Sending emails to employees on Leave of Absence?

[Alessandro Idro]

Is there a workaround to sending notifications to employees who are on leave of absence?

Our client cuts off access to their systems to any employee who is on LOA, and they want to be able to still send them case/incident notifications for anything they have active under their names. 

Is there a way for us to send case notifications to their personal email address on file instead of their work email address while they are on Leave of Absence?

[Tom Sienkiewicz · Accepted solution]

I'm wondering if you need a technical workaround or an "ethical" workaround 😄

Why would an employer send tasks to employees personal emails if they are on vacation? What about work-life balance?

Technically yes, it would be possible if you store details about their absence in ServiceNow, and if their personal emails are also added in ServiceNow. Theres multiple ways to handle such a requirement but that would be a custom functionality.

I am not aware of anything OOTB (there's Delegates but that requires you to pass tasks etc. to someone else).

[Alessandro Idro]

It's not about being on vacation, when an employee goes on LOA (Short Term Disability), and they open a case for this, they want to be able to send communications to them about any active cases. To your point, yes, really there shouldn't be anything going out to the employees on LOA. We have not found any workarounds for this issue. 

1. They do mark their employees as LOA in the user record

2. They do store personal emails in the user record, but we have not been able to edit the script that picks the email vs. any other email on the user record. 

[keithl22]

You should be able to accomplish this pretty easily with a couple of custom notifications and a custom mailscript to set the To:, CC:, BCC: field to personal email address value. ServiceNow is going to want an active user email to send this to as well so you could create a generic user whose email address is =  some shared mailbox. 

I believe the OOTB Onboarding notifications that are sent to the personal email instead of the work email are handled via workflow, so that may also be an option, either legacy or flow designer flavor. 

As Tomasz mentioned this would be custom, nothing OOTB to support. 

[Alessandro Idro]

Yes, the problem is, they have hundreds of notifications and they want ALL notifications to be able to be sent to their personal email address when they are on LOA. 

What we did was write a job to pick up anybody in LOA and override the email field with the personal email values and have indicated to the team to not update the email field for any users on LOA. We have not been able to find another work around this issue.