Assign tasks to employees with work items

Help center / Your team

Work items are jobs for the team, such as resetting an aisle or counting the backroom. Each one can have several assignees, optional locations, a due date and a status, and everyone sees the same board.

How to delegate tasks with a work item

1. Open Work and choose New work item.
2. Enter a title of up to 160 characters and, if it helps, details of up to 2,000 characters.
3. Pick a due date, or leave it blank for work with no deadline.
4. Under Assign people, tick each person who should do the job.
5. Under Locations, tick the stores it applies to, or leave them all unticked for business-wide work.
6. Choose Save work item. The item appears in the To do column.

To change an item later, choose Edit work on its card. To remove it, choose Delete and confirm.

Move work through the board

The board has three columns: To do, In progress and Done. Each card has a Status list that sets its task status. Pick a new value and the card moves to that column, and the change saves for everyone in the business. It works like a simple kanban board, with one card per job and no extra stages to configure.

Each card shows the people assigned, the locations, and the due date if one is set. A card with no locations reads Business-wide. A card with no people reads Unassigned, and a person who has been deactivated shows as Inactive person until you reassign the item.

Who can do what

• Managers, or anyone with the work permission, create, edit and assign items. The permission is called Manage work assignments, and the Owner, Admin, Manager and Assistant manager roles include it.
• Employees update the status of items assigned to them. They cannot edit, reassign or delete an item, and they cannot change the status of someone else's work.
• Filter the board by person or location to see one person's list or one store's jobs.

How to track employee tasks

Use the two filters above the board. Choose a name under Person to see that person's employee task list across every column, or choose a store under Location to see what is open there. The counts beside To do, In progress and Done follow the filters, so you can see at a glance how much of one person's work is finished.

A weekly routine helps. Filter by each store, check what is still in To do past its due date, and talk to the people named on those cards.

Write work that gets done

Clear retail store tasks leave less to guess. A title such as "Count backroom pet food, record in Inventory" says what to do and where the result goes. Put measurements, product names or the reason for the job in Details.

As a worked example, before a large delivery a manager could create three items for one store. "Clear space in the backroom" goes to one employee, due the day before. "Receive the delivery in Inventory" goes to two people, due on delivery day. "Restock the cereal aisle" goes to the same two people, due the day after. Each person filters by their own name and sees only their part.

Good delegation is a management skill in its own right. UC Berkeley's guide for managers covers it as a chapter of its own, and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management lists planning work and monitoring progress among the core parts of managing employee performance. A title, a due date and a named person are the planning part; the board is the monitoring part.

Good to know

• Work items are saved with the business, not in workspace backups.
• A business can hold up to 250 work items. Delete finished items to make room.
• A restore cannot remove a location that still has work assigned to it.
• Work items do not change stock or planogram checklists. Checklists for approved planograms live in Tasks.

Common questions

Can a task have multiple assignees?

Yes. Tick as many people as the job needs. Every assignee sees the item when they filter by their own name, and any of them can update its status.

Can one person have several work items?

Yes. A person can hold any number of items, up to the business limit of 250 in total. The Person filter shows all of them in one place.

Is this enough task management for small business teams?

For a store team that needs a shared list of jobs with owners, places and dates, yes. The board does not send reminders, track time, or repeat items on a schedule, so recurring jobs need a new item each time.

Coming soon

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