Overview
Users are usually assigned to a department within their user profile. However, in addition to departments, users can also be assigned to a group or a team.
Groups
Any collection of users; typically a cohort of users who share an attribute. Common attributes are location (i.e. New York office, California office, etc.) and seniority (i.e. hired before [date]). Groups can only be created by administrators with Super Admin permissions and are primarily used when scheduling conversation cycles (i.e. all users who have been with the organization for 3 months or more are having their quarterly performance review, so the conversation will be scheduled for a group of users hired before the last 3 months).
Teams
Any collection of users; typically made up of users from different departments working on the same project. Teams can be created by any user and are primarily used to assign an objective that is tied to the project.
Comparing Each Approach
The benefits of each method are covered in the table below:
| Department | Group | Team | |
| Creation method | Can be manual or automated through our user management integrations. | Manual. | Manual. |
| Who can create? | Super Admins. | Super Admins. | Any user. |
| Standardized? | Yes, departments are maintained by Super Admins. | Yes, groups are maintained by Super Admins. | No, any user can create teams and they may inadvertently create duplicates if they don't search to see if the team already exists first. |
| Visible? | Seen throughout the application (i.e. org chart, when viewing goals, in reports and exports). | Only visible in the Admin module. | Seen throughout the application (i.e. user profile). |
| Can be assigned to goals? | Yes, if configured. | No. | Yes, if configured. |
| Can be assigned to milestones? | Yes, if configured. | No | Yes, if configured. |
| Permissions? | Yes, departments can be used to assign goal permissions. | No, groups cannot be used to assign goal permissions. | Yes, teams can be used to assign goal permissions. |
| Used to define HR Admin scope? | Yes. | Yes. | No. |
| Used as a goal filter? | Yes. | No. | Yes. |