How to put your leave on Teams

Two ways to say you are away

One is a status message. Write a line under your profile picture and anyone who clicks your name sees it. The other is scheduled out of office. Set a period and anyone who messages you during it gets an automatic reply, and your status changes to out of office.

Scheduled out of office is the one built for leave. A status message stays until you come back and delete it. Scheduled out of office ends by itself at the time you set, so there is nothing to remember on your first day back.

The support page says Teams automatically syncs with Outlook's out of office replies. If you already turned on automatic replies in Outlook, you do not need to do it again in Teams. The Outlook steps are in a separate article.

Schedule out of office, step by step

Select your profile picture or initials at the top right of Teams. Choose Set status message, then Schedule out of office below it.

Turn on automatic replies. Type your message in the box. To reply to people outside your organization as well, turn on Send replies outside my organization and write a separate message for them.

Turn on Send replies only during a time period and enter the start and end date and time. Leave this off and the replies keep going until you switch them off by hand. Select Send when you are done.

When the period starts your status switches to out of office, and anyone who sends you a chat gets the message you wrote.

What to put in the reply

Give the dates you are away and the date you are back. Next week means different things depending on when it is read.

If someone is covering urgent matters, name them. Ask them first.

If you will not read messages while away, say so. Saying you will check occasionally sets up an expectation of a reply.

Is there a legal order when leave overlaps?

The statute does not say who gives way when two people want the same day. Article 60(5) of the Labor Standards Act says the employer shall grant leave at the time the worker requests, and may move it only where granting it then would seriously disrupt business.

So when two requests land on the same day, who goes first is decided by your company's work rules or your team's practice. Some teams go by who asked first. Some give priority to whoever gave way last year. Some approve only requests that already name a cover. This article does not say which is right.

Putting your dates in Teams first does not give you priority. It does make a clash visible early. If you do not know which rule your team uses, check the work rules or ask your manager.

What this article does not cover

If your screen differs from what is written here, open the support page linked below. This article only transcribes menu labels. Your company's leave request procedure is separate, and posting in Teams is a notice, not a request.

How many days of leave you have and when they expire is what the calculator on this site works out. Enter your start date and it lists accrual and expiry dates.