The "Scribe Safety Net": How to Hand Over Your Workload (Without the Panic)

Preparing for an extended leave, whether it’s for a new baby, a medical necessity, or a long-awaited sabbatical, usually triggers a specific kind of professional anxiety. 

You aren't just handing off a "to-do" list; you’re trying to offload years of institutional knowledge so the business doesn’t skip a beat while you’re gone. You want to be present for your life's big moments, but it's hard to relax when you feel like a "single point of failure".

I sat down with Chase Hay to learn what he does before he takes his own extended leaves, and how he uses Scribe to help future-proof his work so it runs when he's gone. Read on to find out how you can do the same!

Who is Chase?

Chase Hay knows this pressure well. As an operations leader who helped scale Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt from double digits to over 500 global locations, he’s seen how easily a lack of documentation can create bottlenecks. Currently, as the Head of Strategy & Operations at High School Nation, he is preparing for the birth of his second son this March.

Chase doesn't have a lot of extra bandwidth right now, but he has a plan. He uses what he calls a "Scribe Safety Net" to ensure his team is supported and his phone stays silent while he’s off the clock.

Drawing from Chase’s experience in high-growth companies and non-tech-forward teams, here is your personal blueprint for a stress-free handoff!

From Frozen Yogurt to Tech Ops: Lessons in Scaling

During his time at Menchie's, Chase was responsible for training franchisees who often had zero restaurant experience. The brand’s CEO famously had only one requirement for new owners: that they had a "good heart."

To make these owners successful, Chase’s team had to create SOPs for everything, including how to mop a floor. He learned that while people are hired for their talent, they are often bogged down by just trying to figure out how to do the job.

"If you hire talented people and then bog them down with needing to figure out how to do things, that’s wasted talent. Make an SOP easy, and then allow talented people to do what they do." — Chase Hay

When your employees have what they need when they need it, it eliminates points of friction in their job and lets them work smarter and more efficiently without you being a bottleneck.

The "Taco Bell" Philosophy: Simplicity is Your Secret Weapon

The biggest mistake in handoffs is over-complicating the documentation. Chase advocates for the Taco Bell Style" of SOPs, which he learned from a mentor. 

In a Taco Bell kitchen, you won't find 50-page manuals. Instead, you'll see visual, step-by-step diagrams posted on the walls showing exactly how to build a Crunchwrap or a 5-Layer Burrito, folding and all. 

Chase applies this same logic to business operations:

• The 5-Step Visual: Just like the guides in a Taco Bell kitchen, your documentation should be simple enough for someone to follow off the street.
• Build for Humans: Hire talented people for the personal touch, but make the technical processes so simple that the how-to is never a barrier to their success.
• Psychological Safety: Even an SOP for something obvious creates a sense of security. When a teammate knows the answer is available in a Scribe, they stop spiraling about what-if scenarios.

Your Step-by-Step Leave Handoff Blueprint

Chase dove deep into the exact process he uses to prepare for his leave, and this can apply to any employee who’s considering taking an extended leave of absence. 

Before getting into the technical details, start by clearing the mental decks with a comprehensive audit of your daily life.

1. Performing a Mental Load Brain Dump
   
   Don’t wait until your last week to start. Chase recommends getting every responsibility out of your head and onto digital paper as early as possible.
   
   • List Every Task: Include daily habits, monthly reports, and even obvious steps like how to log into specific tools.
   • Capture as You Go: Keep your list open during your normal workflow to catch the invisible tasks you do on autopilot.
   • Prioritize (and Deprioritize): Identify the Must-Haves that keep the business running and deprioritize projects that can wait until you return.

Once you have a clear map of what needs to be documented, the next challenge is creating high-value guides without burning through your limited pre-leave energy.

2. Create Your MVP (Minimum Viable Process)
   
   When you're prepping for leave, time is your scarcest resource. Focus on making your documentation functional rather than formal.
   
   • Progression over Polish: A Scribe that shows the visual progression of steps is 1,000x better than no documentation at all, even if it’s unpolished.
     
     💡 Scribe Tip: Turn on the Scribe recorder while you work. It captures the process in real-time, surfacing hidden points of friction you might have forgotten to mention in a written manual.
     
     
   • The 5-Minute Rule: If a task feels too daunting, document it for just five minutes to break the blank page anxiety and build a baseline.
   • Spot-Check Early: Give a draft Scribe to the person covering for you; if they can follow it without asking a question, you've successfully unblocked them.

With your core guides in place, take one final look at the "Safety Net" to ensure you aren't just passing on tasks, but actually improving the way the team operates.

3. Standardize and Surface "Aha!" Moments
   ‍
   The handoff process is a hidden opportunity to improve how your team works.
   
   • Audit for Workarounds: Documentation often surfaces messy processes. Use this time to standardize or find a tool that automates a complex workaround.
   • Upskill Your Team: A successful handoff allows a teammate to step up, learn a new part of the business, and advance their career.

By following this progression, you transition from being a single point of failure to an empowering leader who leaves their team stronger than they found it.

Organizing Your Safety Net: Don't Just Document, Make it Discoverable

Creating a library of Scribes is a massive win, but documentation is only a safety net if your team can actually find what they need when the pressure is on. 

Chase emphasizes that as you document everything, even the simplest tasks, you must organize them in a way that highlights the main path while keeping your fallback scenarios accessible but out of the way.

To prevent your teammates from feeling overwhelmed by a wall of links, Chase recommends chunking your documentation by process rather than by person:

• Highlight the Main Path: Group your high-frequency, daily operational tasks (like lead generation or order processing) where they are immediately visible.
• Layer in the Fail-Safes: Keep your troubleshooting guides, chargeback procedures, and login issue SOPs as a separate fallback layer.
  
  • These are the resources your team won't need every day, but they’ll be incredibly grateful to have them if an edge case pops up while you're offline.
• The Intuitive Test: Organize your folders so that a teammate who has never seen your workflow can navigate to the right Scribe in three clicks or less.

By structuring your handoff this way, you ensure that the must-haves are always at your team's fingertips, with the deep-dive technical answers standing by as a quiet backstop.

The Goal: Becoming Fully Replaceable

It sounds counterintuitive, but the best leaders strive to be fully replaceable. If you can document your role so well that the engine keeps running without you, you’ve mastered the most valuable skill in operations.

By building your Scribe Safety Net now, you aren't just protecting the company. You're giving yourself the peace of mind to hold your newborn, enjoy your vacation, or focus on your health without your phone buzzing with "How do I do this?" pings.

Ready to build your safety net? Turn on Scribe during your next task and capture your first process in seconds!