Product update
Jul 22, 2024
Taking automated scheduling in HR automation to the next level
Klaus Julin
CTO
Scheduling meetings for your employees can be a painstaking task to do. Attendees need to be selected based on the employee, and their work schedules and time zones need to be taken into account to find the optimal schedule for the meeting. The whole scheduling process takes a lot of time, effort, and is prone to human error.
Just as we developed Introist, an automation platform to automate HR busywork, we have spent years creating a powerful tool to automatically schedule meetings for your employees. This summer, we’ve made it even better. In this article, I’ll share the key parts of the scheduling process and how an automatic scheduler can assist in making the whole process more effortless.
Scheduling from your calendars
Even though the scheduling happens automatically, it doesn't mean that the resulting event would be any different. Introist enables you to connect your calendar so that all the meetings are hosted by you. There are several benefits to this: employees can treat the meeting as any other internal meeting, you don't need to introduce a new tool to everyone, and you have the full freedom to organize which calendar includes which events.
Inviting the right team members
For example, let's say you want to schedule a monthly 1-to-1 meeting for all employees with their manager. Naturally, each employee has their respective manager so every meeting needs to include the right people.
Thanks to Introist's dynamic fields, you can build the meeting templates to simply state the desired attendees by their role. In the example, that would mean Employee and Manager. Whenever a meeting is then created from the template, Introist will automatically look for the Employee and from their profile, figure out the manager to find the right person to invite to the meeting.
Find the right time within work hours
When you've identified the right people who should attend, the real work just begins: finding the right time within every employee's work hours. There are several factors you need to consider: where is the employee located? Work hours in different offices might differ widely e.g. because of different time zones. What do the employee schedules look like? When are they available to meet? And what days are not suitable for meeting, e.g. because of public holidays or company level special days.
This is something a software system can do effortlessly and efficiently. Introist's automated scheduling system will pull the availability details for every attending employee, finding the best possible schedule for everyone, within the limits set by you of course.
Booking a meeting room
So you have found a time that fits the team's schedule, great! How about a meeting room? That's one more detail to figure out. Is there a suitable meeting room available for the time of the meeting?
If you need to book a meeting room, Introist can do that for you. Furthermore, you can now instruct Introist to pick a room for a list you chose. Introist will not merely look to see if some of those rooms would be available at the time of the meeting, but take the rooms into account already when finding the right time.
You've got the meeting scheduled, and now it's just about waiting for it to happen. In the best case scenario yes, but not always. Often schedule conflicts happen and some of the attendees might decline the meeting. Or the attendees decide to move it to another time. Or someone ends up just deleting it from the calendar! And it's not just for one meeting but for all meetings that you have scheduled for your employees.
With Introist you have real-time visibility into all your scheduled meetings and can conveniently make adjustments. Whenever a schedule conflict occurs (someone declines the meeting) or the event is removed from the calendar, Introist will flag it and you will get notified. Taken even further, you can instruct Introist to automatically reschedule the meeting if any of the attendees decline it!
For all this, Introist equips you with the tools to increase efficiency in scheduling and managing key meetings. And it's not just for your benefit. Always taking the team's schedule into account and quickly reacting to declines leads to fewer scheduling conflicts, fairness in meeting times, and lower risk of human error. All this is prone to also increase employee satisfaction.
All in all, using an auto-scheduling tool like Introist can be an easy way to streamline the time-consuming task of scheduling and managing meetings for your employees.
We believe that Introist is the best automated scheduling system available. Take a look at the scheduling features, and if you want to see it yourself, feel free to schedule a demo.
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