People & Workforce

What the People Area Owns

Open People at /employee to maintain the workforce record and see how employees and AI coworkers contribute to the business. The page combines five views:

• Directory — employee identity, organization placement, lifecycle dates, contact details, addresses, and pay basis. Switch the same list between List, Grid, and Board without leaving Directory.
• Workforce — current work, concerns that need an operator, and a unified employee/AI roster
• Org Chart — an interactive reporting chart you can rearrange, with span-of-control signal
• Timesheets — weekly time entry, manager approval, and optional customer/service billing context
• My Policies — policy acknowledgements and requirements assigned to the signed-in user

The page leads with staffing readiness and work that needs attention. Role governance & access in full navigation mode holds the access controls: it opens with the control that changes who holds a role and whether their account is active, followed by what each role can do. Each role names the people who currently hold it and flags any role nobody holds. Role definitions themselves — oversight level and service-level target — are set by the platform and are not editable there.

Workforce Operating Loop

flowchart LR
    A["Create employee<br/>Offer or onboarding"] --> B["Complete directory record<br/>Team, role, manager, location"]
    B --> C["Set pay basis<br/>Hourly or salary"]
    C --> D["Active workforce<br/>Employee and AI work"]
    D --> E["Record weekly time<br/>Save draft, then submit"]
    E --> F["Manager decision<br/>Approve or reject"]
    F --> G["Labour evidence<br/>Payroll and job-cost inputs"]
    F --> H["Billable time<br/>Customer and service context"]
    B --> I["Policy requirements<br/>Acknowledge or complete"]
    D --> J["Role or access change<br/>Governed account update"]
    J --> K["Inactive account<br/>Sign-in removed"]

Start With the Daily Attention View

Use Workforce when you need to answer “who or what needs attention?” before editing records.

1. Review Needs you for unowned service-level commitments, approvals, and open handoffs.
2. Address Act now concerns before lower-severity watch items.
3. Review Workforce at work to see active builds and engagements, their phase, and whether an employee, AI coworker, or nobody owns them.
4. Use the roster below the activity view to inspect employee and AI members together.
5. For an AI coworker, check its work role, employee-role parity, approval/interface owner, oversight level, provider/model, and token budget before changing responsibility elsewhere.

This view is an operating projection, not a substitute for the underlying build, engagement, employee, or agent record.

Create an Employee Record

From Directory, select New Employee.

1. Enter the employee’s first and last name. Add a display name if the everyday name should differ.
2. Add work and personal email plus work, mobile, and emergency phone details as appropriate.
3. Choose an initial status:
   • Offer for a person who has not started onboarding
   • Onboarding for a person completing start activities
   • Active only when they should count as current workforce
4. Set the start date when it is known.
5. Assign the department, position, employment type, work location, and manager.
6. Create the employee and confirm the card appears in the directory with the expected status and reporting line.

The employee profile and the platform user account are related but distinct records. Creating an employee does not silently create credentials, set a password, or grant platform access.

Check Organization Placement

Use the directory’s Group by manager option to find missing or unexpected reporting lines. Treat “No manager,” “Unassigned,” and “Unset” as data-quality signals when the person should already have an established placement.

The Org Chart view is where reporting structure is read and changed. See Work With the Org Chart below.

The directory’s detail panels show lifecycle dates, contact information, organization assignment, reference coverage, and recent append-only lifecycle events. Use the event history as evidence of what changed; do not rewrite prior events to make the current record look cleaner.

Open and Edit a Person’s Record

Select any card in the directory to load that person into the detail panels. The selected card is outlined, and the address bar carries the selection, so a link to a specific person can be shared or bookmarked. Everyone in the directory can be selected, including people who have no platform account.

With the workforce management permission, the profile panel shows Edit. It opens the full record — names, work and personal contact, status, start date, team, role, employment type, location, manager, and addresses. Fields you do not touch are left as they are; clearing a field is treated as a deliberate instruction to clear it.

Edit Several People at Once

Switch Directory to Grid to edit the same records as a spreadsheet. Name, work email, timezone, and start date can be changed in place. Grid edits are governed exactly like edits made through the form: they require the workforce management permission and are recorded in the authorization audit trail.

Two limits are deliberate. Fields the grid does not show — pay, personal contact, national identifiers, addresses, termination dates — cannot be reached or changed from it. And status is not editable in the grid, because moving someone between onboarding, active, leave, offboarding, and terminated is a lifecycle transition with its own rules, not a cell value. Change status through the lifecycle controls so the employment event is recorded.

Work With the Org Chart

The Org Chart view draws the reporting structure as a chart: each person is a card, a solid line is a reporting line, and a dashed line is a dotted-line relationship. Drag the canvas to pan and use the controls to zoom or fit the whole organization on screen.

Every card carries the signal you need to judge the shape of the organization, not just names: employment status, team, and — for managers — how many people report to them directly and how many sit beneath them in total. The band above the chart summarises headcount, how many people are managers, the average span of control, and how many people have no manager set.

Change Who Someone Reports To

If your role allows workforce changes, there are two ways to move someone:

• Drag their card onto their new manager’s card. The target card highlights, and you are asked to confirm before anything is saved.
• Select their card and use the Reports to and Dotted line to pickers in the side panel.

Either way the change is recorded as a manager change on that person’s employment record, so the history shows what moved and who moved it. If you do not have permission to make workforce changes, the chart is read-only and the pickers are disabled.

The platform refuses a move that would create a reporting loop — you cannot place a manager underneath one of their own reports, directly or indirectly. Managers who would create a loop are not offered in the picker at all, and a drag that would cause one is rejected with an explanation.

Change Someone’s Team, Role, or Location

The side panel also holds Team, Role, and Location pickers. Each one saves on its own — changing someone’s team leaves their role, location, and reporting lines exactly as they were. Set a picker back to its blank option (“Unassigned”, “No role”, “No location”) to clear that field.

These are the same placements shown on the Directory view; editing them here updates the employee record everywhere.

Find People and Spot Problems

Use the search box and the team and status filters to narrow the chart. Filtered-out people are dimmed rather than removed, so the reporting lines that pass through them stay visible instead of appearing to re-parent someone.

Two signals are worth acting on:

• No manager set counts the people at the top of the chart. More than one usually means a missing reporting line rather than a genuinely flat organization.
• Reporting loop detected appears when people report to each other in a circle. Those people have no path to the top of the chart, so give one of them a manager outside the loop.

Switch to List with the chart/list toggle for a compact indented view when you want to scan a large workforce rather than study its shape.

Set Compensation Inputs

The Pay panel on the Directory view stores how a person is paid:

• Hourly requires a positive hourly rate.
• Salary requires a positive annual salary and a positive number of periods per year.

Select the employee, choose the pay type, enter the value, and select Save pay. The stored basis feeds labour costing and payroll-earnings calculations.

Important: saving Pay does not run payroll, create a bank payment, file taxes, or pay the employee. It records calculation inputs. Use the relevant finance, banking, and statutory processes for actual disbursement and remittance.

Changing the pay type leaves the other type’s prior stored value in place; the selected pay type determines which value is active. Verify the displayed result after every change.

Record and Approve Time

Open Timesheets while signed in as a user linked to an employee profile.

Employee workflow

1. Use the week arrows to choose the correct week.
2. Enter hours by day.
3. Where billable time is enabled for the organization’s financial profile, choose the customer and service for billable entries.
4. Select Save Draft while the week is incomplete.
5. Review the total and billing context, then submit.

A draft or rejected timesheet can be edited. A submitted timesheet waits for a manager decision. An approved timesheet is locked, and entries already attached to an invoice keep their billing fields locked.

Manager workflow

Managers see submitted periods in the pending-approval panel.

1. Confirm the employee, week, total hours, and any billable context.
2. Approve only when the time is complete and correctly classified.
3. Reject with a useful reason when the employee must correct it.
4. Ask the employee to edit the rejected period and resubmit it.

Do not approve time merely to clear the queue. Approval turns the period into downstream evidence for payroll, labour economics, job costing, and—when enabled—customer billing.

If Timesheets reports that no employee profile is linked to the account, establish that link before treating the page as a time-recording surface.

Complete Personal Policy Work

Open My Policies for the signed-in user’s own requirements.

• Acknowledge a policy after reading the published policy it references.
• Complete an assigned requirement only after the required action is actually done.
• Use the completed section as evidence of prior acknowledgement or completion.

An acknowledgement records receipt; it does not prove competence, legal advice, or completion of a separate training requirement.

Manage Roles and Account Access

In full navigation mode, open Role governance & access below the People views.

• Review each platform role’s ID, description, minimum oversight level, service-level target, and assignment count.
• Treat an unassigned role as a coverage signal, not automatically as a hiring request.
• In HR user lifecycle, select a platform user, choose the role, and set the account active or inactive.
• Save the change and confirm the result message.

Deactivating a user removes sign-in access. It does not delete the employee profile or historical evidence, and it is reversible by reactivating the account. Password setup and reset remain under Admin, not People. Superuser accounts require a superuser to change.

For an exit, coordinate the employee status and end-date evidence, account deactivation, ownership handoffs, outstanding time, and any offboarding tasks. Do not use account deactivation alone as proof that the full exit process is complete.

What Is Not Yet a People-Page Workflow

The platform contains service logic and reusable components for leave requests, onboarding/offboarding checklists, and performance reviews, but the current /employee tab set does not expose those as complete operator workflows. Do not tell employees to look for a Leave or Reviews tab, and do not treat those capabilities as operational until a routed screen and its permissions have been verified.

Who Can Approve Leave

Leave decisions follow the org chart. The approver is the person’s manager — or, if that manager cannot act right now, the first person above them who can. Anyone else attempting to decide the request is refused.

A manager is treated as unable to act when they are inactive, offboarding, suspended, on leave, or have not yet started. When the platform routes past someone who is temporarily on leave, the decision still belongs to them: the deputy acts on their behalf rather than taking the decision over.

If nobody up the chain can approve, the platform says so instead of silently holding the request — for example, “Kofi Wolfe has no manager set, so there is nobody to approve this.” Fix the reporting line on the Org Chart and the request becomes decidable. The chart’s No manager count and its reporting-loop warning are the two things to check first.

Similarly, the lifecycle timeline is visible evidence, but the current page does not provide a general-purpose control for manually appending every possible lifecycle event.

Evidence and Recovery Checklist

After a workforce change, confirm the relevant evidence:

• directory status, department, position, manager, and location
• org-chart placement or intentional lack of a manager
• compensation basis and currency
• timesheet state, approver, approval date, or rejection reason
• customer/service context for billable hours
• policy acknowledgement or requirement completion
• platform role, oversight level, and active/inactive account state
• append-only lifecycle event and effective date where one was produced

If a change is wrong, prefer the supported corrective action: edit a draft or rejected timesheet, reject a submitted period with a reason, restore an account’s active state, or make a new governed lifecycle correction. Preserve the prior audit evidence.