[Interviews] Partial Days Off

Hi - is there any way to integrate the MS Outlook Calendar into Wrike? We would love to be able to see someone's Out of Office ?

I would love it if the individual Work Schedules were somehow relatable to PTO tasks. Wrike has no system level PTO management, so we have Tasks that are used with Request Forms and Calendars to handle PTO. However, you then have to manually update their Work Schedules since there is not native way of integrating these things.

Thank you for this feedback, folks, Maria is keeping an eye on this discussion 🙌

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

This is great! Due to time zone I can't attend a session however wanted to add some comments. Not sure if this could be part of it but we also have a number of staff that work a 9 day fortnight which means they have a RDO every second week and sometimes work different amount of hours each day to make up this time.  Due to the fact we can only do a set work schedule for a week I end up having to block off the RDO in every second week for the whole year. If there was an option to set a 2 weekly schedule that would be helpful as well as the ability to have different hourly capacity on each day if needed.  

The ability to add partial days off will be very useful for capacity planning.

Jason Pontius We have asked our Wrike reps for the same feature! We do the same thing where people have to create a subitem for their PTO so it appears on their schedules/dashboard but we also like the work schedule feature because it shows as "unavailable" when you try to tag them. It would be nice if we could create automations from work schedules

I would love to have the ability to block off partial days. I also agree with the comments above about setting up a recurring day off or relating a task (or an automation?) to the user's Work Schedule; we also use a form and calendar to manage PTO and then update the work schedules manually.

In addition to these, I would love to be able to copy holidays from one work schedule to another. We have different schedules for different locations (not user schedules, but time zone or country) and it would be nice not to have to add holidays in every year to every different schedule. Or if copying isn't a possibility, then maybe a holiday schedule that you do once and then can be applied to different work schedules.

Great thoughts above! Maria Dudko could you confirm if this potential feature will apply more widely than Pinnacle subscriptions? If so, I may have interested stakeholders.

We would love the ability to block off partial days. At minimum a 1/2 day - this is something common the team takes. It would be even better if you can block off the 1st or 2nd half of the day. 

For recurring days - Claire, have you considered adding additonal work schedules? We have this set up in our agency, so if someone only works 4 days a week Mon-Thur then I have a schedule to reflect this. Some team members are MTW, some MTWR, others are TWR. So I have a work schedule for each scenario. 

Courtney Maletic I actually have too many different work schedules. This is why I would like a way to copy stat holidays or have master stat holiday calendars that can be applied to different work schedules. I have over 15 different work schedules set up and each year I have to add holidays to each one separately. I don't want to add more work schedule to the list I have to manage, so being able to set up recurring days off on the same work schedule would be helpful.

I also need the ability to have people off for hours or part days.  My install team runs almost solely on calendars for their schedule, and anytime there is a day, or part day off, I have to create a separate task for there time off. 

I also find it very inconvenient that the calendar doesn't show stat holidays.  For example, Thanksgiving is a day off, and it sure would be nice if that day was blocked out, and read "Thanksgiving Day"

Hi everyone!

Thanks for all your comments! We really appreciate the feedback.

John Egleston, to your question: the partial day off functionality will be available starting from the Business plan.

Maria Dudko Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Maria Dudko Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Maria Dudko do you still have times open to discuss partial days off?  I went to your link, and it says no times available. 

Hi Danielle Jones, thanks so much for your interest! We had a wonderful response, and all the available slots have now been filled.

While the sessions are full, we are still reading all the feedback here, so please feel free to share any thoughts you have on partial days off in this thread. Thanks again for your willingness to help!

Maria Dudko Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Maria Dudko Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Hi Maria Dudko

Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to schedule a meeting, but I’d still like to share some feedback here on how we currently work with Wrike capacity and work schedules.

Our current setup:

1. Most employees work 8 or 9 hours a day, 4 days per week. We manage around 17 different schedules for all variations.

2. For employees on special schedules, we create recurring tasks with effort to balance out their capacity.

3. We use a request form for time off. The workflow looks like this:

   • The employee selects their own name (or someone else’s, e.g. for managers).

   • The department is selected, which determines the approver.

   • The employee then chooses the type of request:
     a) Multi-day leave → vacation, special leave, unpaid leave (redirect to page 2)
     b) Single-day leave → day off or exchange of a scheduled day off (redirect to page 3)
     c) Partial-day leave → start later, leave mid-day, or leave early (redirect to page 4)

On the redirected page, employees specify dates and comments. For partial-day specify how many hours and start&end time.

The approver can approve or deny the request. After that:

• Multi-day leave → no manual change needed

• Single-day off → no manual change needed

• Exchange of schedule-free day → manual adjustment  in schedule needed (mark “additional workday” and change original day to “other non-working”)

• Partial-day leave → default effort = 1h manual update required to match actual hours

Workflow statuses:

• Application received

• Being processed

• Approved

• Taken -> Task is moved by automation to a archive folder

• Cancelled

• Rejected

4) The schedules changes (tasks) can be viewed in Wrike Workload & Calendars. 

By department we have a calendar for each employee showing there schedule changes. So they have insight in there own and co-workers schedule changes.

This setup works for us for now, but we’d love to see more automation between schedules, capacity, and requests.

Where we see room for improvement:

• Some manual steps remain, especially around hours for partial-day leave and exchange of free days.

• It would make sense if requests could be directly applied to the work schedule with one click (both ways: from schedule → request and request → schedule).

• Ideally, schedules and request forms should integrate more closely, with capacity automatically calculated based on hours left.

• We need the schedule to be visible directly from Calendar and Workload view
• Private comments (only for managers to see)

Hope this helps!

Hi Jacco Stam 👋  Sorry for the delayed response! Thank you for taking the time to share such detailed feedback about how you’re using Wrike capacity and work schedules. This is very helpful and insightful! I’ve shared your comment with Maria now 👍

Rohan V Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Rohan V Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover