Your holiday handover process can be MUCH simpler – I’ll show you how. 

I just spoke at a session for Commsverse with my friend Ben Lee, Head Nerd at N-able. We talked about M365 Productivity tools like Planner and Loop, and gave some examples about how they can actually be useful in day-to-day work. 

Here’s one we explored… 

It’s coming up to the time of year where people will be off on their summer holidays. That means the dreaded holiday handover looms large. 

If you need to delegate actions to others while you’re away from the office you’ll no doubt have experienced this: 

• Scrabbling about with email threads and SharePoint document links trying to pull everything together 
• Thinking you’ve pulled everything together into a nice email or document to hand over, only to think of more action items as soon as you’ve sent it, resulting in a couple of follow up emails where the subject line is “Sorry – last thing…” 
• A 45 minute meeting to explain everything before you go, and another 45 minute meeting to find out what happened to those action items when you get back. 

Using Microsoft Loop and Teams Chat can make this a lot less painful. 

Here’s how: 

Head to Chat in Teams and set up a Loop component in a new message. You can do this using the little loop icon: 

A Loop component is really flexible and you can put all sorts of different types of content in there. Type a / to find some of the pre-set templates available, like the progress tracker table: 

This creates a table for you where you can easily add action items, assignees and dates:

But you’re not limited to just this format within the Loop component. 

You can also add free text for any FYI info  

You can create emphasis with ‘callouts’ too

And once you’ve sent the Loop component in the chat message, you can continue to edit it without the person on the other end receiving an ‘update’ each time. They’ll just see the live version of whatever content is currently in the Loop component. The bonus for them is that they don’t have to go hunting around for your notes while you’re off, they’re all safe there in the Teams Chat message. 

If you had to hand over items to a team of multiple people, you could do the same thing by setting up a Loop component in a group Chat or a Teams Channel. 

The best thing about this for me is that, with everything in one Loop component, when you come back from holiday, you don’t have to trawl through your email inbox and Teams chats to work out if the items you have delegated were completed while you’ve been away. 

You can simply come back to the Loop component, see what your colleague has ticked off (or not!) and any comments or updates they’ve added to the Loop component too! No need for long meetings delving into the ins-and-outs. 

Another bonus is that any tasks you assign in the Loop component will also show up in My Day for your colleague, which they can access via Outlook:

So they’ve kind of got no excuse to ignore the action items. 

Goes without saying (But I’ll say it anyway) that if your colleagues are unfamiliar with Loop, you’ll need to let them know how to play around with it and the benefits of using it for this scenario before you head off, to make sure they’re bought in to using the tool. 

What are you using Loop for? Let me know in the comments or on LinkedIn!