We Threw Away The Biometric Machine At Our Startup

There was a time when there were just a few of us in the team working out of a small office. Communication was easy — Call out their name and wave at ’em; so was collaboration. Over the past year, we have doubled in team strength, and moved to an office almost five times the size of our old one. It feels good to see our tribe growing. It’s also true that organisational complexities and cross-team dependencies come as a package with increasing team strength.

Earlier, we would simply drop a message or an email to Rajneesh (HR) if we were taking a leave. Over time, it became tough to keep a track of who’s there in the office and who’s not, specially in case of unplanned leaves. This became a major problem for us, but not the only one.

We needed to find a way to solve this problem, and started looking for scalable solutions that would help us. The available alternatives required either a hardware integration or people to sign in to the system everyday. We experimented and installed a biometric attendance machine. However, it came with the following consequences:

• It was a terrible UX as it required a special effort. Also, many of us would forget to brush our fingerprints.
• We hated it with a passion.
• There was little way for us to know who was there in the office or not.
• It didn’t really resonate with our culture and hence, defeated the purpose.

It was a disaster and we removed it within a month. More than something that eased the lives of the HR team, we wanted a tool that would help the entire team monitor their own productivity. We wanted a solution that would fulfil all our requirements, and not have an adverse effect on our work culture at the same time.

We love to build things. Well, we’re building an AI-powered marketing assistant that would help millions of small and individual businesses smartly reach out their audience, turn them into customers, and succeed online. Hence, we built a tool for ourselves to solve our own problem! That’s how Hazir came into existence. Hazir was the outcome of a hackathon on 9th June, 2015. Even though we launched a very basic version that night, our talented developers continue to devote time to enhance it.

This is what Nischal had to say about Hazir: “As the team grew, we wanted to make sure that everyone was committed to building Crowdfire. We believe that a smart and hardworking team will end up creating a really good product for its users. At this stage, we wanted to avoid having people managers just to make sure that the team works hard. We thought hard and realised that if we hired smart people and opened up their work data to them, they would self-monitor themselves. That’s exactly what we’re seeing happen post the introduction of Hazir!”

The best thing about Hazir is that it offers a seamless user experience for the team as we don’t have to perform any action to announce our presence at the HQ. Hazir — very smartly — senses our presence with the help of this pretty useful device, and announces the same.

We have also integrated Hazir with Slack, and this is how Hazir goes like when someone enters the HQ:

Not only has Hazir taken a considerable amount of load off Rajneesh’s head, but it has also helped us with its following features:

• It shows the people present in the HQ, working from home, or on leave so that we can schedule meetings or in case there’s any dependency.
• It helps us monitor our productivity and the number of hours we’ve put at work.
• We can apply for leave straight away from the dashboard (no email hassle) and keep a track of our leaves.

The best part is that every time someone applies for leave, Hazir doesn’t fail to inform the team about the same.

Even when someone decides to cancel their vacation. Not to mention the crazy reactions from the team. Damn you, Slack!

“Hazir helps us take data-driven decisions, it gives a bird’s eye view of our progress”, Rajneesh believes.

When we shared it with our friends at Super, they loved this unconventional approach towards the everyday problems in an organisation. Some startups even asked for an access to Hazir. We’re adding more features to it to make things smoother. If you’re facing a similar issue and you feel that Hazir could solve it for you, all you have to do is click here to get your hands on it. It’s free. :)

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