So you’re counting down the days until that much-needed getaway, and you’ve taken a week off to refresh and recharge. Imagine, seven whole days where your inbox isn’t what you immediately think of when you first wake up AND you’re not wondering if your co-worker really understood your memo. What if you didn’t have to stress about coming back to a week’s worth of work that’s only been ignored, where every email you received while away from the office is now flagged as ‘URGENT’?
When going on vacation, it’s important that those charged with taking the wheel understand exactly what they’ll be doing while you’re on leave. With TaskRay, you can rest assured that while imbibing your favorite summer spritzer by the pool, your projects and tasks are taken care of in your vacancy.
In this blog post, we will explore some of the features that are available as part of the Standard TaskRay package. We’ll look at some of the ways to prepare and delegate tasks, as well as review how managers can have visibility into the handed-off work to make sure everything is staying on track.
Let’s imagine for a moment that Charlie, a member of the Onboarding Team, is going on vacation. When preparing, the first thing that he does is review all his tasks that are due while he is on vacation to make sure they contain all the important details. Knowing that these tasks will need to be handed off to other team members, Charlie updates the task information and adds notes by creating Chatter posts on the respective tasks to communicate any updates that would be helpful while he is gone.
Once all the key details are communicated, Charlie teams up with his manager to determine a plan for delegating work to make sure nothing gets missed in his absence. When working on reassigning the tasks, Charlie and his manager use the Insights tab to identify the current workload for the other members on the team. This serves as a guide to ensure that no team member gets too much work assigned and all the work is delegated evenly across the team.
However, at the time of delegating the work, it might not be immediately apparent what the capacity will be for some of the team members. For this purpose, Charlie and his manager decide to utilize queues, which are often used as temporary placeholders for task assignment in TaskRay. In their org, an Onboarding Queue has already been configured, which Charlie’s manager uses for delegated task reassignment.
When reassigning the tasks, Charlie and his manager use Row View. In this view, they can group the tasks by Owner and move the tasks between the “Owner” groupings to reassign them in bulk, either to the Onboarding Queue or to any available onboarding team member. Alternatively, they could also reassign tasks on a one-off basis using TaskRay’s drag-and-drop task reassignment functionality or by updating the tasks manually.
Now that the necessary open work is reassigned and Charlie is off to his well-deserved vacation, there are a few different options for the rest of the Onboarding Team to view and pick up the tasks that were reassigned to the general Onboarding Queue. And, when working on the tasks, team members can rely on My Work to stay on track on all the items assigned to them that need to be completed.
The final important consideration for work vacations is making sure that managers have clear visibility into the delegated tasks to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. For this purpose, Charlie’s manager can generate a report on tasks to have a clear picture of how tasks are distributed and whether the work is being completed on time. Since TaskRay is native to Salesforce, Charlie’s manager can utilize Salesforce’s powerful reporting tools to relay all the necessary information from the tasks.
TaskRay makes it easy to plan for vacation and delegate any work that needs to be addressed while team members are away. With TaskRay, team members can fully relax when taking time off, and managers have clear visibility into the delegated work. In this blog post, we looked into the Standard TaskRay functionality for this purpose, but this can be taken even further when combined with robust resource management features available in our Premium Edition. For a more detailed look into how it can be taken to the next level, check out this blog post.