Pair staff to employees based on criteria and rotate through the assignments

Hallie.b

Hello,

I am trying to set up a sheet where we have a form attached to it that an employee submits to have a "coffee chat"/1:1 with someone from a different department. Within each department we would have multiple employees that can be chosen from to have that 1:1. I want my sheet to auto-assign someone from the department they choose to that employee row. In addition, each department has multiple people to choose from and I want it to rotate through. For example, if an employee submits a form and asks to have a 1:1 with the finance department. I want the form to auto-populate someone from the finance department on the backend into my sheet for that employee to talk with. The caveat is that the finance department has 5 people that I want the sheet to rotate the auto-populate/assignment through so the same person from finance isn't consistently getting a 1:1 but that they are all taking turns talking to an employee as employees submit forms. I have multiple departments and multiple people per department.

I hope that makes sense.

Stefan

Hi @Hallie.b,

without knowing what the intent is for organising "coffee chats" via software, with Smartsheet this could possibly be done by counting assignments in a helper column and using form logic to select the person with the lowest count.

BUT, what about the times the people requested are not available (due to whatever) or just not the right match? In my experience, organisations either have people capable of answering questions provide availability views (via calendar etc.), or (help desk) a common email address where they internally assign who will watch for incoming requests/questions etc.

Hope this helps and sorry for not just answering the original question ;-)

Stefan

Hallie.b

Hi @Stefan ,

I don't need to know calendar availability. The employees will do that outside of Smartsheets. We just need to keep track of how many requests each person from each department is getting and keep it rotating. The scheduling piece isn't going to be apart of this process. The matching will also be correct because it will be based on the department the employee chooses so everyone within that "department" will be able to answer/chat with any employee that chooses that department.