TeamOhana requires that all budget-impacting headcount changes, such as new headcount requests, change requests, and terminations, are reviewed and approved by a set of approvers. The benefits to the approval workflow reach every member of the organization:

Once the approval workflows are created, they'll automatically go into effect for each new budget-impacting request submitted by members of your team.

Any user that has the "Edit Approval Policy" permission enabled has the ability to view and update the approval rules in place for each department from their Settings page. By default, this permission is enabled for Admins only. During onboarding, the TeamOhana team will help set up the approval policies, but Admins will be able to add, disable, or update them at any time.

As a failsafe, a rule called 'default approvers' will be created so that if a request is submitted and no rule exists for that particular department or request type, the request will be reviewed by the default approvers. This rule will be applied to all request types (new requests, change requests, internal transfers and terminations.)

To add a new rule, click the orange "+ Add rule" button in the top right corner of the approval policy page. From there, you will give the rule a name, then set the rule attributes.

First, set the Division/Department for the rule. Note that you can create a rule at the Division level or the Department level, and you can select multiple divisions/departments for each rule.

Each department can only be part of one rule per request type (eg new requests, change requests). If a department is grayed out and not selectable, it means that a rule for this type of request already exists for that department.

Next, select your approvers. The approval chain is sequential, which means that each approver in the sequence must approve the request before it moves to the next approver. You may only select one user per level.

If a user is grayed out from the dropdown, it means they are already part of the approval rule. Once you've added users to each level of the approval rule, they can be reordered if necessary.

Finally, select the type of requests that the rule will apply to. You can select multiple request types, as below, but if you add a request type, like Change requests, and a change request rule already exists for a department you've selected, you will see an error message.

Click Save to create your rule.

Once you've created an approval rule, you can update it at any time.

You'll be able to change the rule name, the division/department it applies to, and the approvers, but you will not be able to change the rule type (new requests, change requests, terminations).

Note that if the approval chain is updated when a headcount is mid-approval flow, the changes will not take effect for the pending headcount.

When a deactivated user is part of an approval rule, Admins will receive a notification with a call to action to update that particular approval rule. The user's avatar on the Approval Policy page will also have an indicator of their deactivated status.

This will be visible on the specific rule page as well.

Until a deactivated user is removed from the approval rule, all requests to which the rule applies will skip that user.

In the search bar on the Approval Policy page, Admins can search by user name or by department name to filter the list below. This will make it easy to identify all rules with specific users and swap out those who have been deactivated, if necessary.

To copy the details of an existing approval rule to a new approval rule, you can click the three dots to the right of the approvers from the main Approval Policy page and select "Clone." You can then make any necessary edits to your new rule. Remember, each department can only be part of one rule per request type.

Disabling a rule will archive it. Unless a new rule is created to replace the disabled rule, all new requests for that division/department will go to the default approvers.

Disabled rules can be re-enabled by clicking the three dots to the right of the approvers.

Archived departments will remain part of approval rules but a tool tip will notify the admin that a department in the rule has been archived.

To get started, we suggest the following users be added as approvers for each type of approval workflow:

After the approval rules are implemented, users will see them in their requests before they are submitted for approval.

In addition, when a request is partway through the approval chain, the requestor will be able to see where in the process the request is, which is designated by the orange circle around the approver's avatar. Anyone who has already approved the request will have a green circle around their avatar.

Please note that when the requestor of the new headcount / change request / internal transfer / termination is the first member of the approval flow, they will be bypassed. However, if the requestor is the second, third or fourth approval flow member, they will need to approve the request.