By Alex Yohn
Jul 18, 2013
We launched Kin one week ago yesterday. It was a quick ten months to get us to that one magical day where we could send an email to people around the world exclaiming “come ‘n get it!”, albeit in less colloquial english.
Lot’s of folks did, indeed, come and get it. We’ve had hundreds of companies in close to 60 countries sign up for Kin to learn how it fits into their unique workplaces.
How’s our team been during the first week?
Nose to the grindstone. We launched a secure, well-vetted application and have seen no downtime and, without exception, no major bugs. That hasn’t slowed us down though. We’re improving the existing feature set, and we’re well on our way to the next round of updates, due out in just a week’s time.
After ten months of discussing, designing, throwing out, prioritizing, arguing and building, it feels seriously grrrreat to have a beautiful, functioning application out the door and used by real people with real needs. It’s not something someone gets to feel too often in life.
Hearing thoughts from 59 countries
The feedback so far has been helpful, honest, patient, and best of all, plentiful! Kin’s young. Everyone gets that. We’ve got some work to do. Yep. The feedback, though, has been much more than pointing out those facts. Customers are spending huge amounts of time to share their thoughts about what’s working, what’s not, and why. To lodge a gripe or share a compliment takes only a couple of seconds. To dig down and really get to the why’s and how’s of why an experience is working or not takes lot’s of time. We’re getting a lot of that goodness.
What’s most encouraging to us (and for the future of Kin) is that everyone, without exception, notices and appreciates Kin’s beautiful interface and the fact that we’ve placed a huge value on how employees experience the app, not just the power user base of owners and operations people.
The mission
Kin isn’t perfect. Nor are the companies using it. But together, we’re on a mutual mission to improve the experience employees have at small companies around the world. We’re in it together, and that’s the most gratifying experience of all. It’s great having Kin out in the world. It’s a starting point in the mission. What’s even better is having the world respond, understand, and rally around the mission.
By Alex Yohn
Jul 11, 2013
Onboarding is our pride and joy and gets to the heart of what Kin is all about: informing and empowering employees.
Kin’s onboarding page for new hires centralizes the most important information a new team member needs: when to start, where to come, who to contact, what forms to fill out, and who they’ll be working with.
An onboarding page consists of tasks, files, welcome messages, tools, and team members.
What’s beautiful about the onboarding page is that you can set it up once and reuse it for all of your new hires, customizing only the information which is specific to each person. You can create reusable tasks which get assigned to the new employee or another team member who’ll be helping out. You can create Company Tools, which link employees to the most commonly used websites and software. Lastly, of course, you can select individual employees with whom the new hire will be working.
When you’re creating an onboarding page for a new hire, you can work in draft mode until you’re ready to publish. That means, you can edit and preview the employee’s page to your heart’s desire. Once you publish, the onboarding page is the first page the new hire sees when they sign into Kin.
The onboarding page is the first page a new hire sees in Kin when they sign in.
A tip from the Kin team
Ensure a new employee has the best experience on day one by getting them into Kin and using their onboarding page before they ever step foot in the door. It’ll maximize their productivity and minimize scrambling on your end.
Here’s a few other feature overviews for you:
> Kin Overview: Time Off
> Kin Overview: Users and Roles
> Kin Overview: Files
By Alex Yohn
Jul 11, 2013
The files feature is great for keeping digital records of all of your company’s policies and employee documents. It gives instant access to employees and managers alike and makes it easy to broadcast to the entire company when there’s a new update to a file (such as a security policy).
You can share a file one on one with an employee, a few of ’em, the entire company. When you add a file, you can select “Requires Completion”. This will notify the employee(s) that the file needs to be filled out and uploaded back into Kin.
Share a file with one or more employees, and request completion.
File completion is a great feature for new hires. You can get all of the paperwork shared and completed in advance of them starting. You get notified when each file is completed and they get a fantastic task list that lets them know which ones still need to be completed.
Employees sign or fill out files and send them back to their manager via Kin.
A tip from the Kin team
Don’t store I-9’s in Kin or, for that matter, anywhere else where you have other employee documents in the same place. By law, I-9’s need to be stored in their own, comfy location away from every other employee file.
Here’s a few more overviews for you:
> Kin Overview: Time Off
> Kin Overview: Users and Roles
> Kin Overview: Onboarding
By Alex Yohn
Jul 11, 2013
You can create as many time off policies as you need for your company. For example, we have a policy for vacation, for conference visits, and for sick time.
Time off can either accrue over time, or you can give all that time in one lump sum. Kin will automatically prorate time for you, too. For example, if you create a policy with 15 days of time off which refreshes at the start of each year, then deploy it in Kin on June 31st, Kin will give everyone 7.5 days of time off because it’s half way through the term already.
Create as many time-off policies as you need.
If you give more time off to employees, say, at the 1, 2, 3 year marks, create a policy for each year. You can move employees and their balances easily between those policies on their anniversaries, and Kin will automatically prorate and carry over their time off.
When an employee requests time off, their HR Manager will be notified to either approve or decline the request. When an employee edits a request which has already been approved (such as a date change), the request goes back through the approval process. HR Managers can also create time-off requests on behalf of employees, which comes in handy for sick time or emergency leave.
Employees request time off from their own, personal time-off balance page.
A tip from the Kin team
Some states, such as California, require you to roll unused time-off over to the next year or pay employees for that unused time at the end of the year. Check up on your particular state’s employment laws to make sure you’re doing things the right way!
Here’s a few other feature overviews for you:
> Kin Overview: Onboarding
> Kin Overview: Users and Roles
> Kin Overview: Files
By Alex Yohn
Jul 10, 2013
What about the small guys?
As of September of 2012, small businesses made up 99.7% of employers in the United States. Ninety-nine. Point. Seven. Percent. How crazy is that? Even crazier is how many HR management software tools there are for all those millions of small companies. There are like, well, 6.
Now, you may go google “HR management software” and find a lot more than six. HRIS and HRMS solutions are abundant to be sure. But, ya know what? They’re just not that consumable for small companies. Most tools have setup fees, take weeks to configure and install, and are very pricey. What small company has $50,000 laying around to help manage their team of 19 people? Not any of the ones I’ve spoken with.
Of the remaining HR software solutions which are positioned for small businesses, they’re laden with complex features and are focused almost exclusively on the employer’s experience, rather than creating a mutual and, dare I say, enjoyable experience for employees. Even aside from their complexity and lack of intuitive UI, they’re really difficult to get up and running. I still can’t fathom how a software company can stomach charging a customer to set up a new instance of an application. It’s not 1997.
When a small company is thriving and its founders recognize the need to do a better job managing their growing staff, where are they turning? To the only option: complexity. When I had the same problem a year and a half ago, the options were grim. Thus, the idea of Kin was born.
Running a small, growing business is difficult. Doing a good job at a few key aspects of managing a team shouldn’t be. I don’t understand why all these software companies don’t do what’s right for small business employers and, more importantly, employees by offering a simple, coherent web application which helps employers do a better job at the simple stuff.
I’m really excited about the impact Kin will have on small companies. Our core principles of fewer but better features presented in a simple, intuitive UI means thousands of small companies will finally have an HR management tool built for them, their price point, and their needs.
By Alex Yohn
Jul 3, 2013
In Kin, you can add employees one at a time or import the team via Kin’s CSV import tool.
Once an employee is created you can populate their profile for them or let them fill in their own information (address, bank info, etc). Here’s a screenshot of the Manage Team page where you can add new users to your account:
Add a new employee, or import a bunch, via the Manage Team page.
If you add your employees individually, you’ll also need to invite them to Kin individually by clicking “Send Invite” at the top of each of their profiles (see below). Importing users via CSV automatically sends the invites out after creating their profiles in Kin.
Once an employee is in Kin, you need to explicitly invite them by clicking “Send Invite”.
Roles: Account Owners, HR Managers, HR Support Users, and Employees
There are also a few roles in Kin you should know about. There is a single Account Owner who has access to all employee data and billing/account settings. HR Managers (created by the Account Owner and subsequent HR Managers) have access to all employee data, but are explicitly assigned to employees to manage time-off requests, files, and other tasks. HR Support Users are really just employees who have an extra page for tasks. They have no access to employee data, except for their own. Employees are users who only have access to their own employee data, but can correspond with HR Managers and view other team pages, like bios, the calendar, and job descriptions. You can manage the roles of your users by clicking your name in the upper right corner of Kin, then selecting “Manage Account”.
Give users HR Manager or Support roles on the Manage Account Roles page.
A tip from the Kin team
We suggest adding all of your employees to Kin, setting up your time-off policies and documents (and sharing them with those recently imported employees), and only THEN inviting your employees to sign in (via clicking “invite” on each of their profile pages). This saves them from getting a bunch of emails while you’re configuring Kin.
Here’s a few other feature overviews for you:
> Kin Overview: Onboarding
> Kin Overview: Time Off
> Kin Overview: Files