Rohan Ranade

From time to time, your direct report or colleague will take extended time away from work. It could be a parental leave or a sabbatical or an extended time off to take care of personal things. Whatever the reason, when they come back, they are going to be overwhelmed by the thousands of Slack and email notifications that they have missed while they were away.

I will be spending the next 2-3 days catching up on all the messages that I missed while I was out, so I will be slow to respond.

It’s common to find a Slack message like this from someone who has just returned. 2-3 days is a long time for getting all the context back, and almost always starts from not knowing where to start.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Do your returning colleague or direct report a huge favor, reduce their anxiety and get them caught up and productive again quickly. When they come back from their time away, have a short While You Were Out report ready for them. This report should capture all the important stuff that happened while they were out. They will gain all the relevant context quickly and will thank you from the bottom of their heart.

Here are some tips for writing such a report:

• Only write it for someone who is out for an extended period of time (which for me is 2 weeks or more). This effort isn’t worth it for anything less than 2 weeks of away time.
• Bullets are better than paragraphs of text.
• Not more than one page, please. Remember, it’s a tool to reduce time needed to gather relevant context. The report should only have stuff that matters, not everything that happened while the person was out.
• Don’t forget to include links to additional information/reference for each noteworthy item. An important organizational change that you are mentioning in the report? Make sure to add a link to the announcement that was sent to your engineering Slack channel.
• Gather notes while the person for whom you are writing is out. Don’t leave the compilation for one sitting, you aren’t going to remember every relevant detail. I make it a point to spend 5 mins every day adding noteworthy things that happened that day to a rough version. A day or so before the person comes back, I spend 10-15 mins to edit and polish the report.
• Co-create the report with someone else on the team. If that isn’t possible, at least have someone else review what you have compiled in the report.
• 🏆 Bonus tip: Once you have the report ready, use the schedule messages feature in Slack to ensure that the report is the first thing your colleague or direct see on their first day back at work.

While I have seen multiple formats, I use the 3Ps (People, Projects, Processes) format when I am compiling such a report for someone. Each P is a section with bullets with each bullet capturing something relevant/noteworthy.

Tags: #tips, #management