There are many of us who, as a natural part of our work, have the mandatory task of filling in time reports for each completed work week. In the best of worlds, of course you and all your colleagues always have a clear conscience when it comes to this.

Our time reports are the basis for both forecasting for our occupancy rate and invoicing to our customers. It is simply an important task if our business is to function well and we are to receive our salary every month.

In the companies I have worked in throughout my active working life as a consultant, it has always been the same. Either I or one of my colleagues forget (or postpone) filling in the time report within the given deadline. Completely unnecessary, but still a common problem. I guess it’s just not lustful enough because most of us have a greater passion for solving problems and creating great solutions for our clients. But by neglecting this simple and mandatory internal task, our closest leader almost always has to remind us, who have neglected the task, that it would be great if this is done as soon as possible (and preferably recently…).

In the example below, I will to show you how you can easily, using Power Automate and Yammer/Viva Engage, can automate this reminder so that your immediate manager can focus on other things and that you and your colleagues receive the necessary reminder without your manager having to waste his/her time on us who suffer from poor memory.

This is how you do it

Open Power Automate and select New Flow and “Build your own”.

Under “Choose a connector”, select “Scheduled” and then specify when, and with what periodicity, the flow should be run.

In the next step, search for- and select “Yammer” and then select the Action called “Post message”.

Here you specify which Yammer community the message should be posted to and the text the message should contain. When you have done this, click “Save”.

Now we are ready to test. Here you select “Manually” and click the “Test” button.

But that’s not enough if you thought so, you also need to click a button called “Run Flow”.

Now the flow is running and here you can either go to an overview that shows how it worked or you can click the “Done” button and then open Yammer to see if the reminder message has been posted (and posted to the correct Community).

In the best case and most likely it will look like this and you will know that everything is working and can sit back and wait for the reminder to be automatically sent out the next Friday afternoon before everyone takes the weekend off (or whatever time you chose in your case).