing about their salary is one of the central tasks of HR. Not only is it important to have a salary structure that makes employees happy, but it is also imperative to communicate information on compensation that’s clear and easy to understand. There’s a significant convenience factor in having automated employee salary administration processes in place.

This is especially true if a business operates across multiple states, if part of the workforce operates remotely, or if employees are allowed to work flexible schedules. Workativ’s Deputy chatbot takes care of this by allowing employees to view their pay details on their Slack or Microsoft Teams app, anywhere, anytime.

Not only can you automate Deputy tasks with Workativ, but you can also combine Deputy tasks with other app tasks into one single effective automation. Let’s take a look at some of them.

1. Efficient Deputy Employee Onboarding/Offboarding

If you are still using manual methods to onboard your new hires, think again. It becomes important now than ever to give an excellent onboarding experience because numerous studies show that the onboarding period is when your new hires decide whether to stay or leave your company. This means exactly what you think, that all your efforts, physically, mentally, and mainly monetarily will see its fruits only if your new hires get an employee experience like no other during the onboarding process.

Trying to achieve this excellence through manual mode and with no help from intelligent technologies is basically decreasing your chances of being excellent or even mediocre.

So what does this mean for all the HR folks reading this? We have to use smart tools (Workativ) to make Onboarding effective which directly improves retention rates and thus makes sense for all the effort put in hiring that candidate.

You can set up an automation on Workativ after connecting your Deputy, Office 365, and Slack account such that the chatbot will add the employee to the company’s Office 365 email distribution list after retrieving the employees’ email from Deputy and then notifies everyone on the company’s Slack channel about the new employee via message. And when an employee gets terminated, help desk agents can use Workativ’s chatbot to create a ticket on tools like Jira so that the employee experiences a smooth offboarding experience.

2. Timesheet Details

Timesheet automation is the process of capturing and tracking employee working hours easily through an application (Workativ’s Chatbot) that works on multiple platforms seamlessly (mobile phones, desktop, and browser extensions). Employee timesheet automation simplifies and speeds up timesheet processing and changes the way timesheets travel through the organization to the payroll process.

By connecting your Deputy account with Workativ, you can set up an automation such that employees can use Workativ’s chatbot to update their timesheet on-the-go, anytime.

3. Shift Management

By connecting your Deputy account with Workativ, you can set up an automation for the Deputy Slack chatbot such that, employees can bring it up on their smartphone on Microsoft Teams or Slack and tell it that they are starting/ending their shift. Hassle-free.

Now that we’ve seen the endless possibilities of what integrating Workativ and Deputy and your existing apps can do for you, let’s see how you can go about the same.

1. Workflow builder

Workativ assistant comes with easy-to-use no-code workflow builder to help you build simple to complex app-based automations for chatbot in minutes. Integrate chatbot with apps, use pre-built workflows from marketplace, approve requests, connect chatbot with on-prem apps and much more.

2. Chatbot Builder

Our easy-to-use no-code chatbot builder helps you build and manage simple to complex conversations, FAQs, integrate app workflows, and personalize your bot in minutes. Deliver autonomous workplace support with purpose built intelligent chatbots.

Now the benefits are enormous when it comes to integrating and automating Deputy tasks with Workativ.

1. Sharing internal information

Employees can quickly ask about benefits, practices, etc. and get an instant answer. The HR chatbot can also be programmed to refer employees to an HR professional for the more complex (or legally risky) queries such as ‘recommended health plans.’

2. Onboarding

Companies using Workativ’s chatbots in HR can automate the part of onboarding that deals with sharing company and process knowledge with new employees. HR doesn’t need to answer repetitive questions from new hires. Employees can instead get instant answers by simply typing a question to the chatbot.

3. Employee satisfaction

Workativ’s chatbot can be used to monitor employee morale and satisfaction levels. It can be integrated into a messaging app that employees use daily (e.g. Slack) and send automated messages to gather feedback. The chatbot may also be able to administer surveys and analyze sentiments.

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