Telling People Things

Attendance produces a steady stream of events, and it is easy to notify everyone about all of them until nobody reads any of it.

Who needs to know

The person requesting leave: whether it was approved, promptly.

The approver: that a request is waiting, once, with a reminder if it sits.

The team: who is off, as a calendar they can look at — not as a message each time.

Whoever covers shifts: that an absence has been reported, immediately.

Payroll: absence dates before the cut-off.

That is the whole list.

Who does not

Everyone, about every absence. It is a disclosure, it is noise, and in a small business it travels further than intended.

Managers, about a person's balance changing.

The team, about who requested what and was refused.

Pull rather than push

A shared calendar people look at beats a message stream they scroll past.

Balances visible on demand beat monthly balance emails.

The exception is anything time-critical: a same-day absence affecting coverage needs a push, because a calendar nobody has opened yet does not help at seven in the morning.

The response-time problem

The commonest complaint about leave is not refusal but silence.

State a response time — three working days, say — and meet it.

A reminder to the approver after two days is worth more than any other notification in the system.

And an automatic escalation to someone else if it sits a week, where there is someone else to escalate to.

What to check when introducing a tool

What it sends by default, which is usually more than you want.

Whether an absence notification reveals the reason to people who do not need it.

Whether people can see each other's balances, which most teams do not want and some products default to.

Turn off what is not on the list above, before anyone logs in, because the first week sets the expectation.

The measure

If people still ask you questions the system notifies them about, the notifications are not being read.

Which usually means there are too many. Removing half of them generally improves the answer rate for the rest.

Turn off the defaults

Before anyone logs in, because the first week sets expectations.

Most products notify more than you want.

Check whether an absence notification reveals the reason to people who do not need it.

Check whether people can see each other's balances, which some products default to showing.

Keep the list from this note and switch off everything else, which can always be re-enabled if someone asks for it.

Check the difficult case

Use the service-desk workflow to frame one representative test for this issue. The useful evidence is the record created when an employee corrects an entry, a manager reviews it and an administrator exports it.