Assigning a task

Whether it's syncing data or sending emails, most of the tasks in your workflows can probably be automated. But there will always be some things that you just need a person to do. Like setting up a new hire's desk or meeting them at the door on their first day. For these things, it's best to use a task assignment.

From the Workflow management page:

  1. Click the Actions dropdown and select Add Task Template
  2. Give the task a name
  3. Select Task Assignment from the list of task types.

Next, chose the Assignee. The assignee can be one specific person at your company or it can be a person related to the employee going through the workflow, like their manager or mentor. For this task, I want it to be assigned to the person's HR coordinator.

Now, for task assignments, task instructions can be pretty important for getting the right information to the assignee so that they can complete the task. And in the instructions you can include any data from the employee profile using dynamic variables. Just start typing "{{" to get a list of all the available variables to include. For this task, I might include the answer from the "Favorite candy" question in the new hire's fun facts survey so the coordinator can get it for their desk, or maybe I might want to include the answers from an IT survey about any ergonomic needs they might have for their desk.

And, finally, I want to trigger the task assignment 3 days before the new hire's start date, so the HR coordinator has plenty of heads up, but I want the due date to be the day before the start date so that it's all set when the new hire shows up on their first day.

Then, like all other tasks, you can filter to decide which employees going through the workflow will have this assignment task triggered. If no filters are selected, everyone in the workflow will get the task. For this task, I just want to filter so that anyone who is not a remote employee gets this task.

And that's almost it. Now click the Create button.

If it's an active workflow, you'll get this prompt giving you two options. The first option is to apply the changes to the employees who are currently in the workflow. This will add the task to these people's workflows. The second option will only include the task in people's workflows going forward.