When a technician calls in sick: how to replan the day without losing it
It's 6:45 and the phone rings. One of your technicians is sick. The first resident on their list expects them at 8:00, and more appointments are booked for the rest of the day. Some of those people have taken time off work for it.
What happens next is familiar to anyone who has run an installation business. Someone in the office starts calling. Every appointment needs a new date, and every new date has to fit into a week that was already full. Some appointments move to colleagues, and their routes no longer make sense. By lunchtime the planner has spent the whole morning on the phone, and the plan for the rest of the week is a patchwork.
In the flu season this can happen several times a week. This post looks at what a sick day really costs and how to plan so that it hurts less. At the end, we show how Jarvis handles it.
What a sick day really costs
The obvious cost is the lost working day. In our experience the bigger costs are the ones around it.
The appointments. A booked appointment is a promise to someone who arranged to be home. Every one of them has to be cancelled before the person waits in vain, and each needs a new date. A resident who is called at 7:30 and offered a slot two weeks later is rarely pleased about it.
The rest of the week. Rebooked appointments don't disappear. They push into days that were already planned. The work orders that move to colleagues land on routes that may be in a very different part of town, and a single work order far from the rest of the route can cost more time than the job itself. One sick day can leave its mark on the whole week.
The skills and the tools. Not every technician can do every job. A work order that needs a certain qualification can only move to someone who has it, and that person may be on the other side of town. The same goes for tools: a special job may need equipment that not every van carries.
The office. The planner didn't come in with an empty day. Their own work was already planned, and when replanning by hand takes the whole morning, that work gets pushed into the evening. Replanning under time pressure is also where mistakes happen. Somebody gets missed, and that is usually the person who complains.
Plan for it before it happens: work lists for teams of two
One of the most useful things we have seen is planning work lists for teams of two technicians instead of one.
It works because not all sites are the same. Some have a booked appointment with a resident or customer. Others are free access sites: places the technician can enter without anyone being there, for example a meter room the caretaker has opened up or a technical room with a key safe. A free access site can be done today or next week, and nobody notices the difference.
A good work list for a pair mixes both kinds. On a normal day, the two technicians work through it together. When one of them is out, the other focuses on the booked appointments and keeps as many of them as possible. The free access sites wait for a day when there is time. Far fewer people need to be called, and the technician who is still working has a full and sensible day.
With work lists for single technicians, the same sick day means every appointment on that person's list has to move. There is nothing to shift around inside the list, because there is nobody else on it.
Two things decide whether this works:
- The list needs enough free access work. If almost every site on a list has a booked appointment, a pair has the same problem as a single technician, only twice as large. Plan the share of free access sites deliberately.
- The remaining technician works a normal day. They should not try to do two people's appointments. Decide early which appointments stay, and move the others while there is still time to tell people.
Once the team is complete again, schedule the deferred free access sites before they pile up.
Other things that help
- Know who can do what. A current list of each technician's skills and certificates makes it clear in seconds who can take over a work order.
- Tell people early. A message at 7:00 is better than a technician who doesn't turn up at 10:00. Give residents a way to pick a new slot themselves, so the office doesn't have to call everyone back.
One more point: the plan only needs to know that someone is absent. Why they are absent is health data, and it does not belong in the planning tool or the team chat.
How Jarvis handles a sick day
Jarvis plans the daily work of every technician anyway, so a sick day is a change to that plan rather than an emergency. The planner starts a single workflow to replan the absent technician, and Jarvis reallocates all of their work orders in one go.
In doing so, Jarvis does what a good pair does on its own. Booked appointments are kept and move to colleagues who have the skills each job needs, unless the planner decides to reschedule them. Free access sites are pushed back to a day when there is time. Jarvis's routing algorithms then rebuild the routes of the technicians who take on extra work, so the new day still makes sense on the map.
Where an appointment does change, Jarvis contacts the people affected straight away and agrees a new time with them by phone or SMS. Residents can also choose another slot themselves, around the clock.
The technicians see their updated day in the Jarvis app, and the project manager sees what the sick day means for the rest of the week. The planner's morning goes back to planning.
If sick days regularly upset your week, we're happy to show you how Jarvis replans a morning like this. Book a 15-minute walkthrough.
By Valter Pasanen, Founder, Grid Jarvis. Published 2026-09-30.