What happens when a task is missing info

Okay, so you have a task, but it's missing some information. What happens?

Well, the short of it is: nothing. A task that is missing information will get flagged, and if that flag isn't handled by the time in the workflow that it's supposed to be triggered, it won't trigger.

So let's look at this task. Alexandra is going through the onboarding workflow, and she should be getting a 'Welcome email' in 4 days, but as we can see that task is being flagged.

You can see why the task is flagged either by hovering over the flag, or from the task details page, by looking at the flagged tab.

So this email can't get sent until Alexandra's buddy gets set.

Why is that?

Well, if we look at the email, we can see that the email template uses the buddy variable to include the new hire's buddy's first name.

So let's go set that.

Right from the task I can click on Alexandra's name to see her profile page. From there, just click on the actions dropdown button and select, "edit profile."

Now I happen to know that Alexandra's onboard buddy is "Christi Hale," so I can set that right here using the employee search on the buddy field.

And then I click the update button at the button to save my changes.

Now, let's navigate back to the workflow, take a look at Alexandra's task list, and we can see that the flag is gone and the email is ready to be triggered.

But we caught that one before it was supposed to be triggered. What would happen if we hadn't?

Of course the email wouldn't be sent, but what would happen when we added the buddy?

Let's look at the same task, with the same flag. But now it's 1 day overdue.

We go and add Alexandra's onboarding buddy. Now looking at the workflow, it's still flagged but not because she's missing her buddy but because the due date, when the email was supposed to get sent, is in the past.

Sora tends to be cautious about these types of things. It doesn't want to just send the email now that the field is set. If it did that for one email, maybe that would be okay. But imagine if a new hire had a handful of tasks that weren't triggered because of one missing field. You probably wouldn't want to add that field and then automatically send a flood of emails.

So instead, the email is ready to go, waiting for us to tell it when to be sent. So we just go to the task, edit it, and then set the new send date. Let's send it first thing tomorrow morning.

Now we just update, and the email has no flags and is ready to be triggered tomorrow morning.