Out of office#
Heading into a vacation? Good, you earned it! In order to ensure smooth sailing for the rest of the team please follow the following steps.
Request the time off#
Done through Bamboo. Any time off is needed to be approved by your lead.
Planning phase#
After the leave is approved, you can execute the following items
- Setup Out of Office in Google Calendar, and have it auto-decline new meeting requests
- Announce it during the Global Staff Meeting
1 week prior#
- Ensure your customers know you are on leave, and when you return
- Defer any non-essential work until your return
- Decline or reschedule any existing regular meetings (e.g. weekly syncs). Add a note to the decline to make it obvious in Google Calendar
- Handover work to a colleague that must take place during your absence (do it early so your peers can ask back if there would be questions)
- If you are on-call make sure your 1st and 2nd level shifts are covered by someone else
- If you have open tasks that might come up during your vacation create a post in the
#amazeeio-wdydt
channel with the following information:- Project
- Contacts (mail and phone)
- Tasks that you were working on
- Whom you handed it over to
Last day before heading out#
- Set a status on Slack that you are out of office
- Add
- OOO until ...
in your Slack display and full name to make sure external partners and clients know you are not available - Enable an autoresponder on your e-mail and direct people to
support@amazee.io
in case the matter needs to be handled during your absence
Example Out of Office message:
Thank you for your e-mail.
I am out of office, returning on Monday YYYY-MM-DD.
If you need to get a hold of our support team, please send an e-mail to support@amazee.io
Best regards
Firstname
If all of the above is done - Enjoy your time off!
Tricks for disconnecting during your time off#
Walking away from Slack might be challenging due to so many non-work-related channels which are fun to read and participate in. Take those few steps below might be nothing new, but it helps establish a boundary during your vacation. If you are still using your computer and your phone, it might be that additional step that you suddenly end up getting back into work mode.
- Pause notifications in Slack
- Log out from Google on your computer
- Disable mail syncing on your phone