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How to manage colleagues on vacation, annual leave, or long-term leave
How to manage colleagues on vacation, annual leave, or long-term leave

How to deal with a colleagues email and work when they are out on various leaves (vacation, annual leave, disability, child-bonding leave)

Andi Ancheta avatar
Written by Andi Ancheta
Updated over a week ago

How to manage Emails

We recommend creating an out of office from your email client as you normally would and direct clients to another colleague on your team. If the colleague is auto-sharing their emails, any emails received during the leave will automatically go onto the Contact timelines for easy access. There is no ability to assume another user's Triage at this time.

How to manage Work & Tasks for short-term leaves of absence

For short-term leaves of absence (vacation, annual leave, short-term disability, etc.) there are four different options that you can choose from:

1) Re-assign the work;

2) Share colleagues saved work view;

3) Build future tasks and re-assign existing work items;

4) Use My Week to review a colleague's work and tasks (and process on their behalf).

For option #1 (re-assigning the work), you can easily change the Work Assignee on the work header or drag and drop work cards from the Work Kanban view when sorting by Assignee. When doing so, you will be prompted on whether you would like to move additional things like Tasks, Automaters and Estimates. If selecting these, all things related to that colleague on the Work item will be redirected to the new person. Note: If the work item is on a repeating schedule, the work assignee will revert back to the original colleague when the next work item is built but the tasks, estimates, and automaters will continue to reference the colleague who took over the work temporarily.

For option #2 (sharing a colleague's saved work view), this provides the person or team taking over the colleague's work to view exactly how they view the items in their possession. Using the saved work view, you could easily monitor and take action on things that required that colleague's attention when out. While this doesn't move the ownership to someone else, it does provide the visibility needed to ensure work progresses forward.

For option #3 (build future tasks and re-assign the work), this corrects for the negative aspects in option #1. For this option, prior to re-assigning the work, go to the work's work schedule, review the Work tab on Repeating Work, and ensure the Tasks & Estimates for the next work item in the series has built / processed these. If not, select the work item, go to the Tasks tab, and generate the tasks, estimates and automators. By doing so, the work item will build the regular work item going forward and you are free to re-assign the work as in option #1, and the future work items in the sequence will remain in the possession of the colleague who is out currently on leave.

For option #4 (Use My Week to manage), this is similar to option #2. Use My Week to select the view of the Colleague and then manage their My Week accordingly. This will enable you to monitor what needs to be done while not re-associating the work out of the hands of that colleague on leave.

How to manage Work & Tasks for long-term leaves of absence

If a colleague is out for a longer period of time (e.g. maternity / paternity / child-bonding leave, long-term disability, etc.), then someone(s) in the firm most likely will to assume the existing work and tasks that the team member had in their possession.

For this, you might consider archiving a colleague. By using this option, Karbon will ask who in the firm you would like to redirect all open items (work, tasks, etc.) to. Choose this option only if one person will assume all things that were in the colleague's possession. If things are to split between people, then follow the same process for short-term leaves to divvy up the work.

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