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What's your process for handing off a job when a technician calls in sick?

Teresa Lund

6:45 am call. Jake's out with the flu. I've got four jobs on his board today including a commercial install that needs permits pulled. Usually I can split the smaller stuff between the other guys but the big one's got me stuck.

How do y'all handle this? Do you have backup techs on standby or just shuffle and pray? My supervisor wants me to document the handoff better but honestly we're moving too fast most mornings to do much more than a phone call and some quick notes in the job.

Specifically curious about:

  • How much job detail you try to transfer vs letting the new tech figure it out
  • Whether you notify customers or let the replacement handle it
  • Any FieldPulse features that help with this (tags? notes? something else?)

Thanks

Parents

  • We've got 34 techs and this still happens weekly. My dispatchers were spending 45 minutes some mornings just on phone calls.

    Simple change: sick tech calls dispatch first, not supervisor. Dispatch immediately flags jobs as "Needs Reassignment" in FieldPulse. Whole team can see it in the dispatch view.

    Customers get automated SMS with new ETA once reassigned. We don't call unless it's a same-day change after 10am.

    Handoff notes are mandatory. Tech doesn't clock in without reading them. Boring but it works.

  • in reply to Mike Dolan

    mandatory notes sound nice until you're the guy getting three reassigned jobs at 7am and the sick tech left garbage notes because they were actually sick, not planning to write documentation

    in my experience the best handoffs happen when dispatchers know the work, not when there's a policy

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