Editing tracking settings per team member

Different settings for one person: occasionally necessary, and it makes their numbers incomparable. A profile setting beats the account-level one.

Different settings for one person: occasionally necessary, and it makes their numbers incomparable. A profile setting beats the account-level one.

Change it

1. Open the Team members page and open the person's Zendesk WFM profile.
2. Set auto-tracking: on, and their day starts with their first activity; off, and they clock in and out by hand.
3. Set task lock, which keeps somebody clocked into one ticket while they open others to research.
4. Note why, somewhere your team will find it.

Two consequences follow. A setting on somebody's profile takes precedence over the account-level setting, and a later change at account level does not reach the people who already have their own. So an exception made today is an exception forever unless somebody undoes it by hand. The same two settings can also be changed for several people at once from the Team members page.

When it is justified

• Somebody working mostly outside Zendesk, where auto-tracking records little.
• A team lead whose day is meetings rather than tickets.
• Somebody whose work genuinely does not fit the team's tracking pattern, once you have checked that it is the pattern and not the assumption that differs.

The cost

Their figures no longer compare with their colleagues'. Team averages including them are slightly wrong, and nothing on a report says so.

That is acceptable for a genuine exception and corrosive if it becomes common.

Write down why

Otherwise it looks like an accident in six months, and somebody will either change it back or copy it to somebody else without knowing the reason.

Watch for drift

Individual settings accumulate, one helpful adjustment at a time, until a team has five configurations and no comparable numbers. Review them together rather than one at a time.

Prefer changing the team

If several people need the same exception, the team setting is wrong. Change that instead; it is one decision rather than five.

Tell the person

Tracking settings are about them. Adjusting them silently is exactly the behaviour that makes a workforce tool feel like surveillance.

See also

• Turning auto-tracking and task lock on and off
• The Zendesk WFM team members page
• Tracking time spent outside Zendesk