Blackout team calendars
Blackout team calendars are used to prevent employees from submitting requests for certain time-off types during certain defined periods. For example, retail traffic greatly increases from the day after Thanksgiving through the New Year. You may not want to permit employees to request scheduled time off during Thanksgiving weekend or other defined periods.
To ensure that employees do not submit time off requests on certain dates, or blocks of dates, you can define blackout dates. Employees cannot submit time off requests on any day covered by the blackout range.
You can also define grayout dates, where time off requests are permitted by the system but are discouraged by the business.
Calendar inheritance
By default, child teams automatically inherit the blackout calendars that are defined for their parent teams. With inheritance, teams do not have to redefine blackout or grayout dates that have already been defined further up in the hierarchy. Teams can elect to define their own blackout and grayout dates or redefine inherited blackout dates as grayout dates, or vice versa. Teams can also ignore inherited blackout or grayout dates by white-listing them.
For example, the corporate team (Base Team) defines Thanksgiving weekend (November 26, 2015 through November 29, 2015) as blackout dates.
This table shows the final blackout calendar of the Base Team:
| Final | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Start Date | End Date | Type | Defined On |
| 11/26/2015 | 11/29/2015 | Blackout | Base Team |
A child team, New York Region, redefines November 28 and November 29 as grayout dates.
This table shows the final blackout calendar of the New York Region team:
| Final | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Start Date | End Date | Type | Defined On |
| 11/26/2015 | 11/27/2015 | Blackout | Base Team |
| 11/28/2015 | 11/29/2015 | Grayout | New York Region |
Employees belonging to the New York Region team would be prohibited from requesting time off from November 26 to November 27, but would be permitted to submit grayout requests from November 28 to November 29.
Another child team, Canada, white-lists the US Thanksgiving weekend period entirely.
This table shows the final blackout calendar of the Canada team:
| Final | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Start Date | End Date | Type | Defined On |
| 11/26/2015 | 11/29/2015 | Whitelisted | Canada |
Employees belonging to the Canada team would have no restrictions on their time off requests from November 26 to November 29.