Detect when users are out of office via their Slack status, customize which emojis trigger detection, and choose whether the app asks you each time, skips them automatically, or stays out of the way.

What is Out-Of-Office Detection?

Out-Of-Office Detection looks at each user’s Slack status when a shift is about to start. By default, it recognizes 🌴 (on vacation), 🤒 (out sick), and ⛔ (out of office). You can also customize which emojis trigger detection, including custom workspace emojis.

A Slack status only counts as out-of-office if it’s set to last for a significant part of the shift (>25% of its duration), so a status that’s about to expire won’t block an upcoming shift.

Modes

Each rotation has three modes for handling out-of-office users:

• Ask each time (default): when the assigned user is detected as out-of-office, Rotation App posts a message in the rotation channel asking whether to assign someone else:

  ⚠️ Looks like [user] is out of office. Would you like to assign other people?

  The message includes a button to pick the next available user, plus a checkbox labelled “and automatically do so in the future, if a user is out of office”. Ticking the checkbox switches the rotation to Always skip from then on.

• Always skip: skip out-of-office users automatically. No prompt is shown.

• Never skip: ignore out-of-office statuses entirely. The user is assigned as scheduled, and no prompt is shown.

How to configure

1. Go to Home tab: Learn where to find Rotation App’s Home tab
2. Open your rotation’s menu and select ⚖️ Balancing & Availability.
3. Open Out-Of-Office Status Detection by pressing Configure.
4. Choose a mode in the dropdown:
   • Ask each time: prompt in the channel for each out-of-office assignment.
   • Always skip: skip out-of-office users automatically.
   • Never skip: ignore out-of-office statuses and assign the user as scheduled.
5. Press Save to apply.

Customizing the emojis

You can choose which Slack-status emojis trigger detection, and which kind of absence each one represents. Custom workspace emojis are supported.

These settings apply workspace-wide — every rotation in your team uses the same emoji-to-absence mapping.

Absence categories

• On vacation — fun time off, like vacations and holidays. Default: 🌴.
• Out sick — out due to illness. Default: 🤒.
• Out of office — out of office for any other reason. Default: ⛔.
• Unavailable for shifts — at work today but can’t take a shift, like conferences, focus time, commute, or weak connectivity.

The category an emoji belongs to controls how the in-channel prompt is phrased — for example, vacation says “on vacation (enjoy your time off!)” while sick says “out sick (get well soon!)”, and out-of-office stays neutral.

Steps

1. Open the Out-Of-Office Detection modal as described above, then press Manage emojis.
2. For each category, pick emojis from Slack’s emoji picker or type :emoji_name: directly into the field. Order doesn’t matter, and any non-emoji text is ignored.
3. Press Save.

What happens in the queue

• If a user’s Slack status expires within the first quarter of the shift, they’re treated as available regardless of mode.
• Out-of-office detection runs alongside Days of Availability and Overlap Prevention, so a user has to clear all three checks to be eligible for a shift.