Departments Overview
A department maps to a schedule with Workforce Management. They define your ability to see staff for a given schedule. Employees can then be assigned to their relevant department/s, and managers can also be allocated to departments.
A department, "Schedule", is set up by default when your Workforce account is first created.
If you have different people who schedule the shifts for Front of House (FOH) and Back of House (BOH), then you may want to have separate FOH and BOH departments so their schedules can be published independently of each other.
If you want to be able to see all employees at once, then you may choose to start off with just the default "Schedule" department and add everyone to that.
What is a department?
Departments are key to creating shifts and publishing schedules
Workforce supports a hierarchy:
Company: overarching entity within Workforce
Location: specific place where the work is performed - for example, a restaurant address. At the moment, Workforce only supports a single location per company
Department: Each location can then be broken down into departments. Think of a department as a group of people who would be on the same schedule and managed by the same manager. There is no limit to the amount of departments you can create. For example, a restaurant may have two departments:
Front of House
Back of House
Section: a breakdown of department if further granularity is needed.
Employees need to be added to their respective departments so they can be scheduled. Employees can be added to as many departments as applicable.
Each department will also need at least one manager. Departments managers are effectively those people who will create shifts, publish schedules, and make any changes that are applicable.
Each department's schedule can be viewed on the Scheduler.
Manage Departments
To view and manage Departments, navigate to Settings > Organization > Departments
Add Departments
You can create as many departments as required. Departments can be created from Settings > Organization > Departments, or using the shortcut on the Scheduler:
Department Settings
Enable Off-Site Addresses
If employees work at other physical locations, you can enable off-site addresses so that the geo-fenced time clock still works.
Department Managers
Add managers to the department by clicking the Add manager button directly against the Department. Only those users who are specifically given access to manage a department can do so. ‘Managing a department’ (and the Manage Schedule permission) provides the ability to view, create, and edit shifts and schedules.
Alternatively, a manager can be made a department manager directly from the Employee Profile > Access & Permissions
Shift Swaps / Drops
Enable the ability for your employees to swap and/or drop shifts unless they have been added to the ‘exclusion’ list (in which case they do not have permission to do either).
Allow employees to swap shifts, toggle ON
Auto approve checkbox to allow shift swaps to occur without a manager's approval.
Allow employees to drop shifts, toggle ON
Sections
Create and manage your company sections where appropriate. Sections are areas within your department.
Click Add Section
Enter a Section Name
Click SAVE
Rename Departments
Select a department from the list of departments.
Click into the department name field and enter the new name
Click Save
Delete Departments
Select a department from the list of departments.
Click Options > Delete departments
On the pop-up confirmation screen, click Confirm.
Add employee to departments
From the Weekly or Daily View, click on the Manage Employees icon located on the top toolbar directly above the Employees column.
Click in the Add an employee to [department name] field to return a list of employees in the company network.
Start typing the employee’s name to filter the list.
Click on the employee’s name to add them to the department.
Apply Changes when done.
Remove employee from departments
From home page, click Manage Employees (blue + sign near the upper left of the screen).
Hover over one of the employees in the list of employees that appears.
Select Remove next to the selected employee's name.
