I am building a leave request process for our external employees (our employees at our customers).
Some of our external employees in a specific customer belongs to two or sometimes 3 different divisions in our company. The external employees doesn’t know to whom division they belong, therefore I cannot put the divisions names in a drop down menu for them to choose from.
Each division has its own manager than our external employees need to take leave approval
from.
I thought of putting customer names in a drop down menu, but again I am stuck with to which division manager should I assign the task for approval and on what criteria.
I thought of putting employee names in a drop down menu and assign each employee to his division manager, but the challenge here is that, the employees might change or leave or additional employees might join. I will be then obliged each time to adjust the customized fields accordingly.
@Samer_Jaber - I think you are wise to resist using the custom field for the employee to select their name. As you said, that would need to be updated AND you’d need to update your approval automations every time an employee joined or left.
Obviously, to route these approvals, you’ll need some type of consistent data. If they don’t know their division, … do they know their manager?
If so, that’s a much easier route.
Create a single select dropdown custom field for the external employees to select from the form.
Make the options in that custom field match the names of the managers
Set up rule automations to route the approvals based on the custom field.
If a manager is replaced, just adjust the manager name on that specific custom field option and route the rule to the replacement manager.
Since managers likely change less often and there are fewer of them, this will be a much easier way to go.
Assuming they all have Asana accounts you could make the form internal in the form settings, which enables the option to automatically be added as collaborator, which should automatically inform them of leave approval. (Turn it into an approval task with a rule). It may be wise to test this. To be sure you can add a “if approval status is changed” rule that adds a comment.
Depending on the plan you have you might want to consider how many rules you want to put into this system to be mindful of the plan limits.
You could use a division or division lead single select field and add a “I am unsure about my division” option. (connect it to the form question). Then with rules based on this field ensure the task ends up at someone who knows the roster forwards it to the right division, and informs the employee which division/division lead they should select next time.
Another option is to add a hyperlink to a website or shared file where you post a roster of who should request leave where.
Or you could duplicate the form, and have each division lead share the form link for who should request leave at their division. Drawback: This would mean more forms to maintain if the process changes.
You can have rules in place to automatically forward the request to the right division when the division field gets changed. (have collaborators set to comment only, so only division leads can change this/approve this.)
Even more polished: In the forwarding rule add an action that comments the link to the form that they should use the next time they request a leave.
Good luck, and let us know if you have further questions.
1- the external employees only know which customers they are working with. They don’t know their manager because they have their own managers in the customer side and they don’t need to know who is their managers from our company.
2- They don’t have Asana account. I was planning to tell them about the status of their leave through sending email to their outlook account (the new functionality that has been implemented recently).
3- I don’t have problems with routing approvals once the manager has been identified.
4- I am building a unified portal for the HR department and I need them all to use one unified leave form.
5- I wish that we can have rules to add automatically options to the customized field. In that way, whenever a new employee is added on another project, it would trigger the rule to add this new employee to the drop down menu of the current employees.
6- It seems that there is no solution for what I’ve asked for except a workaround of adding employee names to a drop down menu and link it to his/her division. whenever a new employee is added or resigned, I would need to manually add/remove him/her.
Anyway, thank you for trying to help me… Much appreciated.
