Updated September 2026: the original 2019 post was a diary entry about my only teammate moving to another team. I have rewritten it into advice for anyone left as the last person on a team, based on what I had to work out myself.
In mid-2019 my only teammate at my location moved to another team for her career. I was happy for her and worried for myself. Within days I was pulled back onto the most difficult opportunity our team had, and I had no one nearby to share it with.
If this has just happened to you, these are the steps that would have saved me a few bad weeks.
What should you do before your teammate's last day?
Get the knowledge out of their head while they are still around. Ask for a written list of everything they own: open requests, recurring reports, contacts on each account, passwords to shared tools that should be rotated, and the unwritten habits of each stakeholder. Schedule a proper handover session rather than relying on a goodbye chat. Most teammates are glad to do this well if you ask early.
How do you stop taking on two people's workload?
Make the gap visible to your manager in numbers. List what your teammate handled each week and how many hours it took. Then ask directly which items should stop, which should wait, and which move to someone else until a replacement joins.
Managers often assume the remaining person will quietly absorb everything. They are far less likely to do that when the list is in front of them. Put the agreed priorities in an email afterwards so there is a record.
What if you are pulled onto a difficult account?
This is what happened to me. The opportunity came back, and the person who had made it painful last time had left the company, which was a relief for a day and then a worry: I did not know who would replace him or what the new expectations were.
Start by finding out who now owns the relationship on the other side and what they need, in writing. Restate the scope in your first email and ask them to confirm it. On a difficult account, the scope email you send in week one is the thing you will point back to in week six.
How do you avoid working in isolation?
Being the only person at a location is lonely, and it quietly hurts your work. Nobody catches your mistakes, and nobody sees your effort. Join the calls of the wider team even when you are not required to. Find one person elsewhere in the organisation doing similar work and agree to review each other's documents. It costs an hour a week and it replaces most of what a teammate gave you.
When should you ask for a replacement?
Immediately, and then again at a fixed interval. A backfill request that is raised once and forgotten tends to disappear into budget discussions. Ask your manager for a date by which a decision will be made, and put it in your calendar. If the answer keeps sliding, that tells you something useful about how long you will be carrying the extra load, and whether it is time to think about your own next move.
My teammate made the right call for her career. Looking back, the two things worth doing in that first week are a proper handover before the last day and a direct conversation about what should stop, rather than quietly absorbing everything.
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