Out of Office for Jira: How to Prevent Jira Issues from Being Assigned to Unavailable Teammates

[Tetiana Bondar]

How many Jira work items (issues/tasks) are sitting idle right now... simply because they were assigned to someone who's on vacation?

It's a frustratingly common problem.

A developer goes on PTO. A QA engineer calls in sick. A product manager is away for a week.

Meanwhile, Jira keeps happily assigning work to them.

No warning.
No visibility.
No indication that the work won't even be looked at for days.

Then comes the familiar routine:

• Someone notices the issue hasn't moved.

• The assignee turns out to be out of office.

• The issue gets reassigned.

• Sprint commitments start slipping.

• The team loses momentum.

The frustrating part?

This problem is completely preventable.

The hidden cost of assigning work blindly

Most Jira teams have excellent processes for planning work.

But when it comes to assigning work, they're often making decisions without one critical piece of information:

Is this person actually available?

Without visibility into planned absences, every assignment is essentially a guess.

Most of the time you'll guess correctly.

Sometimes you won't.

And those "sometimes" become delayed releases, unnecessary meetings, Slack messages asking where someone is, and project managers spending valuable time redistributing work that should have been assigned correctly in the first place.

Introducing Out of Office for Teamployees

That's exactly why we built Out of Office.

It's a new Teamployees feature that brings employee availability directly into the Jira work item assignment workflow.

Instead of discovering days later that the assignee is away, Teamployees checks availability before the work item is created or updated.

If the selected assignee is currently on vacation or sick leave, Jira immediately displays an Out of Office warning.

Now the person creating the work item can simply choose another available teammate.

Problem solved before it becomes a problem.

How it works

The setup is intentionally simple.

A Jira administrator selects the Spaces (projects) and Work types where the Out of Office rule should apply.

From that moment on:

• A user creates or edits a Jira work item.

• Teamployees checks the selected assignee against the Teamployees Calendar.

• If the assignee is away, Jira displays an Out of Office warning.

• The user can assign the work item to someone who's available before saving.

No extra clicks.

No manual calendar checks.

No additional process for the team.

It simply works in the background whenever work is assigned.

Why teams love it

Out of Office helps teams:

• Avoid assigning work to unavailable teammates

• Reduce unnecessary reassignments

• Keep sprint work moving

• Respond faster to new Jira work items

• Plan workloads using real availability instead of assumptions

• Prevent avoidable delays before they happen

For project managers, it's one less thing to monitor.

For developers, it means fewer unexpected assignments while they're away.

For the whole team, it creates a smoother workflow with less administrative overhead.

Available now in Teamployees

Out of Office is now available in Teamployees.

If you're already using Teamployees, simply enable the feature for the Jira projects where you want assignee availability checks to work.

Not using Teamployees yet?

Install it from the Atlassian Marketplace and start managing vacations, sick leave, and employee availability directly in Jira. With Out of Office, your team can make smarter assignment decisions and avoid unnecessary delays before they happen!